Treago Castle

The name looks Welsh: Tre for a homestead or farm and Ago from Iago, the Welsh form of James, which suggests a dwelling stood on the land before the present house. Another account derives it from the hamlet of Treiago in Cornwall, on the ground that the heiress of John of Treiago, sheriff of Cornwall in the 1320s, married a Mynors in the reign of Edward IV. Some Mynors family history can be traced back to the eleventh century, but the direct association between the Baskerville Mynors and St Weonards is recorded only from the middle of the fifteenth century, about the time the present building went up. The name carried further than the parish: in 1932 the Great Western Railway gave it to Castle Class locomotive No. 5019, which ran under it for thirty years until it was withdrawn in 1962.

The house was probably built by Sir Richard Mynors, who lived from about 1440 to 1528 and collected taxes in Wales. It was raised as a fortified house to keep the Welsh out, and it was never attacked. The original design was a secure one, a central courtyard with no windows facing outwards. Digging on the site has revealed solid bedrock. Later the courtyard was covered over in stages and windows were cut in the outer walls, turning the place into a more conventional house.

The parkland around the buildings was probably landscaped in the late eighteenth century. There is no sign of a moat, though early plans of the estate show a leat running along the contour line across to the adjacent Furnace Farm. The grounds were left neglected between the 1790s and the 1840s. Four major improvements followed from about 1840: a walled garden by the road, screened from the house by the shrubbery known as The Wilderness; a walled kitchen garden of well stocked fruit trees south of the house, where the vineyard now stands; a Tudor and Italianate garden of gravel paths, flower beds and clipped Irish yews, marked as Treago Garden on the tithe maps of the period; and a long drive making a new principal approach from the east.

Mason's marks matching those at Raglan Castle, and traced to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, were detected following a visit in 1975 by the Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, A. J. Taylor; there are similarities too with Croft Castle, also in Herefordshire. On 30 April 1986 Treago was recorded as a Grade I listed building, on the strength of its surviving medieval architecture, its quadrangle courtyard layout and the defensive corner towers of its walls.

The Mynors family has held Treago since about 1500. Sir Roger A. B. Mynors lived on the estate in his last years, and the house is still owned by the Baskerville Mynors family and lived in by Sir Richard Mynors, born in 1947, holder of the Mynors of Treago Baronetcy and a vintner, with his wife Lady Fiona Mynors, an educational consultant. The couple have occupied the main building since 1989 with their three daughters, Alexandra, Frances and Victoria, and major restoration and modernisation followed the move.

In the 1990s the stables were converted into three connected cottages, Hollyhock, Coach House and Looseboxes, in continual use as weekly holiday lets. A fountain was added in 1990, designed and made by Vanessa Marston from ideas in the Mynors crest, a man's hand holding a bear's paw, itself a play on the French main ours. By 2009 initiatives were under way to heat the house more greenly, with a ground-source geothermal heat pump and compost-based biomass, and the addition of a north porch has helped make Treago an all-year-round family home. It remains a private residence, though local charity events give the public a limited chance to see inside.