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When the Lunatic Act was passed in 1808 an asylum was to be built in every county, but North Wales still did not have one by 1840 because the populace was too poor to finance the building of such a large institution. As a result the most seriously ill pauper "lunatics" were sent instead to asylums in the English Midlands such as the one at Gloucester. But with this arrangement there was a serious problem, and the Superintendent of Gloucester Asylum had this to say about it in a letter to The Times: "So few of the lower class of the Welsh, except in some towns or the precincts of inns, speak English, and this only for the purpose of commerce, or to qualify themselves for duties of menial servants, and not to an extent which would enable them to comprehend anything higher, whilst both the officers and servants of our English Asylums, and the English public too, and equally ignorant of the Welsh Language, that when the poor Welshman is sent to an English Asylum he is submitted to the most refined modern cruelties, being doomed to an imprisonment amongst strange people, and an association with his fellow men, whom he is prohibited from holding communications, harassed by wants which he cannot make known and appealed to by sounds which he cannot comprehend, he becomes irritable and irritated; and it is proverbial in our English Asylum that the Welshmen is the most turbulent patient wherever he happens to become an inmate"
So building work commenced and was completed some four years later with the formal opening ceremony on the 14th of November, 1848. Constructed from locally made limestone bricks the building was praised for the grace and beauty of it's architecture. The magnificent clock tower was later built with money donated by the wife of the late Mr. Ablett, in memory of her husband who had donated the land upon which the asylum was built.
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In
a report to the government in 1844 by the Metropolitan Commissioners in
Lunacy the appalling conditions that Welsh inmates were being subjected to
in the English asylums was brought to light. Following an earlier meeting
in 1842 the need for an asylum in North Wales had already been recognised
and soon after Joseph Ablett, of Llanber Hall, donated some 20 acres of
land. But even with the land sorted out there were still further problems
- the law as laid down in the Lunatic Act would not permit adjacent
counties to cooperate in the building of an asylum, rather it insisted
that each county should still have it's own irrespective of such logical
considerations as cost, convenience and practicality. Furthermore the
other counties in North Wales did not wish to contribute to the cost of
building the new asylum. In the end however the money was raised, some
£4,600, which included a hefty donation from none other than Queen
Victoria herself. 
