15 June - Cardiff Castle

We caught the bus into Cardiff to visit the famous Cardiff Castle.

This place has such a long, interesting history. The Castle began life in the first century as a Roman fort and in the 4th century outer stone walls were built. In the 11th century, the Normans built the motte and bailey castle with a moat. (FYI a motte is a mound.) Inside the wall is the keep which is the central and most fortified tower of the castle; the point you would fall back to as the last protection if the outer walls and other defenses were breached. After buying our tickets for the guided tours, this is where we started our explorations. There are 100 steps to climb to get to the keep, but it's worth the climb.

The first level you reach is that of the outer wall.

From there, you climb stone steps to get to the Keep Gatehouse.

It's pretty bare now, but in its day it provided housing for the lord's household. The walls would have been plastered or paneled, there would have been rush mats on the floor and there would have been a few items of furniture. Up more steep stone steps

you reach a second and third level with commanding views of the house and the surrounding hills.

It was so massive yet primitive next to the house we would visit next.

We climbed more stone stairs and walked the length of the wall to where our tour of the house was to meet. I found some lovely gargoyle drainpipes.

At the appointed hour we were met by our tour guide, Dee, who took us into the house. The tour we were taking was of rooms not open to the public.

The house developed over time from the 16th to the 20th centuries. In the 16th century the Earls of Pembroke, who owned it, would have furnished it with tapestries and other textiles and planted elaborate private gardens. By the time the Bute family inherited the castle, it had fallen into disrepair. The 2nd Marquess of Bute amassed an almost obscene fortune from the coal industry. He owned all the coal mines in Wales and turned Cardiff into the world's greatest coal exporting port. When he died at age 55, the castle and his fortune passed to his son, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, aka John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, who had no interest in the coal business but a great interest in many other things. He was, in fact, a polymath and loved to sit in his libraries and read; he is said to have been able to understand 21 languages. He was a bit of an eccentric, as became evident as the tour progressed. The Marquess was Scottish, this property in Wales was just a vacation retreat. He fell in love with and married an English woman, the honorable Gwendolen Mary Angela Fitzalan-Howard, with whom he was madly in love. In fact, the house is adorned with panels proclaiming the glories of love.

Lord Bute engaged the architect William Burgess and the two undertook the project of transforming the house into a "Gothic feudal extravaganza." It is certainly that. The room we started in was the Winter Smoking Room.

It's an incredibly elaborate room which would have been used for the gentlemen to retire to after dinner. They would smoke cigars, they would drink, they would even smoke opium, which was legal in those days. The ceiling is decorated with the signs of the zodiac.

The stained glass windows picture the Norse gods after whom the days of the week are named.

Lord Bute was a lover of nature so throughout the house are paintings and sculptures of animals and birds. In this room alone, there are over 100 small painting of birds, each unique. (They're the round medallions on the walls between the windows.)

In each corner of the room is a sculpture representing the four seasons. Here are autumn and spring.

Women were strictly forbidden to enter this room. To ensure they wouldn't come in, a monster was placed on the ceiling just outside the room.

We then moved on to the nursery (photo from Cardiff Castle site)

The tiles at the top of the walls are pictures from nursery rhymes.

Rapunzel and Puss in Boots:

Not sure about all of these, but among them I think is Genevieve, the Children in the Wood, and the Magic Lantern.

We passed through the great hall but didn't stop as that room is open to the public and could be viewed later.

Our next stop was the Ladies' Withdrawal room, aka drawing room, which was decorated with scenes of women who gave their lives for love.

Cleopatra & the asp:

Our next private room was a bedroom built in the 1880s, complete with flushing toilet, which was truly cutting edge in those days. Dee told us that Queen Victoria was alleged to be furious when she heard about it, because she didn't have one at her estate, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight.

The bathroom was decorated with panels of 60 different types of marble.

Lord Bute was a very religious man, so his wardrobe was built in the style of a confessional.

Next, we were off to the Italian roof garden.

Though it's covered now, originally it would have been open to the elements. Orange trees would have been grown in the rectangular planters you see. The goats around the room hold a ring from which would hang baskets of flowers.

The tall object is a fountain. Water would pour out of the mouths of fish, held by otters.

The fountain is placed slightly off-center, but that's intentional. There's a tiny window at one end of the room; when the sun shines in, it illuminates the Virgin Mary at the other end of the room.

