# Candleston Castle

Grade II* listed building in Bridgend County Borough

Merthyr Mawr, United Kingdom

Fortification

## Story

• Candleston Castle is a ruined fourteenth-century fortified manor on the inland edge of the Merthyr Mawr dunes, about 1.2 kilometres southwest of the village.
• The name comes from the Cantilupe tenants of the St Quintin lords, and Robert de Cantilupe III held one ploughland here in the Despenser Survey of 1320.
• Sir Mathew Cradock refitted the hall around 1500 in local green sandstone, and the house then passed to Sir Richard Herbert of Ewyas and their son George.
• Later holders included the Herberts of Swansea, the Doddingtons, and the Grevilles before Sir John Nicholl lived here while Merthyr Mawr House was built.
• The tower, hall, curtain, and stable were a farmhouse into the nineteenth century and are now a scheduled and listed ruin above the warren.

## History

Candleston Castle is a ruined fortified manor house on a low promontory at the inland edge of the Merthyr Mawr dunes, in Bridgend County Borough. It stands about 1.2 kilometres southwest of Merthyr Mawr and about the same distance northwest of Ogmore Castle, with the River Ogmore between them. The height of the site kept the walls clear of sand that buried the borough of Kenfig.

The name, written Cantelowstowne in 1596 and Cantloston in 1635, is traced to the Cantilupe family, tenants under the St Quintin lords of the fee of Merthyr Mawr. No twelfth-century deed places them on this ground. In 1320 the Despenser Survey recorded one ploughland here in the hands of Robert de Cantilupe III.

The stone house is a fourteenth-century building, one of only five lightly fortified manors of its kind in Glamorgan, and it may stand on an earlier wall. A D-shaped court, a hall range, and a southern tower fixed a plan that later owners kept. Around 1500 Sir Mathew Cradock, steward of Gower and constable of Kenfig and Caerphilly, refitted the hall in local green sandstone, including the large perpendicular chimneypiece.

His daughter Margaret married Sir Richard Herbert of Ewyas. The house passed to their son Sir George Herbert of Swansea, then through later Herberts until Sir John Herbert died in 1617. Mary Herbert’s marriage took it to the Doddingtons, and her granddaughter’s marriage took it to Robert Greville, Baron Brooke. The Grevilles sold it to the Franklen family in the eighteenth century.

Sir John Nicholl lived at Candleston while Merthyr Mawr House was built between 1806 and 1809. One account dates his purchase of the castle to 1804, with the estate, and another to a sale by Richard Franklen in 1830. The rooms then served as a farmhouse until the later nineteenth century, after which the house was abandoned.

The tower, the hall, the curtain, and a stable of about 1800 still stand, with nineteenth-century battlements added for show. The building was listed on 26 July 1963 as an important medieval fortified house, and the ruins are a scheduled monument above the warren.

## Photographs

- [Candleston Castle 2009 — Thruxton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Candelston_Castle_2009.JPG)
- [Candleston Castle — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Candleston_Castle.JPG)
- [Candleston Castle - Glamorgan. The ruins of this castle that is now on the edge of the Merthyrmawr sand warren. — Richard Knights](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Candleston_Castle_-_Glamorgan_-_geograph.org.uk_-_31062.jpg)
- [Candleston Castle View from the south of the recently preserved ruins of the fortified manor house originally built in the 14th (some sources say 15th) century. — eswales](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Candleston_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1096419.jpg)
- [Candleston Castle Ruins — Mark Evans](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Candleston_Castle_Ruins_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1192632.jpg)
- [Footbridge by Candleston Castle One of two wooden footbridges over a small stream by Candleston Castle. The bridges provide access to Merthyr Mawr Warren from — eswales](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Footbridge_by_Candleston_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1654368.jpg)
- [Exterior of Candleston Castle — Hchc2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Exterior_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG)
- [Exterior corner of Candleston Castle — Hchc2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Exterior_corner_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG)
- [Interior of Candleston Castle — Hchc2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Interior_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG)
- [Exterior wall of Candleston Castle — Hchc2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Exterior_wall_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG)

