Castell Coch

Castell Coch, the Red Castle, stands in ancient beech wood on the hillside above Tongwynlais, overlooking the River Taff where the valley narrows on the way north from Cardiff. The Welsh name means red castle. In the later thirteenth century the place was called Castrum Rubeum, Latin for the red castle, probably from the colour of the red sandstone. It is a High Victorian Gothic Revival house built over a medieval fortress, and the two periods can still be read in the masonry.

The older work is crudely laid red sandstone rubble and grey limestone. The nineteenth-century additions are more precisely cut red Pennant sandstone. The building was designated Grade I on 28 January 1963 for its exceptional architectural and historical interest, and it is also a scheduled ancient monument. It sits about 10.6 kilometres north-west of the centre of Cardiff.

The woods around it, part of the Taff Gorge complex and called Fforest Fawr in the account of the present castle, are among the most westerly natural beech woodlands in the British Isles. They hold dog's mercury, ramsons, sanicles, bird's-nest orchid, greater butterfly-orchid and yellow bird's nest. The rock shows where Devonian Old Red Sandstone meets Carboniferous Limestone, and Castell Coch Quarry lies nearby. The woods and the road section are a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The woods above the castle are used for walking, mountain biking and horse riding. A nine-hole golf course to the south-east occupies the ground of a nineteenth-century vineyard.

The first castle was probably raised after 1081, during the Norman invasion of Wales. That invasion had begun soon after the conquest of England, without the same single purpose, in the years from 1067 to 1081. A stronger push began in 1081, and by 1094 most of Wales was under the control of William II. The Welsh recovered the greater part of the country by 1101, in the long reign of Gruffudd ap Cynan.

The new motte at Castell Coch was one of a string of eight fortifications meant to defend the newly conquered town of Cardiff and to watch the route through the Taff gorge. It was an earthwork about 35 metres across at the base and 25 metres across on the top, protected by the steep slopes. A ditch was later cut in the rock in front of the gate, except on the south, where the precipice made a ditch useless.

Who founded that first work is disputed. The sixteenth-century historian Rice Merrick, also Rhys Meurug, claimed that the Welsh lord Ifor ap Meurig built it. Ifor ap Meurig, called Ifor Bach, Ivor the Short, was lord of Senghenydd and was active in 1158. Modern historians doubt his foundation, because no record of that phase survives.

His own life says he is reputed to have built a medieval castle on the site now occupied by Castell Coch. In 1158, Giraldus Cambrensis wrote, Ifor was a tenant of William Fitz Robert, 2nd Earl of Gloucester, who held Cardiff Castle and was trying to take land that Welsh law gave to Ifor. Ifor scaled the walls of Cardiff with his bare hands, seized the earl, his countess Hawise and their young son Robert, and carried them to the woods of Senghenydd. He would not release them until he had his land back, and a lot more.

He had also, in 1158, attacked and killed Morgan ab Owain, lord of Caerleon and Gwynllwg. Senghenydd was the upland between the Taff and the Rhymney, still not fully in Norman hands. Ifor married Nest, sister of Rhys ap Gruffudd, the Lord Rhys, and was succeeded by his son Gruffudd before 1170. Descendants included Morgan Gam and, later, Llywelyn Bren.

The Lordship of Glamorgan was one of the richest Marcher lordships, with its seat at Cardiff Castle. Robert Fitzhamon, the first Norman feudal baron of Gloucester, is called Lord of Glamorgan in 1075, and the lordship is also dated from his conquest, given as 1093 to 1107. A Marcher lord could declare war, raise taxes, hold courts and markets and build castles by his own law, without asking the English crown. Those liberties lasted until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542.

The first castle at Castell Coch was probably abandoned after 1093, when the lordship of Glamorgan was created and the line of the frontier changed. Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, held the lordship from 1118 to 1147, and William Fitz Robert from 1147 to 1183.

The stone castle is a second question, and the dates do not agree. One account builds it for Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester, between 1267 and 1277, after he seized the lands around Senghenydd from their Welsh ruler in 1267. Caerphilly was raised to hold the new territory, and Castell Coch, between Cardiff and Caerphilly, was occupied again. The new work wrapped the motte in a shell wall, with a projecting round tower, a gatehouse and a square hall over an undercroft.

The north-west wall was given a talus, and the motte sides were scarped steeper. Between 1268 and 1277 two large towers were added, with a turning bridge for the gatehouse and more protection on the north-west. The listing of the standing building describes a twelfth- and thirteenth-century masonry castle of the de Clares, lords of Glamorgan, in two phases: a first phase that cased an eleventh-century motte in stone and added curved shell walls, and a second that added the hall range with its undercroft, two drum towers rising on spurs from a square base, and a third drum tower, the shell wall raised a little later and an entrance tower made. David McLees, writing before the Royal Commission's survey, thought the evidence inconclusive and argued that the shell walls and stone apron might be mid-twelfth century, with the first round tower possibly early to mid-thirteenth century, built by the de Clares.

The Royal Commission's survey found no castle here in the de Clare inventories of 1263, nor in the lists of payments to their castle garrisons that year, and found no evidence for dating the stone castle earlier than the work of the later thirteenth century.

Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester, was also Gilbert de Clare, 6th Earl of Hertford. He was born at Christchurch in Hampshire on 2 September 1243 and died on 7 December 1295. He was called Red Gilbert, or the Red Earl, probably from his hair or from his temper in battle, a name that belongs to the man and not to the red stone of this castle. His father was Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford and Gloucester, and his mother was Maud de Lacy, daughter of John de Lacy and Margaret de Quincy.

He inherited the estates in 1262 and took the titles, including the lordship of Glamorgan, from 1263. He was still under age, and a ward of Humphrey de Bohun, 2nd Earl of Hereford. He held one of the wealthiest Marcher lordships and more than 200 English manors, 172 of them in the honour of Clare.

He came of age inside the Second Barons' War of 1264 to 1267, the civil war in which Simon de Montfort's barons tried to make Henry III rule with a baronial council. In April 1264 Gilbert led the massacre of the Jews at Canterbury, as Montfort's supporters did elsewhere, attacks aimed at seizing and destroying the evidence of baronial debts. Henry III took Gilbert's castles of Kingston and Tonbridge. The king let Gilbert's countess, Alice de Lusignan, leave Tonbridge because she was his niece.

On 12 May 1264 Gilbert and Montfort were denounced as traitors. Two days later, on 14 May, just before the Battle of Lewes, Montfort knighted Gilbert and his brother Thomas. Gilbert commanded the centre of the baronial army on the downs west of Lewes. When Prince Edward chased Montfort's broken left wing off the field, the king and the Earl of Cornwall were thrown back into the town.

Henry took refuge in the priory of St Pancras, and Gilbert accepted the surrender of the Earl of Cornwall, who had hidden in a windmill. Montfort was, for a time, de facto king.

On 20 October 1264 Pope Clement IV excommunicated Gilbert and his associates and laid an interdict on his lands. The next month, once they held Gloucester and Bristol, Gilbert was proclaimed a rebel. He then broke with Montfort. To stop Montfort escaping, he destroyed ships at Bristol and the bridge over the Severn at Gloucester.

He shared Prince Edward's victory at Kenilworth on 16 July 1265, and at the Battle of Evesham on 4 August, where Montfort was killed, Gilbert commanded the second division. On 6 October 1265 he received papal absolution, and on 9 October the king's pardon. In October 1265, as a reward, he was given the castle and title of Abergavenny and the honour and castle of Brecknock. At Michaelmas his disputes with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Llywelyn the Last, went to arbitration and were not settled.

He was already turning Caerphilly into a fortress. At the end of 1268 he refused a summons to parliament, saying that Llywelyn's inroads meant he had to stay and defend his Welsh estates. On 24 June 1268, reconciled to the prince, he and Edward took the cross together at Northampton.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been prince of Gwynedd from 1255. After campaigns across Wales in 1257 he proclaimed himself prince of Wales in 1258, and Henry III recognised him in the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. That was the year Gilbert seized upland Senghenydd. Llywelyn's father, in the account of Llywelyn Bren, had been dispossessed of Senghenydd by this same earl and imprisoned in Kilkenny Castle in Ireland, with no record of his return.

The stone castle on the Taff was the lowland pair to Caerphilly: a small, strong fort on the road between the old caput at Cardiff and the new castle in the hills. One later reading calls the medieval castle a hunting lodge of this Marcher lord. He is not recorded as having lived here for any length of time. The same is said of the Victorian owner who rebuilt it.

Henry III died on 16 November 1272. Gilbert led the oath of fealty to Edward, who was then in Sicily on the way back from crusade. The next day, with the Archbishop of York, he entered London, proclaimed peace to Christians and Jews, and secured, for the first time, an acknowledgement that the king's eldest son succeeded at once. He was joint guardian of England during the king's absence, and in August 1274 he entertained the new king at Tonbridge.

Edward I, king from 1272 to 1307, had been loyal to his father in the barons' war after an early flirtation with reform, had escaped captivity after Lewes, and had beaten Montfort at Evesham. He suppressed a conflict in Wales in 1276 and 1277, and answered a second in 1282 and 1283 by conquering Wales, building castles and towns and settling them with English people. Llywelyn was killed in an ambush at Cilmeri on 11 December 1282. In that invasion Gilbert insisted on leading an attack in the south.

Edward made him commander of the southern army. The army was heavily defeated at the Battle of Llandeilo Fawr, and Gilbert was replaced by William de Valence, 1st Earl of Pembroke, whose son had died in the battle.

In 1291 Gilbert quarrelled with Humphrey de Bohun, 3rd Earl of Hereford, grandson of his former guardian, over the lordship of Brecknock. Bohun accused him of building a castle on Bohun land, and the quarrel became a private war. Marcher lords claimed the right to wage such wars. Edward tested the right.

He called both earls before a court of their Marcher peers, then, expecting that court to protect the privilege, called them before his own court. Both were imprisoned and sentenced to lose their lands for life. Gilbert, as the aggressor, was fined 10,000 marks, and Hereford 1,000. They were released almost at once and their lands were restored, but the king had given a public lesson.

Gilbert's first marriage was to Alice de Lusignan, also called Alice de Valence, daughter of Hugh XI of Lusignan and a niece of Henry III. They married in 1253, when Gilbert was ten. They separated in 1267. It was alleged that Alice's affections lay with her cousin, Prince Edward.

