Gwrych Castle, Abergele

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

I am sure many of you have a made trips to North Wales at some point in your lives, so this may be of interest to some.

On the A55 in North Wales towards Conway, past the attactive stone church, St Asaph's I think it's called, and past another castle that is signposted as being open to visitors, Bodelwyddan Castle, there nestles in the forested hills that overlook Abergele a place called Gwrych Castle. If you have made the journey through North Wales, you have probably spotted it from the road.


A couple of weeks ago I was invited to play at Abergele Golf Course and many holes gave an excellent view of what looked to me like a large Medieval castle. When I came in and asked some of the members about it, I heard the first bits of a very sad story about a magnificent building that has turned into a ruin.

The castle was, it turns out, built in 1819 as a mock medieval castle, to the be the home of the Hesketh family. It left the family in 1946 and in 1948 Leslie Salts bought the building and successfully opened Gwrych to the Public for twenty years. The Castle was named “The Showplace of Wales” and attracted nearly ten million visitors. Randolph Turpin and Bruce Woodcock trained there.

It continued to exist as a tourist attraction through the 70s, as a sort of medival centre with jousting etc., but was finally closed to the public in 1985.

Then an American businessman called Nick Tavaglione bought it in 1989, planning to turn it into a 5* hotel and opera house, hoping to get government grants to do so. The grants never came and in the early nineties Tavaglione got pissed off and all but abandoned the place, no longer employing security. That must have happened by 1994, because when I revisited and climbed into the castle this week, one of the items of graffiti said "Rick 94".

Once the security went, the the castle was broken into and looted; teenagers got drunk in there and lit fires; travellers moved in and stripped the the building of its marble, timber and slate.

A lot of vanadlism later, the place has nothing of value left in it, and a fire and weathering, in addition to the theft, has meant that there is practically nothing left of the internal structure of the building apart from piles of rubble and litter from all the tramps, teenagers, and travellers who have frequented the castle over the last 15 years. Over the years, it has even been used (inside and out) by idiots on motorbikes. Several cars have been driven and burnt out round it too, and there is some horrific damage to one of the big lower turrets where a car has been driven straight through it.

It now stands as a shocking monument to the lack of respect in modern society for just about anything. That the authorities have done nothing to halt to slide of this awesome place is also beyond belief. And it is no wonder some fans of clubs bought by Americans wonder if they will really look after their piece of British heritage.


Last year, the castle was auctioned ( http://chrislad.worldonline.co.uk/GwrychCastlesale.pdf ), and in the end it went for a mere £850,000 - amazing for a 19-turret castle with so much land! It was bought by Clayton Properties who want to make it the first hotel of Clayton Hotels ( http://www.clayton-hotels.co.uk/ ).

They reckon they can restore it for £6million, which, having been in there myself this week, looks like a conservative estimate.

Some interesting sites:

http://www.gwrych.org.uk/
http://www.gwrychtrust.co.uk/index.html



If any of you visited it pre 1985 I should be interested to hear your memories of it. Even though it isn't an ancient monument, it's still a magnificent building with some interesting history, and it's great that someone is going to give it some attention at last.

[sluffy]

I also have a sympathy for 'grand' homes that fall into neglect and ruin.

I think it started when I was just a kid and very close to where I lived was a 'big house' (or so it seemed to me at the time), that was abandoned and boarded up. This was at the junction of Merehall and Vernon Street (I think it may have been called Merehall House - but I can't be sure of this).

All the other kids used to try to get into the derelict house and smash it up even further, but I always kept outside and simply admired what once must have been a beautiful building.

I have no idea why I felt sorry for the place - I came from a poor background and had no education at all in architecture or local history - but I always felt sad about the place.

It was eventually demolished.

I have over the years visited a number of the stately homes of England - Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Longleat, Castle Howard, Woburn Abbey, to name but a few.

I came across a book a few years ago called 'No voice from the hall' by John Harris, which - after reading your post above - I think you would thouroughly enjoy. Below is the reveiw for your information.