## Sources

- [Candleston Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candleston_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Normans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans) — Wikipedia
- [John Nicholl (judge)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nicholl_(judge)) — Wikipedia
- [Richard Herbert (died 1510)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Herbert_(died_1510)) — Wikipedia
- [Baron Brooke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Brooke) — Wikipedia
- [Merthyr Mawr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merthyr_Mawr) — Wikipedia
- [G. Howell-Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Howell-Baker) — Wikipedia
- [Bridgend County Borough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgend_County_Borough) — Wikipedia
- [Ogmore Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogmore_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Kenfig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenfig) — Wikipedia
- [Hugh Despenser the Younger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Despenser_the_Younger) — Wikipedia
- [Margam Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margam_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Francis Greville, 1st Earl of Warwick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Greville,_1st_Earl_of_Warwick) — Wikipedia
- [William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke (died 1570)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herbert,_1st_Earl_of_Pembroke_(died_1570)) — Wikipedia
- [Candleston Castle, listed building report](https://cadwpublic-api.azurewebsites.net/reports/listedbuilding/FullReport?id=11230&lang=en) — Cadw
- [Candleston Castle, scheduled monument report](https://cadwpublic-api.azurewebsites.net/reports/sam/FullReport?id=2243&lang=en) — Cadw
- [Candleston Castle](https://coflein.gov.uk/en/site/93050/) — Coflein
- [Candleston Castle, historic environment record](https://archwilio.org.uk/her/chi3/report/page.php?watprn=GGAT00258m) — Heneb
- [HLCA 014 Candleston](https://ggat.org.uk/cadw/historic_landscape/kenfig/english/merthyr_mawr_014.html) — Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust
- [Candleston historic landscape character area](https://heneb.org.uk/hcla/merthyr-mawr-kenfig-and-margam-burrows/candleston/) — Heneb
- [Cradock, Sir Mathew or Mathias (1468?–1531)](https://biography.wales/article/s-CRAD-MAT-1468.html) — Dictionary of Welsh Biography
- [Nicholl, Sir John (1759–1838)](https://www.biography.wales/article/s-NICH-JOH-1759.html) — Dictionary of Welsh Biography
- [Ruins of Candleston Castle, Merthyr Mawr](https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=ruins-of-candleston-castle-merthyr-mawr) — History Points
- [Candleston castle](https://medievalheritage.eu/en/main-page/heritage/wales/candleston-castle/) — Medieval Heritage
- [Candlestone Manor, partial excavation, 1930](https://portal.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/resource/f8dd2f34f70111c86a943415e05eaae80089e08b8352842fea018bfdd56e3207) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Candelston Castle 2009.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candelston_Castle_2009.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Candleston Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candleston_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Candleston Castle - Glamorgan - geograph.org.uk - 31062.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candleston_Castle_-_Glamorgan_-_geograph.org.uk_-_31062.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Candleston Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1096419.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candleston_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1096419.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Candleston Castle Ruins - geograph.org.uk - 1192632.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candleston_Castle_Ruins_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1192632.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Footbridge by Candleston Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1654368.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Footbridge_by_Candleston_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1654368.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Exterior of Candleston Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exterior_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Exterior corner of Candleston Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exterior_corner_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Interior of Candleston Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Exterior wall of Candleston Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exterior_wall_of_Candleston_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Candleston Castle is a ruined fortified manor house in the community of Merthyr Mawr, within Bridgend County Borough in south Wales. It stands about 1.2 kilometres, or three quarters of a mile, southwest of the village of Merthyr Mawr, and about the same distance northwest of Ogmore Castle, with the River Ogmore between them. The ruins lie on the inland edge of Merthyr Mawr Warren, at the western end of a low narrow promontory, where a small stream bends before running south toward the Ogmore. The ground is flat enough for a house, yet high enough that blown sand from the Bristol Channel coast did not bury it. Rocky slopes close the site on the west and north, while the ground falls more gently to the south. The position is recorded on the Ordnance Survey National Grid near SS 871772.