The marriage was annulled in 1285. They had two daughters: Isabel, born on 10 March 1262, who died in 1333 and married Maurice de Berkeley, 2nd Baron Berkeley, after a marriage with Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick, had been contemplated or perhaps made and annulled; and Joan, born in 1264 and alive after 1302, who married Duncan Macduff, 7th Earl of Fife, and then Gervase Avenel. On 30 April 1290 Gilbert married Joan of Acre, daughter of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile. Joan had been born at Acre in April 1272, while her parents were on crusade.

Edward wanted the Clare lands tied to the crown. The contract said the joint possessions and Gilbert's lands could pass only to a direct descendant, and if the marriage had no child the lands would pass to any children Joan had by a later marriage. Gilbert had resigned his lands to the king on the promise of receiving them back when he married her, and a dower of 2,000 silver marks was agreed. Joan was twelve when the negotiations ended.

They married at Westminster Abbey. On 3 July 1290 Gilbert gave a banquet at Clerkenwell to celebrate, after waiting for the pope to sanction the marriage. Edward then gave him large estates, including one in Malvern. Disputed hunting rights there led to armed clashes with Humphrey de Bohun, which Edward settled.

Gilbert also had a conflict over hunting rights and a ditch with Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, settled by costly litigation, and a jurisdictional dispute with Godfrey Giffard, bishop of Worcester, settled by the chancellor Robert Burnell. In September he signed the barons' letter to the pope, and on 2 November he surrendered his claim to the advowson of the bishopric of Llandaff. Gilbert and Joan are said to have taken the cross and set out for the Holy Land.

They had a son, Gilbert, and three daughters, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth. The son, born about 10 May 1291, was Gilbert de Clare, 8th Earl of Gloucester and 7th Earl of Hertford. Eleanor, born in 1292, married Hugh Despenser the Younger and, after his execution in 1326, William la Zouche. Margaret, born in 1293, married Piers Gaveston and, after his execution in 1312, Hugh de Audley.

Elizabeth, born in 1295, married John de Burgh in 1308, Theobald of Verdun in 1316 and Roger d'Amory in 1317. The Red Earl died at Monmouth Castle on 7 December 1295 and was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey, on the left side of his grandfather, also Gilbert de Clare. Joan kept the lands until her own death. Around the time of his death this castle was called Castrum Rubeum.

Joan of Acre was a widow for a little over a year when she married Ralph de Monthermer, a squire in her household, in secret in January 1297. Edward was arranging her marriage to Amadeus V, Count of Savoy, for 16 March 1297. He seized her lands. She told him she was already married.

He imprisoned Monthermer at Bristol. Joan said that it was not disgraceful for a great earl to marry a poor woman, nor blameworthy for a countess to raise a gallant youth. Her pregnancy made the marriage impossible to undo. Edward released Monthermer in August 1297.

Monthermer did homage on 2 August and was granted the earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford for her lifetime. The lordship of Glamorgan is given to him from 1297 until her death. Joan died on 23 April 1307 at the manor of Clare in Suffolk. The cause is unclear.

One theory is childbirth, unconfirmed. Less than four months later her father died. The earldom passed to her son by Gilbert. She was buried in the Augustinian priory at Clare.

A fifteenth-century chronicle records a claim that in 1357 her daughter Elizabeth inspected the body and found it intact. No cause for beatification was ever introduced.

The young Gilbert was invested with the earldoms at sixteen. He was a soldier in the Scottish wars more than a politician at home, though he became one of the Lords Ordainers who ordered the expulsion of Edward II's favourite Piers Gaveston in 1311. When Gaveston was killed on his return in 1312, Gilbert helped negotiate a settlement. He then stood with the king.

In 1314 he went with Edward II to Scotland when several other nobles refused. He was killed at the Battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, in circumstances that are unclear. He was the most prominent English casualty in a humiliating defeat. He had married Maud de Burgh, daughter of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, and he left no child.

The de Clare inheritance was divided among his three sisters. Eleanor's husband, Hugh Despenser the Younger, used that share to expand the lordship of Glamorgan. That expansion fed the crisis of Edward II's later reign, including rebellion in the Marches, the defeat of the Earl of Lancaster at the Battle of Boroughbridge, and the deposition of the king by Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella in 1326.

What happened to Castell Coch in those years is told in more than one way. One account says that the son's death at Bannockburn set off a rising of the native Welsh, that the castle was probably destroyed by the rebels in July 1314, and that it may have been slighted so it could not be used again. It was not rebuilt, and the site was abandoned. Another account, of Llywelyn Bren, separates a revolt in the lordship from June or July until September 1314, after Bannockburn, from the larger revolt of 1316.

About 500 men of Glamorgan were among a larger English army at the battle, and the 1314 revolt is said to have ended when Edward II appointed Bartholomew de Badlesmere as royal custodian. The listing of the building says the castle was probably partly destroyed in the Welsh rebellion in Glamorgan of 1316.

Llywelyn Bren, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd ap Rhys, Llywelyn of the Woods, was born in the 1260s and died about 1317. He was a noble of Senghenydd and Miscin and a descendant of Ifor Bach. His father Gruffudd ap Rhys had been dispossessed by the Red Earl. Llywelyn spoke Middle Welsh, French and Latin, married Lleucu, who died in 1349, and had at least seven sons.

