Margam Castle

The site at Margam has been occupied for some 4,000 years, and the remains of an Iron Age hillfort, Mynydd-y-Castell, stand north of the present castle. After the Norman invasion of Wales, Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester and Lord of Glamorgan, granted the lands at Margam to Clairvaux Abbey for a new Cistercian monastery, which became Margam Abbey. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536, the estate was bought by Sir Rice Mansel, whose descendants built a substantial Tudor mansion in the park; in the 18th century this mansion was demolished and the family returned to Penrice Castle, one of their earlier ancestral homes, where Thomas Mansel Talbot commissioned Anthony Keck to build a new mansion beside the castle ruins. Keck was also employed at Margam itself, which Talbot turned into a pleasure garden with an enormous orangery to Keck's design.

Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot succeeded his father in 1813 at the age of ten. Enriched by the development of Port Talbot in the early 19th century, and after a Grand Tour of Europe as a young man, he returned to South Wales and from 1830 re-established Margam as his main seat, building the present house to designs by Thomas Hopper, with Edward Haycock Snr as supervisory architect. Constructed over five years in finely cut ashlar from a quarry at nearby Pyle, the Tudor Revival house cost £50,000. Talbot took a keen interest in the project, encouraging his architects to borrow elements from Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, ancestral home of the Talbots, and from Melbury House in Dorset, home of his mother's family the Fox-Strangways. In the Glamorgan volume of the Buildings of Wales, John Newman writes that 'Margam has an accumulation of architecture and sculpture unparalleled in Wales'.

Talbot's cousin William Henry Fox Talbot, of Lacock Abbey, was a frequent visitor to Margam, and the castle featured as an image in some of his early photographic experiments. On 9 March 1841 the Reverend Calvert Richard Jones made a daguerreotype of the castle, the earliest known Welsh photograph.

After the death of Emily Charlotte Talbot, daughter of the house's first owner, the castle passed to her nephew and continued in Talbot use until it was sold in 1941. The buyer, David Evans-Bevan, found the house too large to live in and could interest no public organisation in taking it on, and it fell into disrepair; for many years it belonged to the local authority but was not open to the public. A fire in 1977 caused substantial damage, and it was only after this that a restoration project began in earnest.

In December 1997, following the success of the devolution referendum, Neath Port Talbot Council put the castle forward as one of the proposed sites for the new Welsh Parliament building, a bid that would likely have meant extensive renovation of the historic structure to fit in a debating chamber and offices for the Welsh Government, the First Minister and their cabinet; following the shortlist selection, the bid was rejected.