The last room we visited was the family dining room. Its design is based on the book of Genesis. (Photo from Cardiff Castle website)

Can you see the hole in the center of the table? Dee asked us what we thought it was for (knowing that we'd never come up with the answer.) When the family was in residence, usually only four to six weeks a year, The room would be decorated with plants and flowers. The table would come apart in the center and a planter would be placed under the table in which grew an orange tree. The family could just reach up and pick an orange from the tree during dinner. In the corner of the room is my favorite little feature. It's a monkey carving, complete with little mother-of-pearl teeth. He's holding a nut and when you pulled on the nut, it would ring a bell for the servants downstairs.

At the end of the tour, we went back to visit the public rooms we passed by earlier. There's a reception room which holds the portraits of all the Earls of Bute, from the first through the seventh. The 8th Earl is an extraordinarily private person and wants nothing to do with the castle, which is now the property of Cardiff City Council.

The Second Earl of Bute The Third Earl of Bute

I loved a couple of details at the top of the doors leading out of the room.

The library:

The Arab Room is absurdly extravagant. The ceiling is a style known as a ‘muquarnas’, it is made of wood which has been covered in gold leaf and decorated.

The Banqueting Hall is the largest room in the castle and is in the oldest part of the building, dating from the fifteenth century. However, all the surface decoration, ceiling and floors are in fact a Victorian re-imagining of a noble hall from the Middle Ages and took nearly 15 years to complete. The ceiling was raised and the floor sunken to make the room as grand as possible.

Tour of the house complete, we had 20 minutes to kill before the tour of the tower commenced, so we went to the cafe.

 I researched typical Welsh food and have been trying to find it since we got here. On the menu at the cafe was bara brith. It's a spice cake with dried fruit that's been soaked in tea, and is really tasty. Yay! One down, how many to go?

We finished our snack and went to the meeting place for the tower tour. Our guide was Carey and he's been working at Cardiff Castle for over 20 years.

The first room we visited was the winter smoking room, which we had seen before, giving us the chance to take a second look at this amazing room.

We then walked up half a million stone steps to the bachelor bedroom. This room was built for the 3rd Earl so that he could be on premised during the construction and redecoration of the castle. Bruce & I were both taking pictures, but neither of us managed to capture the whole room - sorry.

Many more stone steps led us to the bell room, where the 7 ton bell lives. It's 150 years old and shares the room with the Victorian clockworks. Carey said that if you're in the bell room when it chimes, it's deafening. The bell room is just above the bachelor bedroom. Though every possible noise mitigation scheme was devised, no one would have been able to sleep in the room below. When the bell sounds, the entire tower shakes. Carey suspects that the Earl would use the room for guests he didn't particularly like.

Up a million more stone steps, we entered the servants' quarters. No decoration, just a very small room with a very large fireplace that would have been going at all times so that the family's meals could be prepared. There were only two small, ie, 4"x4" windows for venting the smoke from the fire or letting in air. As rough as the circumstances were, the servants would have been happy to have had the jobs.

Finally we reached the summer smoking room, which was just magnificent.

The theme of the room is "the universe" and it's decorated with images of astrology, the four elements, more representations of birds and images of love. There's a balcony above the room from which the 3rd Earl would look down on his guests.

Air: Earth:

Water: Fire:

In the ceiling are mirrors which would reflect the sunlight or candlelight into the room.

The floor tiles represent the end of the world.

This room wasn't just for men in the way that the winter smoking room was. The 3rd Earl would often hold seances here. As interested in science as he was, he seems to have also been quite interested in the occult and astrology. The Earl loved animals and I was enchanted by this little mouse sculpted into the wall by the exit.

I was struck by how beautiful, but how obscenely over-the-top the house was. The wealth that enabled the construction of such a place came from coal, and it's hard not to think of how different the lives of the 3rd Earl was from the lives of the men responsible for his wealth: the miners. Rather like Jeff Bezos and the people who work in the Amazon warehouses. At least that's how this lefty thinks about it.

The keep and the house are not the only areas of interest in the Cardiff Castle complex. I didn't know it, but during WWII, the tunnels built near the Roman walls were used as air raid shelters. They're filled with posters, and a sound track of air raid sirens and bombs plays along with news bulletins and addresses by Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. My friend Rex would have liked it.

As you exit the tunnels, you could see evidence of old Roman walls.

Near the entrance of the castle complex is the Black Tower, which was once linked to the keep by a massive wall. The Tower dates from the 13th century. Two dark chambers at the bottom once served as a prison. In these cells, religious martyrs were imprisoned before meeting a grisly death.

The outer walls were reconstructed in such a way as to highlight where the original walls were found.

It was a really fascinating day out and totally worth the 8 million stone steps we had to climb.