He was constable of Senghenydd. Before the 1316 revolt he denounced the new administration of Payn de Turberville, was accused of sedition, and appealed to Edward II. The king ordered him to parliament on a treason charge and said that if the charge were true he would be hanged. He was summoned to Lincoln for 27 January 1316, fled home, and on 28 January attacked Caerphilly with his six sons and a force put at 10,000.

They took the constable outside the castle and the outer ward, burned the town, and could not break the inner defences. The revolt spread through Glamorgan. Kenfig and Llantrisant were sacked. Cardiff was raided.

On 18 March 1316 Llywelyn surrendered to Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford, at Ystradfellte, saying the fault was his and asking that his followers be spared. He was in the Tower of London from 27 July 1316 to 17 June 1317. In November 1317 Despenser became lord of Glamorgan and took Llywelyn to Cardiff Castle, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Contemporaries called it an unlawful killing.

Kathryn Warner has argued that the execution was most likely at the king's own command. Llywelyn was buried in the Greyfriars at Cardiff. His death helped unite Welshmen and Marcher lords against the Despensers. In 1321 their lands in Glamorgan were raided.

Edward exiled the Despensers, then defeated the barons at Boroughbridge in 1322, where the Earl of Hereford died. In October 1326 Roger Mortimer's rebellion ended with the capture of Edward and the Despensers. Hugh was hanged, drawn and quartered. On 11 February 1327 the Senghenydd estates were restored to Llywelyn's sons.

None of these accounts says that Castell Coch was rebuilt after the early fourteenth century.

The antiquary John Leland, visiting around 1536, and in the 1530s in the listing, found it all in ruin, no big thing but high. The marcher liberties of Glamorgan were ending in the same decade, under the Laws in Wales Acts, and the lordship had already passed through the Despensers, the Beauchamps, Richard Neville, Richard III, Jasper Tudor and the English crown. The ruin stood. In 1792 Julius Caesar Ibbetson painted it, and an 1808 painting was based on that watercolour.

He showed substantial remains, a prominent tower, and a lime kiln working beside the fort. Stone from the castle may have fed the kilns. An unknown artist, a few years into the nineteenth century, showed more trees. Robert Drane later recommended the place for picnics and noted the wild garlic.

The ruins came to the Bute family in the eighteenth century, and the accounts of that acquisition do not match. One says they were acquired in 1760, when John Stuart, the 3rd Earl and, from 1794, the 1st Marquess, married Lady Charlotte Windsor, heiress of Viscount Windsor, and added her estates in South Wales to his own. The life of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, gives different facts. He was born in Parliament Close, Edinburgh, on 25 May 1713, and he died on 10 March 1792.

He was the son of James Stuart, 2nd Earl of Bute, and Lady Anne Campbell. He was at Eton from 1724 to 1730, studied civil law at Groningen and Leiden, and succeeded his father in 1723. In August 1735 he eloped with Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a Scottish representative peer in 1737, dropped in 1741, and spent years on his Scottish estates and on botany.

In 1747 at the Egham races he met Frederick, Prince of Wales. After Frederick's death in 1751 he became tutor to the future George III. Gossip linked him with the prince's widow, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The rumour is treated as almost certainly untrue.

He was prime minister from 1762 to 1763, the first Tory in the office and the first prime minister from Scotland after the Union of 1707. In 1780 he became the first president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. His life does not make him a marquess in 1794, and it does not marry him to Charlotte Windsor.

His son was John Stuart, 1st Marquess of Bute, born at Mount Stuart on 30 June 1744 and died on 16 November 1814. He was styled Lord Mount Stuart until 1792 and Earl of Bute from 1792 to 1794. On 12 November 1766 he married the heiress Charlotte Hickman-Windsor, daughter of Herbert Hickman-Windsor, 2nd Viscount Windsor. The Windsor titles recognised a barony and viscountcy that had ended when her father died in 1758.

In 1776 he was made Baron Cardiff, of Cardiff Castle. In 1794 he was created Viscount Mountjoy, Earl of Windsor and Marquess of Bute. He was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan from 1772 to 1793 and again from 1794, envoy to Turin in 1779 and ambassador to Spain in 1783. Charlotte died on 28 January 1800.

On 17 September 1800 he married Frances Coutts. In 1799 he, or his immediate family trust, was estimated the second-wealthiest small family unit in Britain, at 4.2 million pounds, largely from coal-bearing and agricultural land. His eldest son, John Stuart, Lord Mount Stuart, died on 22 January 1794, and that son's son succeeded as 2nd Marquess. The castle account's marriage of 1760, and its identification of the 3rd Earl with the 1st Marquess, therefore sit beside a marriage of 12 November 1766 by the son, and beside a father who was dead before the marquessate existed.

The 2nd Marquess began, at heavy financial risk, the development of Cardiff as a port for the mineral wealth of the South Wales valleys. In 1844 he told a worried solicitor that he was willing to think well of his income in the distance. The next fifty years proved him right, and the riches were spent by his son. The castle account also says that this John Crichton-Stuart carried out exploration for iron ore at Castell Coch in 1827 and considered an ironworks there.

He died in 1848. John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, was born at Mount Stuart on 12 September 1847 and succeeded at the age of six months. He was John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, Earl of Dumfries at birth, son of the 2nd Marquess and Lady Sophia Rawdon-Hastings, daughter of the 1st Marquess of Hastings. His mother died when he was twelve.