The place has been called Candlestone Castle as well as Candleston. In 1596 the name was written Cantelowstowne, and in 1635 Cantloston. In Welsh it was Tregantlow, with tref or tre meaning a town or settlement. The name is understood to come from the Cantilupe family, whose surname appears as Cantulupo, Cantilupo, Cantelo, Cantaloupe and de Cantelupe. They are taken to have been the first feudal tenants. No record places them on this ground in the twelfth century, so the link is carried by the name and by later tenure rather than by a surviving deed of that early date.

The Norman people who gave families such as the Cantilupes their identity had formed in the medieval duchy of Normandy, where Norse settlers mixed with the people of West Francia. After the siege of Chartres in 911, the Scandinavian leader Rollo swore fealty to King Charles III, and the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte began the county of Rouen that grew into Normandy. Those settlers took up the language, religion and fighting habits of the land they held, and their descendants carried Norman lordship into England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In Glamorgan that lordship was planted in the early twelfth century by men such as Robert Fitzhamon. Ogmore was one of three castles raised in this district with Coity and Newcastle. Its building may have begun about 1106. The manor and castle of Ogmore were given to William de Londres, named among the twelve knights of Glamorgan. In 1116 he left the castle when a Welsh force appeared, and his butler Arnold is credited with holding it. Candleston belongs to a later and smaller kind of defence, a house for a mesne tenant rather than a conquest castle, but it sits in the landscape those Norman people had taken.

In the twelfth century the manor of Candleston passed to the St Quintin lords of Talyfan and Llanbleddian, who held the fee of Merthyr Mawr and then sub-enfeoffed this part of it. The Cantilupes are considered the first tenants under them. A member of that wider family, William de Cantilupe III, witnessed a gift to Ewenny Priory at some point between 1210 and 1219, and Robert II de Cantilupe is recorded in the 1240s. It has been presumed that the family acquired property here in that century. The first document that actually ties them to Candleston is later. In 1320 the Despenser Survey of Glamorgan recorded that Robert de Cantilupe III held one ploughland at Candleston. Hugh Despenser the Younger had claimed the lordship of Glamorgan in 1317 through his marriage to Eleanor de Clare, after her brother’s death, and he was chamberlain and a close favourite of Edward II until his fall and execution in 1326. The survey belongs to those years of his power. Robert III is not recorded after 1320. He may have been succeeded by John de Cantilupe. One account asks whether that John was the abbot of Margam in 1315. Another treats it as uncertain whether he can be identified with the John de Cantilupe who was abbot of Margam in 1325. Margam itself had been founded in 1147 by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, as a daughter house of Clairvaux. It was dissolved in 1536, when twelve monks remained, and the site was sold to Sir Rice Mansel. Nothing in the Candleston masonry depends on settling the abbot’s identity.

The stone house is dated to the fourteenth century, and it may stand on an earlier enclosure. Remnants of an older wall have been taken as evidence of a previous building. An alternative founder is Nicholas de Cantilupe, a sub-bailiff of Glamorgan in 1366, who appears to have died without children. Robert III remains the candidate for a build in the first quarter of the century, and Nicholas for a start later in the first half. The first period of masonry fixed the plan that every later phase kept. The house is one of only five lightly fortified manor houses of this sort in Glamorgan. It was a dwelling for a minor lord, strong enough to close a courtyard and to give a family a tower, and not a great fortress.

Sand was already moving along this coast in the late fourteenth century. Dunes encroached on Kenfig, the borough planted in the twelfth century around Kenfig Castle, about a mile inland from the Bristol Channel. Intensive grazing and the warmer conditions of the medieval warm period made the fields and buildings hard to use, and by the fourteenth century most of them were unusable. The town was abandoned by 1650. Its church was taken down and rebuilt, stone by stone, at Pyle, where smaller stones sit at the foot of the walls and larger ones above. Candleston’s raised seat was just enough to keep the house clear. The dunes of Merthyr Mawr Warren wrapped the promontory and formed a fairly stable margin close to the southern wall. Since then the sand has had a complicated life of blowing, settling and moving again. The dunes west of the castle rise more than 80 metres, about 260 feet, above the sea, and they are now fairly stable. They are counted among the highest and most voluminous dune systems in northwestern Europe, they are the highest sand dunes in Wales, and they have also been called the second highest mobile dune system in Europe. Merthyr Mawr Warren is a national nature reserve, and the warren as a whole is also a scheduled monument because prehistoric burials and other finds have appeared in the sand, especially where sand and gravel were dug.

