Wales Diary, Cardiff Castle

—for Hilary and her mother

My first attempt to breach the walls of Cardiff Castle didn’t work out quite as planned.  When I returned from walking the barrage, it wasn’t yet 6 o’clock, and the sun was still out, so I thought, why not hop over to the castle and take a look?  The hotel’s front desk staff recommended a taxi over the bus, and I thought, OK, just this once.  I’ll figure out public transportation after I’ve had a proper night’s sleep.

I’d failed to consider that the castle wouldn’t be open to visitors after 5 PM.  A taxi back seemed a bit excessive, so now the question was to find a bus that went to Cardiff Bay.  I walked up to a commuter as she strode by and asked if she might know.  “I don’t know anything about buses to Cardiff Bay,” she replied.  “I always take the train.”  And so it was I learned there’s a train that does absolutely nothing but shuttle back and forth between the center of Cardiff and Cardiff Bay.

The next day was properly gloomy and threatened rain.  I climbed aboard my newly found commuter train to Cardiff proper, followed the very fine sign posts, and lo, the castle was exactly where I’d left it the day before, and, indeed where it has stood, albeit in various incarnations, for the last two thousand years.

I signed up for the “premium tour,” which I figured was as good as any place to start (with the advantage that the tour was inside the castle, where it would be dry).  Our knowledgeable and witty guide led us through several rooms, each decorated within a millimeter of its life.

The castle, we learned, had undergone several major renovations, perhaps the most appalling of which was by ‘Capability’ Brown.  As part of his renovation scheme, he “cleared away the Lodgings of the Norman Knights,” “stripped the Keep of its ivy and cut down all the trees growing on the ancient mound,” and, get this, “filled in the moat.”

How can anyone even think of living in a castle without a proper moat?

The third Marquess of Bute, in between speaking the twenty-one languages he knew like the back of his hand, reversed course, at least in part.  The moat was back, though chiefly, with money to burn, he turned the castle into a Gothic Revivalist fantasia par excellence.

The rooms were one after another over-the-top, and it was good entertainment to view them, no doubt about that:

Here's the Marquess of Bute's bedroom.

What kind of dreams would he have with this going on overhead?

This ceiling, if I've got it right, is in the family dining room and  intended as a copy of the Alhambra.

And here's the ceiling of the Arab room. Wouldn't you get a permanent crook in your neck with all that time spent looking up?

Queen Elizabeth II has done some entertaining in the banquet hall.  Our guide advised the castle is happy to entertain any comer to rent it out (for the right price, of course).

For a bit of fresh air, there's the top of tower garden room (though, actually, no fresh air anymore, as they've had to put up a roof to keep out the elements).

The detail everywhere made it impossible to know where to look, like this alcove with a monkey up to no good.

Or these five scholars in the library, each with a tablet in a different language, one of which, we were told by the in-resident expert on the subject, consisted of runes.

The thing that was most castle-like to me, though, was the unadorned keep. Here I could sense some history without being overpowered by unending evidence of extravagance and wealth.  Here, in days gone by, even the most posh of castle residents were forced to withdraw in time of war.

The rain came on while I stood, and I, too, was forced to withdraw, though, in my case, only to the cafe for a cup of tea and a sandwich of Welsh cheddar and laverbread (which I thought a type of bread, silly me as it turned out).

As we perused postcards, a fellow visitor told me something about the castle I’d so far missed finding out:  corridors under its battlements housed air-raid shelters in World War II.

The fellow in the cafe told me something else, as well.  Chamberlain, whose unhappy task it was to declare war on Germany at the time, served as MP for Birmingham Edgbaston from 1937 to 1940. The current MP for that constituency is Gisela Stuart, née Gisela Gschaider in Velden, Bavaria, West Germany.

Of such things, perhaps Wisława Szymborska put it best, in Reality Demands:

What moral flows from this?  Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

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Listening List

Benedictus, from John Metcalf's Plain Chants


© John Metcalf.

For a Spotify Playlist of the music of John Metcalf, click on Wales Diary. Metcalf is the Artistic Director of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival of Music, which occasioned my visit to Cardiff.

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This is the second in a five-part series entitled Wales Diary.  The first part, Cardiff Bay Barrage, can be found here.  The third-fifth parts can be found at these links:  The Covered Streets of Cardiff here, Art and the Aquabus, here, and From Celtic Village to Castle Gardens here.

A three-part series of posts on the Vale of Glamorgan Festival of Music concerts I attended while in Wales, including listening lists, can be found at these links:  Crossing a Bridge of Dreams here, Ancient Instruments, Timeless Sounds here, and Worlds Entwined here.

For considerably more sensible and well-researched information on castles, I recommend Hilary's Positive Letters . . . inspirational stories . . . site and her A to Z on castles.  A good starting point can be found here.

Credits:  The quotations about Brown's renovations can be found here.  The quotation from Reality Demands can be found at Friko's Poetry and Pictures here.