He was educated at Harrow and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1865. He owned 116,000 acres, about 47,000 hectares, mostly in Glamorgan, Ayrshire and Bute, and the inheritance was reported to make him the richest man in the world. He was drawn to the Roman Catholic Church from childhood. He was never a member of the Church of England.

On 8 December 1868 Monsignor Capel received him at a convent in Southwark, and Pius IX confirmed him in Rome. The conversion was a public scandal and the basis of Benjamin Disraeli's novel Lothair, published in 1870. He married into the Catholic family of the Duke of Norfolk. His interests included astrology, medieval art, religion, medievalism, the occult, architecture, travel, linguistics and philanthropy.

He died on 9 October 1900, aged 53. His heart was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. He was a Knight Grand Cross of the Holy Sepulchre, a Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great, and Hereditary Keeper of Rothesay Castle.

In 1865 he met William Burges. Within a year Burges had written a scheme for improving Cardiff Castle with a tower and an excavated moat garden. Work there began as soon as the marquess came of age in 1868. William Burges was born on 2 December 1827 and died on 20 April 1881.

His father, Alfred Burges, was a wealthy civil engineer, famous for the embankment at Westminster, and the fortune let the son study architecture without having to earn his living. William entered King's College School in 1839 to study engineering. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti were contemporaries. In 1844 he joined Edward Blore, surveyor to Westminster Abbey.

In 1848 or 1849 he moved to Matthew Digby Wyatt and worked on the Medieval Court of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and on drawings for Wyatt's book on metalwork. He won Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork in 1863, at the age of thirty-five. He wanted to escape industrial Britain and neoclassical architecture and to recover what he took to be the values of a medieval England. His work sits in the Gothic Revival, echoes the Pre-Raphaelites, and points toward the Arts and Crafts movement.

His output was small: churches, a cathedral, a warehouse, a university, a school, houses and castles. Cardiff Castle, for this same marquess, ran from 1866 to 1928. His own page dates Castell Coch from 1872 to 1891. Other works include Gayhurst House, Knightshayes Court, the Church of Christ the Consoler, St Mary's at Studley Royal, and Park House in Cardiff.

Competitions for Lille, Adelaide, Colombo, Brisbane, Edinburgh and Truro failed. He lost the Royal Courts of Justice to George Edmund Street. His plans for the interior of St Paul's were abandoned and he was dismissed. For most of the century after his death, Victorian architecture was unfashionable and his work was ignored.

Interest returned in the later twentieth century.

In 1850 George Thomas Clark surveyed the ruins and published the first major scholarly study. Clark was born in Chelsea on 26 May 1809 and died on 31 January 1898. He was a surgeon and an engineer, educated at Charterhouse, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1832, and then an engineer for Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Great Western and Taff Vale railways. From 1843 to 1847 he surveyed the Great Indian Peninsula Railway.

From 1855 he controlled the Dowlais Ironworks, after the remarriage of Lady Charlotte Guest, and with William Menelaus he brought Henry Bessemer there. By the mid-1860s his salary was 3,500 pounds a year plus five percent of the profits. In 1876 he was president of the British Iron Trade Association. He bought Talygarn near Llantrisant in 1865 and built an estate of about 924 acres.

He died there in 1898, worth 333,305 pounds. At Castell Coch in 1850 he found rubble, ivy, brushwood and weeds. The keep was largely destroyed. The gatehouse was so buried that he missed it.

He thought the outer walls tolerably perfect and advised that the castle be conserved, ivy and all. His Mediaeval Military Architecture in England appeared in 1884.

In 1871 the marquess asked his chief Cardiff engineer, John McConnochie, also called James McConnochie in some accounts, to excavate and clear the ruins. William Burges, who had an interest in medieval architecture, wrote the report on the dig. It drew heavily on Clark. Up to those excavations the castle was, to an ordinary spectator, a mass of ruins.

The moat was filled, and the path in crossed the buried foundations of a gateway that could not be seen. The moat was then cleared and the rest of the building excavated. The foundations and lower walls were repaired so that further work was possible. Burges set out two choices: conserve the ruins, or rebuild the castle as a country residence for occasional occupation in the summer.

The listing dates his partial excavation to 1872 and says the reconstruction also used medieval illuminated manuscripts and the antiquarian research of the time. The marquess chose rebuilding, in a Gothic Revival style. Work waited until 1875, because Cardiff Castle came first and because the trustees had an unfounded fear that he was facing bankruptcy. The Kitchen Tower, the hall block and the shell wall were rebuilt first, then the Well Tower and the gatehouse, and the keep last.

The bulk of the outside was finished by the end of 1879. An extra watch tower meant to look like a minaret, and some defensive timber hoardings, were not built. The drawings survive at Mount Stuart, with a large number of wooden and plaster models, some of them full size. Clark kept advising on the historical questions, and Burges checked details such as the drawbridge and the portcullis against surviving work at other British castles.

Burges wrote that Viollet-le-Duc and George Thomas Clark had taught a great deal, but that knowledge of medieval military architecture still lagged behind domestic and church architecture, and he asked that the restoration be judged by what was known.

The team had already worked with him at Cardiff and elsewhere. John Chapple, also J. S. Chapple, his office manager, designed most of the furniture, made in the marquess's workshops at Cardiff.