The Cantilupe holding passed through an heiress. Joan, daughter of Robert de Cantilupe III, married Sir William Horton of Tregwynt in Pembrokeshire. Nicholas Horton lived briefly at Candleston and in 1411 paid a small quit rent, understood to be for this place, to the lord of Merthyr Mawr. Joan and Sir William’s son Jenkin may never have lived in the house. Jenkin’s daughter is named Jennet or Janet. Around 1468 she married Richard Cradock, and the manor went with her into the Cradock family. There is a competing fourteenth- and fifteenth-century claim in the records. Joan Robert, described as a daughter of Margaret Cantilupe, married John Eyre, who is named as landholder of Candleston in 1412 and again in 1429. Janet Horton and Richard Cradock received the property afterwards, perhaps because the Eyres had no children, or because of the kind of tenure the Eyres held. The two accounts sit side by side. What is clear is that by the later fifteenth century the heir was the son of Janet and Richard.

That son was Sir Mathew Cradock, also called Mathias, born about 1468 and dead in 1531. He was the son of Richard ap Gwilim ap Evan ap Cradock and of Jennet Horton of Candleston, and he was counted among the descendants of Einion ap Collwyn. His tombstone called him deputy to Charles, Earl of Worcester, in Glamorgan and Morgannwg, chancellor of the same, and steward of Gower and Kilvey. He is believed to have been steward of Gower in 1491 and in 1497. On 6 March 1485 or 1486, in the first year of Henry VII, a Matthew Cradock was appointed constable for life of Caerphilly and of Kenfig. In July 1491 he was among those commissioned to seek help for the king’s French wars in the lordships of Cardiff, Glamorgan, Morgannwg, Gower, and other Marcher lands. On 6 February 1504 or 1505 a Matthew Craddock of London, also of Swansea, received a pardon for failing to appear before the king’s justices. The poet Iorwerth Fynglwyd wrote two poems that touch him, one from the time Cradock imprisoned him at Swansea, and one asking to be reconciled. Cradock married first Alice, daughter of Philip Mansel of Oxwich Castle, and second Katherine Gordon, widow of Perkin Warbeck. His only child, Margaret, was the daughter of the first marriage, and she was heiress of Candleston. He died between 14 June and 16 August 1531 and was buried at Swansea.

The late fifteenth-century refurbishment of the manor is attributed to him. Around 1500 the hall range was altered. The work used local green sandstone. It included a four-centred ogee arch, a pointed and chamfered arch at the tower, parapet corbelling, and a large perpendicular chimneypiece. The house he renewed was still the old D-shaped enclosure, with the domestic range on the east and the tower at the south end, set a little forward of the curtain so that it could flank a gate. He did not replace the plan. He made the hall a room of the new century.

Margaret married Sir Richard Herbert of Ewyas in Herefordshire. He was an illegitimate son of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1469, and of Maud, daughter of Adam ap Howell Graunt. He had a full brother, also named George, and he should not be confused with his uncle, Sir Richard Herbert of Coldbrook. The earldom and the main Herbert estates went to his legitimate half-brother William. In 1465 Richard was granted Westminster and the manors of Grove, Radnore, Mookas, Brutescourt, Throuckeston, Westhide, Egelton, Redehire, Howton and Wormeton Tirell in Herefordshire, and he was then styled esquire. He served as a gentleman usher to Henry VII. On 22 July 1509 he was appointed constable and porter of Abergavenny Castle. Whether he was a knight is disputed. A roll of knights records a Richard Herbert knighted in 1513, three years after this man was dead. One study treats him as an esquire who was never knighted. Another account says Henry VIII knighted him, which would have to have been in 1509 or 1510, the first year of that reign and the last year of Herbert’s life. He died between 2 and 12 September 1510 and was buried in Abergavenny church, under a richly decorated wall arch, with an alabaster effigy.

