Castell Coch

The first castle here was probably raised after 1081, during the Norman invasion of Wales, one of a string of eight fortifications defending the newly conquered town of Cardiff and holding the route through the Taff Gorge. It was an earthwork motte about 35 metres across at the base, with steep natural slopes doing much of the defensive work. The sixteenth-century historian Rice Merrick credited it to the Welsh lord Ifor ap Meurig, but no record of this phase survives and modern historians doubt him. The site was probably abandoned after 1093, when the new Norman lordship of Glamorgan shifted the frontier elsewhere.

In 1267 Gilbert de Clare, who held the Lordship of Glamorgan, seized the lands around Senghenydd from their native Welsh ruler. Caerphilly Castle was built to hold the new territory, and Castell Coch, sitting between Cardiff and Caerphilly, was reoccupied. A stone castle went up around the old motte - a shell wall, a projecting circular tower, a gatehouse and a square hall over an undercroft - a small but powerful fortification, to which work continuing to 1277 added two large towers and a turning-bridge at the gatehouse.

On Gilbert's death the castle passed to his widow Joan, and about this time it begins to appear as Castrum Rubeum, the red castle, probably for the colour of its red sandstone defences. His son, another Gilbert, inherited in 1307 and was killed at Bannockburn in 1314; the news set off a rising of the native Welsh. Castell Coch was probably destroyed by the rebels that July, and possibly slighted to put it beyond further use. It was never rebuilt.

John Leland, visiting around 1536, found it "all in ruin, no big thing but high". Julius Caesar Ibbetson painted it in 1792 with a lime kiln working alongside the ruin; stone from the castle may have been fed into those kilns. The site came to the Butes in 1760, when John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, married Lady Charlotte Windsor and added her South Wales estates to his inheritance; the 2nd Marquess prospected for iron ore here in 1827 and considered building an ironworks. In 1850 the antiquarian George Thomas Clark surveyed the ruin - the keep largely destroyed, the gatehouse so buried in debris that he failed to find it - yet judged the outer walls "tolerably perfect" and advised conserving them, ivy and all.

The 3rd Marquess of Bute inherited castle and estates as a child in 1848; the family fortune, made on the coal trade that the family's Cardiff Docks had opened up, left him one of the wealthiest men in the world. In 1871 he had his chief Cardiff engineer, John McConnochie, excavate and clear the ruins, and William Burges wrote the report on what was found. It set out two options: conserve the ruins, or rebuild the castle as a house "for occasional occupation in the summer". Bute chose to rebuild.

Work was held up until 1875 by the demands of Cardiff Castle and an unfounded fear among Bute's trustees that he faced bankruptcy. The external work was largely done by the end of 1879, though a watch tower meant to resemble a minaret and some timber hoardings were never built. Burges died in 1881 after catching a severe chill during a site visit here; his brother-in-law Richard Pullan took over and handed most of the work to the clerk of works, William Frame, who saw the interiors through to completion in 1891.

Prompted by antiquarian writing on British viticulture, Bute set out in 1873 to bring commercial grape vines back to Britain. He sent his gardener Andrew Pettigrew to France to train and in 1875 planted a 1.2-hectare vineyard just beneath the castle. The first harvest, in 1877, produced 240 bottles, and Punch scoffed that the wine would take four men to drink, two to hold the victim and one to pour it down his throat. By 1887 output was 3,000 bottles of sweet white, and by 1894 some 40 hogsheads a year, including a red made from Gamay grapes. Sugar shortages halted fermentation during the First World War and the vines were uprooted in 1920.

The castle itself was barely used: reception rooms fit for large gatherings but only three bedrooms, and too far from Cardiff for a casual visit. Bute rarely came after it was finished, and after his death in 1900 his widow occupied it with their daughter Lady Margaret during her mourning. In 1950 the 5th Marquess placed it in the care of the Ministry of Works, which accepted only with reluctance - Victorian architecture was at its lowest ebb and the castle was dismissed as a "hideous Victorian joke".