William Frame was clerk of works. Horatio Lonsdale, also H. W. Lonsdale, was the chief artist.

Thomas Nicholls was the main sculptor, with the Italian sculptor Ceccardo Fucigna. The listing credits Fucigna with the Virgin and Nicholls with St Lucius and the overmantels, and Lonsdale's stencils as executed by Campbell Smith, also Campbell, Smith and Company.

Burges died in 1881 after catching a severe chill on a visit to the site. His life gives the date 20 April 1881 and the place as his house in Kensington, The Tower House, at the age of fifty-three. His brother-in-law, the architect Richard Pullan, took the commission and passed most of it to Frame, who directed the interior until 1891. The paint research of 2026 speaks of the castle's completion in 1881, and also of a return to a red used 135 years before a statement made in March 2026, which points to 1891.

Both dates stand. The marquess and his wife Gwendolen were consulted on the interior. Replica family portraits, based on those at Cardiff, were hung here. In 1884 Clark called the restoration excellent taste.

An oratory built on the roof of the Well Tower was removed before 1891. Otherwise the finished castle was left as completed. On 17 April 1882, just before the first anniversary of Burges's death, Pullan told the Royal Institute of British Architects that the chapel was of wood, partly projecting on immense brackets toward the courtyard. Of the portcullis, perhaps the only modern one, Pullan thought Burges would have spent more time than many architects would spend on a whole house.

Ewan Christian, in an otherwise complimentary reply, called that effort a pure waste, because a portcullis would never again be of use.

The castle was little used. The marquess rarely came after it was finished. There is no record of him staying after 1881, and some rooms were never finished. It had reception rooms for a large party, but only three bedrooms, and it was too far from Cardiff for a casual visit.

It reads as a retreat after a picnic more than as a house for everyday life. The total rebuilding also sat badly with the late Victorian wish to conserve old buildings rather than remake them, and the architectural profession paid it little attention at first.

The outside follows the medieval plan more closely than the inside, though the three towers were shaped for a dramatic silhouette, nearer to castles such as Chillon than to most British forts. The design owes a debt to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, including his restorations of Carcassonne and the châteaus of Aigle and Chillon. Burges defended the conical roofs from medieval manuscripts, which show both flat tops and pointed roofs. He argued that a tower used for military engines would have a flat top, and that otherwise a high roof kept the defenders from rain and light missiles.

He also chose the roofs because they looked more picturesque and because they gave more rooms. They are capped with copper-gilt weather vanes. The keep and the kitchen tower are each 12 metres in diameter, on square spurred bases. Their walls are about 3 metres thick at the base and thin to about 0.61 metres at the top.

A thirteenth-century latrine turret on the south-west of the keep has almost gone. There is no evidence that the tower Burges called a keep was a keep in the Middle Ages. He seems to have used the name because he first meant to put the bedrooms of the marquess and the marchioness there. The kitchen tower was originally two storeys and held the kitchen.

He raised it, gave it a conical roof and chimneys, and a timber fighting gallery and a wall-walk were part of the recreation. The Well Tower is slightly narrower, 11.5 metres, with a flat rather than curved side toward the courtyard, like some de Clare towers at Caerphilly, and with a well in the lowest chamber. It lacks the spurs of the other two. The three towers open on a small oval courtyard on top of the motte, about 19.5 metres long.

Galleries and wall-walks run round the inside. The shell wall on the north-west, rebuilt about a metre thick, has arrow loops and a battlement. A wooden bridge, with a drawbridge, crosses the ditch to the gatehouse. Burges thought medieval bridges of this kind were made to be burned if the castle were attacked.

Above the entrance he set a portcullis and a glazed statue of the Madonna and Child by Ceccardo Fucigna. A wooden bretèche overhangs the gate so that things could be dropped on attackers. In 1850 Clark recorded an outer court of which nothing remains. It may have been the trace of the lime kilns rather than a bailey.

The interiors are High Victorian, not a copy of the thirteenth century. Charles Handley-Read wrote that he had yet to see High Victorian rooms, largely from one designer, to match the Welsh castles for completeness, execution or originality, and that for sheer power of intoxication Burges stood unrivalled. The banqueting hall fills the first floor of the hall block, 6.1 by 9.1 metres, with a ceiling 11 metres high. Burges persuaded the marquess and George Thomas Clark that the medieval hall had stood on the first floor.

His first approaches were roundabout, through the Well Tower or round the gallery. Neither suited the marquess. Around 1878 or 1879 a window at the head of the gallery was enlarged into the present entrance. The hall is austere.

John Newman called the decoration dilute and unfocused. J. Mordaunt Crook called it anaemic. Joseph Mordaunt Crook, born on 27 February 1937 and known as J.

Mordaunt Crook, is the historian of Georgian and Victorian architecture whose life of Burges, published in 1981 and reissued in 2013, has been called one of the most substantial studies of any Victorian architect. The hall has stencilled ceilings and murals like medieval manuscripts, designed by Horatio Lonsdale and painted by Campbell, Smith and Company. The furniture is by John Chapple. The tapered chimney, modelled on fifteenth-century French work, holds a statue by Thomas Nicholls.

Mark Girouard suggested the Hebrew king David. Most historians take it to be Lucius of Britain, in legend the founder of the diocese of Llandaff.

