Carew Castle

The military use of the limestone bluff above the Carew inlet runs back at least two thousand years: recent excavations in the outer ward uncovered multiple defensive walls of an Iron Age fort. The Norman castle began around 1100 with Gerald de Windsor, made castellan of Pembroke Castle by Arnulf of Montgomery in the first Norman invasion of Pembrokeshire. Around 1095 Gerald had married Nest, princess of Deheubarth, whose dowry included the manor of Carew; he cleared the old fort and raised a stone keep within timber outer walls. That keep still stands inside the later castle as the 'Old Tower'.

Gerald's son William took the name 'de Carew' — the family have owned the castle, and carried its name, for more than nine hundred years. In the middle of the twelfth century William enclosed the keep with stone walls and built a Great Hall inside them. The castle as it now reads, a high-walled circuit packed with rooms and halls, was the work of Nicholas de Carew (d. 1297) in about 1270, contemporary with — and influenced by — Edward I's great castles then rising in North Wales. The outer ward was walled in at the same time.

The de Carews fell on hard times after the Black Death and mortgaged the castle, which passed to Rhys ap Thomas, who made his fortune by switching sides to back Henry VII just before the battle of Bosworth. Rewarded with lands and a knighthood, he added luxurious apartments in the late fifteenth century: an inner doorway carries the arms of Henry VII, his son Arthur and Arthur's wife Catherine of Aragon. He remodelled the great hall, built the lesser hall, and set a large new window in the great hall facing the inner gatehouse — placed, the historian Audrey Thorstad suggests, to show off the castle's own architecture rather than the view towards the Carew River.

The royal connection turned sour when Rhys's grandson Rhys ap Gruffudd was executed for treason by Henry VIII in 1531, and the castle reverted to the Crown. In 1558 it was acquired by Sir John Perrot, a Lord Deputy of Ireland, who made the final substantial changes, rebuilding the north walls into a long range of domestic rooms with ornate windows and a long gallery. Perrot too fell from favour, dying a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1592.

The de Carew family bought their castle back from the Crown in 1607, and Sir John Carew restored the causeway walls and floodgates of the adjoining tidal mill in about 1615. In the Civil War the castle was refortified for the King — the earthworks the Royalist defenders threw up in the outer ward survive — though south Pembrokeshire was strongly Parliamentarian. It changed hands three times before the south wall was pulled down to deny it to the Royalists for good.

Returned to the de Carews at the Restoration, the castle remained partly lived in, the family occupying the eastern wing until 1686. It was then abandoned to decay, and much of the structure was looted for building stone and for lime burning. Since 1984 Cadw has funded substantial restoration carried out by the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority, to which the castle is leased.