Sir Matthew Cradock is also described as receiver of Glamorgan, and through Margaret the house passed to her and to Sir Richard Herbert. Alice, Margaret’s mother, is also named Jane Mancell, and she had been the widow of John Malefant. Richard and Margaret had three surviving sons. One was William Herbert, born in 1501, who was created Earl of Pembroke of the second creation on 11 October 1551. He married Anne Parr, sister of Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII. He was chief gentleman of the privy chamber, a privy councillor, and receiver of the king’s revenues, and he was knighted in 1544. Later earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and of Carnarvon, and the dukes of Powis of Pool Castle, whose title ended in 1747, descend from Sir Richard Herbert, and through a female line the Marquess of Bute’s Glamorgan estates were traced to the same stock. Another son was Sir George Herbert of Swansea. Candleston passed from Richard and Margaret to George. The Herberts of Swansea, Cogan, Cookham and the White Friars, extinct in 1739, descend from him. Richard was also the father of the illegitimate Herberts of Dinas Powis and Hengastell.

George’s son Mathew Herbert held Candleston next. In the second half of the sixteenth century the house continued among Herberts whose main seats were at Swansea and Neath. Sir William Herbert had the manor in 1598. After his death in 1609 it passed to his brother Sir John Herbert, who died in 1617. With Sir John the Herbert holding of this particular house ended. His daughter and heiress Mary married Sir William Doddington. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a wing with an outshut was added on the west side of the hall, and a stable was added against the tower. The owners of these generations were often elsewhere. A small early modern extension was made, but the house reads as a peripheral property, visited rather than rebuilt as a principal seat. The surrounding land was losing value as sand covered it, even while people still lived in the building.

Mary Doddington’s granddaughter married Robert Greville, 4th Baron Brooke of Warwick. The title Baron Brooke had been created in 1621 for Fulke Greville, the poet and courtier who was treasurer of the navy and chancellor of the exchequer under Elizabeth I and James I, and who received Warwick Castle from James. The first baron died unmarried in 1628, and the barony passed by a special remainder to his adopted heir Robert Greville, the second baron, a Parliamentarian commander killed at the siege of Lichfield Cathedral in 1643. The fourth baron, born about 1638, was a younger son of the third baron. He was one of the six commissioners sent to invite Charles II back in 1660, and he was lord lieutenant of Staffordshire. He outlived his six sons. Candleston’s history says he died in 1676. The peerage list gives his death in 1677. His brother inherited Candleston at that death, and the barony itself passed to that younger brother, Fulke Greville, fifth Baron Brooke, who lived from 1643 to 1710. Francis Greville, great-grandson of that brother, became the eighth Baron Brooke and Earl of Warwick. Francis was born on 10 October 1719, inherited Warwick Castle and the barony in 1727, was created Earl Brooke on 7 July 1746, and in 1759 obtained the earldom of Warwick after the Rich family’s earldom ended. He died on 8 July 1773. The Grevilles came to Candleston only now and then, made small changes, and in the eighteenth century sold the manor to the Franklen family. Nothing in that sale suggests the house had become a great residence again. It remained a secondary building on a sandy edge of Glamorgan while the Greville fortune and attention sat at Warwick.