The octagonal drawing room occupies the first and second floors of the keep. The vaulted stone ribs follow Viollet-le-Duc's work at Coucy, and a minstrels' gallery divides the height. The first plan was two separate chambers. The double-height room was adopted only in 1879, when Burges said he meant to indulge in a little more ornament.

John Newman described the intertwined themes as the fecundity of nature and the fragility of life. A fireplace by Thomas Nicholls shows the Three Fates, spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of life. Butterflies climb the ribs to a golden sunburst. Birds fly into a starry sky.

Fifty-eight panels show plants, wild flowers from the Mediterranean, where the marquess spent his winters, and above them a mural of animals from twenty-four of Aesop's fables. Carved birds, lizards and other creatures decorate the doorways. Terry Measham called this room and Lady Bute's bedroom the two most important interiors. Andrew Lilwall-Smith called the drawing room Burges's strongest room, a romantic vision of the Middle Ages.

The ceiling was painted while Burges was alive. The murals, and Lady Bute's bedroom, were finished after his death, under Frame and Lonsdale, and they take on the softer colour of the Aesthetic movement of the 1880s.

Lord Bute's bedroom, above the winch room, is smaller and plainer. The original plan put his rooms in the keep. The double-height drawing room of 1879 forced a change. Doors lead to a balcony over the courtyard and to the bretèche over the gate.

The furniture is mostly by Chapple and later than Burges, though the washstand and dressing table are pared-down versions of the Narcissus washstand and the Crocker dressing table that Burges made for The Tower House. The walls use plain stencilled geometry. Crook thought this a spartan pause before Lady Bute's bedroom. Peter Floud thought it thin and drab.

The room would have been awkward for regular use, with no wardrobes and little storage.

Lady Bute's bedroom fills the upper two floors of the keep, with a coffered double dome rising into the conical roof. Burges left an outline model, which survives, and no detailed decorative drawings. In a letter of 1887 Frame asked Nicholls whether Mr Burges would have done it. Lonsdale painted the room in 1887 and 1888, with a large part taken by the marquess and Gwendolen.

The room is circular, the windows set in a ring of arches. The theme is love: carved monkeys, pomegranates and grapevines on the ceiling, nesting birds on the pillars. The marquess thought the monkeys too lascivious. Over the fireplace a winged Psyche, the Greek personification of the soul, carries a heart-shaped shield with the Bute arms.

The washbasin, by Chapple, has a dragon tap, and the cisterns for hot and cold water are covered with crenellated towers. The scarlet and gold bed, the main piece of furniture, is modelled on a medieval original drawn by Viollet-le-Duc. Crook called it medieval to the point of acute discomfort. The room is Moorish in the way much mid-Victorian decoration was, and it echoes Burges's Arab Room at Cardiff Castle and the chancel at St Mary's, Studley Royal.

Lilwall-Smith likened the dome, the maroon and gold furniture and the low bed with glass crystal orbs to a scene from the Arabian Nights. Floud thought the Moorish theme eclectic and theatrical, even like a pantomime, beside the more consistent Arab Room. Matthew Williams thought Lonsdale lacked the imagination Burges might have brought.

The windlass room, or winch room, is in the gatehouse, entered from the drawing room. It holds a working mechanism for the drawbridge and the portcullis. Burges first wanted that gear on the second floor, which he thought the authentic place. When the bedroom moved into that space, the gear was simplified and put on the first floor.

He also provided murder holes, which he thought would have let a medieval garrison pour boiling water and oil onto attackers. The oratory had twenty stained-glass windows. Ten are shown at Cardiff Castle and ten at Castell Coch, two that had been missing having come back in 2011. Other rooms include Lady Margaret Bute's bedroom, the servants' hall and the kitchen.

The house had modern conveniences for its date, including central heating, and a metal bell-pull for visitors.

Stimulated by antiquarian writing on British viticulture, the marquess decided in 1873 to bring commercial grape vines back to Britain. He sent his gardener, Andrew Pettigrew, to France for training, and in 1875 planted a vineyard of 1.2 hectares, about three acres, just below the castle. The first harvests were poor. The harvest of 1877 produced only 240 bottles.

A comic paper of the time said that any wine would be so unpleasant that it would take four men to drink it, two to hold the victim and one to pour it down his throat. By 1887 the output was 3,000 bottles of sweet white wine of reasonable quality. By 1894, 40 hogsheads a year were produced, including a red wine from Gamay grapes, and the reviews were favourable. Production stopped in the First World War because sugar for fermentation was short, and in 1920 the vines were uprooted.

David McLees, researching the archives for his guide, found previously unseen photographs showing commercial vineyards here before the 1930s, a rare case in Britain. Alexander David McLees was born on 9 November 1945 and died on 14 June 2020. He was an architectural historian, a director of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain from 1998 to 2001, and later an inspector of historic buildings for the Welsh heritage service. His guide to this castle, written in 1988, was reissued in 2005 and in 2018.

He described the castle as one of the greatest Victorian triumphs of architectural composition. Charles Kightly called it the crowning glory of the Gothic Revival in Britain. John B. Hiling, in a study of Welsh architecture, put Castell Coch and Cardiff Castle among the most remarkable domestic buildings resurrected in the nineteenth century, and wrote of their sheer ostentatious extravagance and sumptuous theatricality.

