Castell Coch

Castell Coch stands on a wooded hillside at the edge of Tongwynlais, a village at the northern fringe of Cardiff where the M4 motorway now passes below and the Taff valley begins to narrow into the South Wales Valleys. The name is Welsh for 'Red Castle' — coch means red, referring to the local red Triassic sandstone from which both the Norman original and the Victorian rebuild were constructed. The castle that rises from the tree line today was designed by William Burges in the 1870s, but built on the foundations of a genuine medieval fortification destroyed five and a half centuries before Burges arrived. The relationship between those two layers — the medieval original and the Victorian fantasy built above its ruins — is what makes Castell Coch one of the most architecturally interesting buildings in Wales, and also one of the most misleading: it looks ancient, it is not ancient, but the reasons for its not-ancientness are as interesting as the original castle would have been.

The Norman original was begun after the Conquest of Glamorgan by Robert FitzHamon in 1081 — the same conquest that brought Cardiff Castle into existence two miles downstream. The first fortification on the Castell Coch ridge was a motte: an earthwork mound with a timber tower, the standard quick-and-cheap Norman fortification that established territorial control while waiting for resources to build in stone. The stone castle — three round towers and a gatehouse, largely the form that the Victorian rebuild follows — was constructed by Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, between 1267 and 1277. De Clare, building simultaneously at Caerphilly Castle eight miles to the north, was the dominant marcher lord of his generation, and his two south Welsh castles represent a concentrated investment in military architecture unusual even by the ambitious standards of 13th-century castle-building. Caerphilly was the larger project and the more innovative in military engineering; Castell Coch was smaller, more domestically refined, a possible hunting lodge-fortress in the Taff valley woodland above the larger manorial centre.

The castle was taken and apparently destroyed during the 1314 revolt of Llywelyn Bren — a Welsh lord who rose against English administration immediately after Edward II's defeat at Bannockburn removed English military prestige from the region. The ruins appear to have been left unoccupied thereafter; by the 18th century, when the estate passed to the Bute family, the surviving fabric consisted of the lower courses of three towers and stretches of the curtain wall.

John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute — one of the wealthiest men in Victorian Britain, with income derived from the Cardiff coal trade through Cardiff Docks — commissioned the reconstruction in 1872. William Burges, his architect of choice for the parallel restoration of Cardiff Castle, had spent years studying medieval art and architecture across Europe and producing intricate measured drawings of Gothic buildings from France, Italy, and the Low Countries. He was the obvious choice for a client who wanted archaeologically grounded Gothic Revival rather than decorative approximation. Burges's designs for Castell Coch were as ambitious architecturally as decoratively — the conical roof towers, the working drawbridge, the elaborate water-powered gatehouse mechanisms — and construction began in 1875.

Burges died in 1881 with the construction structurally complete but much of the interior decoration unrealised. His assistants John Pullan and William Frame completed the work to his specifications using detailed drawings and notes. The result embodies a single coherent vision rather than the compromised outcome of a committee, even though the vision was executed by others after the author's death. The drawbridge still operates; the great hall has Burges's painted ceiling of grotesques and animals; the round towers have the conical roofs that Victorian imagination — and Burges's French research — associated with medieval military architecture.

The most spectacular room is Lady Bute's bedroom in the Lady's Tower: the circular room contains a painted canopy bed of extraordinary elaboration, trompe l'oeil ceiling panels depicting classical mythology, a fireplace bearing the image of three monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, rendered in Burges's characteristically knowing medieval idiom), and the visual density of ornament that characterises his interiors at their most concentrated. The castle was never seriously used as a residence — the Bute family visited rarely — and the intensity of the decoration may be one reason why sustained habitation would have been oppressive. The building passed to the Ministry of Works in 1950 and is now managed by Cadw.

The woodland setting is part of the experience: the castle sits on the hillside above Tongwynlais in a stand of mature oaks and beeches that give the approach walk — from the village car park, through the trees — a quality of gradual revelation. The full view of the castle, emerging from the trees with its conical towers and red stone walls, is understood better on foot than from a car.

The contrast with [Caerphilly Castle](/castles/wales/caerphilly-castle), eight miles north — the largest castle in Wales, moated, water-defended, and built by the same 13th-century lord — illustrates the range of de Clare military ambition. The comparison with Cardiff Castle is the other logical pairing: Bute and Burges applied the same Victorian Gothic Revival approach to Cardiff Castle's Clock Tower and interior suites in the same decade, producing interiors of similar decorative intensity within a Norman shell of far greater historical complexity. Cardiff Castle is in the city centre, Castell Coch on a wooded hillside; together they constitute the most concentrated expression of a Victorian noble's medieval fantasy in Wales. Cadw membership includes admission to both Castell Coch and Caerphilly Castle, making a combined visit to both de Clare-period sites the most efficient approach for visitors planning a day in the Cardiff region.