Between 1806 and 1808 Sir John Nicholl lived at Candleston while his own house was rising at Merthyr Mawr. One account says he bought Candleston Castle together with the Merthyr Mawr estate in 1804. Another says Richard Franklen sold him the castle in 1830, and that until then he had occupied it as a tenant. Both the estate purchase and the later castle purchase are recorded, and they need not be the same transaction. Nicholl was born on 16 March 1759, the second son of John Nicholl of Llanmaes, near Llantwit Major, and of Elizabeth, daughter of the Havard family. He was taught at Cowbridge and at Bristol, and he matriculated at St John’s College, Oxford, on 27 June 1775. He took the bachelor of civil law in 1780 and the doctor of civil law on 6 April 1785, and on 3 November 1785 he was admitted an advocate of Doctors’ Commons. His practice grew. On 6 November 1798 he succeeded Sir William Scott as king’s advocate and was knighted, as the office required. In that post he advised the Privy Council and the secretary of state on international law. He entered Parliament in 1802 for Penryn in Cornwall, sat for Hastings from 1806 to 1807, and then held Great Bedwyn until the Reform Act dissolution of December 1832. He was a consistent Tory, and he opposed Roman Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. His own statute was the Ecclesiastical Courts Act of 1829. In January 1809 he became dean of the Arches and judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and he was sworn of the Privy Council. In that court he decided White v Driver. In 1833 he was made judge of the High Court of Admiralty. In 1834 he became vicar-general to the archbishop of Canterbury and gave up the deanery of the Arches and the Prerogative Court. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. During the wars against Napoleon he served in the volunteers and reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He also helped to found King’s College, London.

His private life stayed tied to Glamorgan even while his seats in Parliament were English and much of his work was in London. On 8 September 1787 he married Judy, youngest daughter of Peter Birt of Wenvoe Castle. They had one son, John, later member of Parliament for Cardiff, and three daughters, Mary Anne, Katherine and Judy. A monument to the son stands in the Dyfrig chapel at Llandaff. Nicholl had inherited an interest at Llantwit Major in 1770 from his godfather, the Reverend John Nicholl, and in 1771 Edward Powell left him estates in five parishes, including Tondu House. He divided his time between a London house and Tondu. Merthyr Mawr came later. When Charles Bowen died in 1797, Nicholl was a trustee of a heavily mortgaged estate. He bought 800 acres, about 3.2 square kilometres, for a price eventually agreed at £18,000. About 1803 is the date given for the purchase of the Merthyr Mawr estate in one life of him. He began a new country house in 1806, pulled down the old Stradling hall of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and employed the architect Henry Wood. Wood and Nicholl parted in 1808. Nicholl moved into the unfinished house in 1809. The completed mansion is a five-bay, two-storey classical building faced in white local carboniferous limestone, with a hipped roof, sash windows, and a single-storey porch of Tuscan columns on the north front. Its library was described as holding some 30,000 volumes, and also as 30,000 books or 30,000 articles. The mansion and its stables are listed buildings, and the park is on the register of historic parks and gardens. Inside the park is the Iron Age hillfort of Chapel Hill Camp, and within the banks stands the roofless fifteenth-century chapel of St Roque, which shelters early medieval inscribed stones.

In 1822 a woman living at Candleston invited other women to lodge with her, on the condition that they be of respectable connections. When the castle was sold to Nicholl in 1830 it was said to contain a drawing room, a dining room, breakfast rooms, four bedrooms and a coach house. Brick dressings in the ruins belong to the alterations of his time. After the new house at Merthyr Mawr was finished, Candleston was used as a farmhouse. It was abandoned in the nineteenth century, and it was uninhabited by the twentieth. One landscape account says the fortified house was occupied until the early nineteenth century. The longer account of the building itself carries the farm into the late nineteenth century and the abandonment to the end of that century. Sir John Nicholl died at Merthyr Mawr on 26 August 1838.

The fabric still shows four main periods of masonry, with smaller undated additions from a continuous occupation between the fourteenth century and the nineteenth. The enclosure is D-shaped. One set of measurements gives a courtyard about 30 metres across, closed by a wall about 1.1 metres thick that rises about 2 metres to the wall-walk on the inside and higher on the outside. Another gives the enclosure as about 40 metres from east-northeast to west-southwest and about 26 metres across, defined by the hall and tower on the east and by a stone curtain elsewhere. A further enclosure, about 44 by 30 metres, on the northeast, may belong with the castle. The curtain is ruinous and broken. It stands up to about 2.5 metres at its highest, at the north and south ends, and five battlements survive at the north. Those battlements are a nineteenth-century addition, cut for show when the house was still lived in, not the original medieval parapet. The wall is built in short straight lengths, with a longer curtain on the north. A ditch was probably dug on the south and east, the sides most open to approach.