J. Mordaunt Crook wrote that the castle was the learned dream world of a great patron and his favourite architect, recreating from a heap of rubble a fairy-tale castle which seems almost to have materialised from the margins of a medieval manuscript.

The 3rd Marquess died in 1900. His widow had a life interest. During her mourning she and her daughter, Lady Margaret Crichton-Stuart, lived in the castle, and they made occasional visits afterwards. John, the 4th Marquess, acquired it in 1932 and made little use of it.

He also began to reduce the family's investments in South Wales. The coal trade had declined after 1918, and industry suffered in the depression of the 1920s. By 1938 the great majority of the family interests, including the mines and the docks, had been sold or nationalised. The castle was requisitioned for British and American troops in the Second World War.

John Crichton-Stuart, 5th Marquess of Bute, was born on 4 August 1907 and died on 14 August 1956. He was the son of the 4th Marquess and Augusta Bellingham. On 26 April 1932, as Earl of Dumfries, he married Lady Eileen Beatrice Forbes. Their children included John, 6th Marquess, and Lord David, twins born on 27 February 1933, Lord James, born on 17 September 1935, and Lady Caroline, born on 7 January 1941.

He was an ornithologist. In 1931 he bought the islands of St Kilda as a bird sanctuary and left them to the National Trust for Scotland when he died. In 1953 the Marchioness of Bute and Lady St David's Fund was set up to help women train as nurses and midwives in south Wales. He succeeded in 1947 and inherited an estate burdened by death duties.

He sold the family's remaining interests in Cardiff and gave Cardiff Castle to the city. In 1950 he placed Castell Coch in the care of the Ministry of Works. The gift was accepted only with reluctance. In those years Burges's reputation, and Victorian architecture more generally, were at a low ebb, and the castle was called a hideous Victorian joke.

The family portraits were removed from Cardiff Castle before the gift. The paintings here were taken out by the ministry and sent to Cardiff, and the National Museum of Wales lent other pictures in their place. Many of the original furnishings, removed in 1950, have since been brought back. Two stained-glass panels from the demolished chapel, lost since 1901, were found at an auction in 2010 and bought for 125,000 pounds in 2011.

The 5th Marquess died at Mount Stuart on 14 August 1956, aged 49, reportedly suffering from a throat complaint.

Since 1984 the castle has been administered by the Welsh heritage service and is open to the public. It has usually received between 50,000 and 75,000 visits a year. Recorded figures include 75,710 in 2017, 50,511 in 2018, 58,937 in 2019, 8,610 in 2020 and 23,095 in 2021, the last two years marked by the drop during the pandemic. The drawing room has been used for wedding ceremonies, and one account puts the number at more than 60 couples a year.

The castle has also been a film and television location, including The Black Knight in 1954, Sword of the Valiant in 1984, The Worst Witch in 1998, Wolf Hall in 2015, and several episodes of Doctor Who. A model of Lady Bute's bedroom, photographed for an article by W. Howell in 1951 and then lost, was found at Dumfries House in Ayrshire in 2002. The other models, stored in the Model Room of the Black Tower at Cardiff Castle, were probably destroyed in the late 1940s.

The exposed site suffers from penetrating damp. The stone roof tiles were replaced by slate in 1972. The keep was repaired in 2007. In 2011 conservation tackled Lady Bute's bedroom, where damp had begun to damage the finishes.

In 2017 a systematic restoration of the three towers began, to secure the outsides and protect the insides. Work on the keep was completed in 2019, including the roof and chimneys and a new heating system. A programme for the Well Tower was set to run from April 2024 to November 2026. The tower, to the right of the gatehouse, is an inner and an outer stone wall with a rubble core.

The core had become saturated, and impervious cement mortar had sealed the water in. Interior walls were damp and in places wet, and the decoration was at risk. The plan was to scaffold the tower, rake out the cement, let the core dry for about twelve months, and repoint in a breathable lime mortar, while keeping the castle open. Further work was still expected on the kitchen tower and on the interior decoration.

The café closed on Monday 9 June 2025 until further notice, and wedding hire was suspended while the conservation continued.

In work published on 28 March 2026, architectural paint researcher Lisa Oestreicher examined samples from across the castle and identified up to sixteen phases of redecoration since 1881. The original finish on the external timber, the windows, doors, shutters, fascias and gutters, was an orange shade of red, not the darker red built up by later repainting. A key sample survived under the handrail of the balcony next to Lady Margaret's bedroom in the kitchen tower, a shaded spot. Red pigments fade in light and darken under later paint, so matching the colour took many trials.

The shade was named Castell Coch Red 2025 and is to be used for future repainting of that timber. Conservation architect Michael Davies said that, while the Well Tower was being repointed, pink-orange medieval mortar appeared in the lower stonework, previously covered, so that the medieval walls could be told from the Victorian additions. Kate Roberts, chief executive of the heritage service, said it had been many years since the original red could be seen. Repairs to the exterior walls and chimneys had been under way since 2018 to protect the decorated rooms.

On 11 November 2026 it was reported that the scaffolding, in place since April 2024, had come down, that the orange-red timber was visible, and that the castle had fully reopened. The published programme had run until November 2026 and had promised that opening times would not be affected while the work went on.