The domestic range runs north to south on the east side of the court. It is a two-storey hall block, undercroft below and hall above, of rubble stone, with walls about a metre thick that still stand 6 to 7 metres in places. The original fifteenth-century, or in another description fourteenth-century, arrangement was a single pile across the east end of the enclosure, with the tower added outside the enclosure on the south. The hall range is fourteenth century and was partly rebuilt about 1500. The first-floor hall of that date keeps the perpendicular chimneypiece, a Tudor-Gothic piece in local green sandstone, with the remains of a Tudor head. Filleted jambs rise as shafts, and foliage trails in hollow chamfers once carried a shelf. To the left of the fireplace a doorway leads into the tower. The ground floor of the northern part of the wing was lit by narrow openings, splayed inward and closed with segmental arches, and those rooms were probably for service. At the end of the fifteenth century a new hall was set on the first floor and a kitchen on the ground floor, divided by a flat timber ceiling and joined by wooden stairs. The hall was heated by the decorated fireplace in the wall shared with the tower, and it was lit by two-light pointed windows. An open roof stood over it.

The original entrance was at the north end of the west wall, where the later wing was built. The jambs of an outer and an inner arch survive, with wave-moulded chamfers and the haunches of Tudor arches. That doorway led to stairs up to the hall. To its right a cross wall in the undercroft has a fireplace with a segmental head and a blocked hearth. Above it is a single moulded corbel, and to its right a Tudor-headed doorway climbs toward the hall. One jamb of the hall door remains above and to the left of the fireplace. A later fireplace was cut into the east wall of the undercroft, beside a blocked window. Ground has banked up against the east wall, so the lower openings show only from inside, while one upper window still shows outside. On the west wall of the hall range a doorway was inserted, with a window over it, and another first-floor window stands over a blocked door.

The tower at the south end is the best preserved part, probably because its walls were more massive than the hall’s. It is slightly narrower than the hall range and is set back from the hall’s west wall. It measures about 7.9 by 6.4 metres, and about 8 metres up to the wall-walk, so it was never a great keep. Most of its walls are about a metre thick. The west wall, which contains the stair, is about 1.8 metres thick. It was placed a little askew against the south end of the range, which suggests that it was added to a wall already standing, and it projects in front of the curtain so as to flank a gate whose exact form is lost. A parapet on corbels once crowned it. Inside were a vaulted ground floor and two upper floors. The vault over the cellar has also been described as very flat. The undercroft is entered from the hall range by a two-centred doorway with a stop-chamfered surround. A mural stair remains. At the top, one stop-chamfered jamb survives from the door into the upper chamber. That chamber, the solar, measures about 4.9 by 3.9 metres. It was the principal living room, with a fireplace, larger windows to the east and south, and a garderobe in the northeast corner entered through a doorway whose head was triangular. The garderobe projects and overlaps the east side of the adjoining wing. Its stone seat drained by a channel, probably into the ditch, a small opening lit it from the east, and overlapping stone slabs formed its ceiling. The solar itself was ceiled on stone corbels. A narrow stair in the thickness of the southwest corner rose from the ground floor, and a further stair in the northwest corner went on up to the wall-walk and to a second floor. That top room had no windows and is read as storage, or as a dark lodging for servants. At about 4.9 metres above the ground the tower met the curtain, and a narrow door with a lancet head in the west wall still leads to stone steps up to the former wall-walk. A blocked opening at the stair-head once opened onto that walk. The south wall of the tower has a small stair light and a large upper opening, with putlog holes beside it. The east wall has a central segmental-headed opening in the upper stage, its voussoirs missing. Two small stair lights mark the west wall.

The west wing, added in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, is ruined to its lower walls and to inserted openings. In its south wall are two later doorways, one with brick jambs and later blocked, the other with a segmental brick head, also blocked, and a window above. The west gable has an inserted upper window with brick jambs and a segmental head, blocked with stone. An outshut on that side has a wide doorway, one jamb repaired in brick, and a small dressed opening above. In the north wall, low down, are the chamfered jambs of a blocked door. The stable against the east of the tower is of about 1800 and is now detached. Its south wall has four windows. A doorway to the right has a segmental head. Former doors left and right of centre were turned into windows, one of them with a brick head. The window left of centre was narrowed in brick. Upper windows to the right have brick heads, and one upper window left of centre is blocked. Ground has risen against the gable and the rear. Brick in these openings is the mark of the years when Sir John Nicholl was altering the house. An early nineteenth-century phase also crenellated the castle for ornament and is said to have included the building of a defensive tower.

Near a windmill that the sand uncovered in 1823, the stepped base of a Calvary cross was found, with the fallen shaft lying beside it. No date was recorded for the cross. In 1901 the artist G. Howell-Baker, who was born George Howell Baker in 1871 at Prestwich Park and who died in 1919 after spending his later life in Bridgend, published Penholm, a book of twenty-five lithographs. One plate shows Candleston. His mother, Mary Catherine Howell, was from Bridgend, and his father, George Baker, was from Manchester. He was baptised on 15 March 1871. A partial excavation of the manor was recorded in 1930. What that dig exposed is not set out in the short record of the event. Buried remains in the surrounding fields are indicated mainly by scatters of prehistoric finds. The landscape around the house takes in three south-facing valleys beside the warren, an irregular field pattern, ancient and other broadleaf woodland, twentieth-century forestry, and Candleston Farm.

In the Victorian years and into the twentieth century, territorial soldiers used a rifle range in the dunes west of the castle. In 1903 the Glamorgan Yeomanry held individual and team shooting there. The winner of the recruits’ prize was disqualified when it emerged that he had already served as a volunteer artilleryman. The range was given up because so many people walked and picnicked in the woods that firing was no longer safe. In June 1914, while it was still in use, Margaret Bishop of Bridgend was in the woods with her husband and children when a stray bullet hit her lower right leg. It had probably ricocheted from a tree. At Cardiff Infirmary the bullet was removed with the help of X-ray images.

The village of Merthyr Mawr, whose community had 267 people in 2011, lies about two and a half miles from the centre of Bridgend. It is largely an estate village for the house Nicholl built. Several cottages keep thatched roofs. The parish church of St Teilo was built in 1849 to 1851 by Benjamin Ferrey and John Pritchard on an older site, and a shelter in the churchyard holds early medieval stones gathered nearby. The River Ogmore runs through the village, crossed on the outskirts by a stone bridge of four arches, sixteenth century or older, with two openings used for washing sheep, which is why it is also called the dipping bridge. The community holds a long run of protected monuments besides the castle: the Neolithic Tythegston long barrow, the Bronze Age cairn on Mynydd Herbert, Chapel Hill Camp, the warren itself, the Roman and Iron Age settlement at Cae Summerhouse, the pre-Norman stones, Vervil Dyke between the Ogmore and the Ewenny, the cross in Tythegston churchyard, St Roque’s chapel and the Conbelani stone, the churchyard cross at Merthyr Mawr, and New Inn Bridge. Candleston is the medieval manor house among them, occupied, on the shortest statement of its life, until the nineteenth century.

Bridgend County Borough, formed on 1 April 1996, covers about 285 square kilometres, or 110 square miles, and stretches about twelve miles from east to west across the Llynfi, Garw and Ogmore valleys. Bridgend is its largest town, then Maesteg and Porthcawl. The castle looks west toward the dunes and the bay, and east toward the village and the river. In the twenty-first century the house is an ivy-covered ruin. Wildfowl, butterflies, moths, autumn gentian, violets and orchids are seen round about, and the immediate ground is woodland and farmland. Parts of the curtain are open to vandalism and parts are structurally unsound, while other stretches are still sound. The tower, the domestic range, the courtyard and the stable, with an area around them in which further evidence may survive, are protected as a scheduled monument. The standing building was designated a listed building on 26 July 1963 because it is an important example of a medieval fortified house. The scheduled area is irregular, about 70 metres from northeast to southwest and about 50 metres across.

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