In 1955, one country house was demolished in Britain every two and a half days. To John Harris, the power behind the 1974 "Destruction of the Country House" exhibition at the V&A Museum, the loss to British architecture was as great as at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

This autobiographical book is an elegy to the 1,000-odd houses so cavalierly disposed of in the decades after the Second World War. It begins as an adventure story about a boy growing up in the Forties who liked nothing better than to go fishing with his Uncle Sid - an engaging upholsterer, Sussex downsman and country-house sale frequenter - and to explore the deserted houses they came across, breaking in when occasion demanded. (Harris's motto, said a friend, should be "Up, over and in".)

A love story, it charts Harris's growing infatuation with these ravished beauties. Visiting and researching them turns into an education and a mission. Harris the amateur house-hunter goes on to become an architectural historian (largely self-taught), a writer and Curator of the RIBA Drawings Collection. The book starts in 1946, immediately after the war when grand houses were requisitioned - and wrecked - on a vast scale unknown in France and Germany. Fifteen-year-old Harris is already succumbing to "the sensual and emotional effect of discovering a house in extremis", hitch-hiking and travelling on pre-Beeching branch lines, and staying in youth hostels. His patch is the Home Counties: Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Kent; but he also ventures further afield, in particular to Lincolnshire. In 35 pleasingly short chapters, he tells the story of 53 houses, 31 of which no longer exist. He is not immune to the romance of the ruin. The restoration of Painshill Park in Surrey he commends as "one of the triumphs of European garden conservation", but admits "once a garden is restored and tidied up it loses its romantic appeal of decay and ruin". The text is illustrated with suitably moody, melancholy photographs, and enriched with bracing chapter-headings such as "Getting the better of the Rothschild agent" and "They've come to read the meter mum" - referring to Nikolaus Pevsner's reception at Narford in Norfolk, when he arrived with a clipboard. Harris describes the shortcomings of Pevsner's methods with glee. A wealth of characters includes Philip Yorke at Erddig in North Wales, still riding a penny-farthing. But none of this dispels the pain and anger that Harris feels at the wanton destruction he witnesses. On his first visit to Burwell Park in Lincolnshire he encounters a flock of sheep in the hall and "plaster perfection" in every room. On his second, men with picks are hacking at the rococo plasterwork and a bonfire consumes the superb mahogany staircase. As he himself wonders, "How could they?".

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... _n14160430

[TANGODANCER]

Mere Hall is alive and well. My daughter got married there a year ago.

[sluffy]

Mere Hall is alive and well. My daughter got married there a year ago.

No, I know Mere Hall is still there - I went to a wedding reception there myself a year or so ago.

I'm talking about (what I think was called) Merehall House. Like I say it was on the junction of Merehall Street and Vernon Street (adjacent to what was then Wentworth Street).


(I also remember Mere Hall being boarded up - I think it was a nursery for a time too - before the Council finally decided to spend money on restoring it in more recent years).

[TANGODANCER]

Mere Hall is alive and well. My daughter got married there a year ago.

No, I know Mere Hall is still there - I went to a wedding reception there myself a year or so ago. I'm talking about (what I think was called) Merehall House. Like I say it was on the junction of Merehall Street and Vernon Street (adjacent to what was then Wentworth Street). (I also remember Mere Hall being boarded up - I think it was a nursery for a time too - before the Council finally decided to spend money on restoring it in more recent years).

Have a vague recollection of where you mean Sluffy since I was born and raised only a couple of hundred yards from St Mathew's Church and the old Prince of Wales pub on Mount Street. Merehall Park was right behind it. Not been up there for a while but they had a Casino of some sort in the area last time I was in the area (Brownlow Way?). Changed a whole heap since I went to St Josephs and played football for Brownlow fold in the amateur league and Mount Street Tavern in the Sunday League.

[Leonard]

Mere Hall is alive and well. My daughter got married there a year ago.

No, I know Mere Hall is still there - I went to a wedding reception there myself a year or so ago.

I'm talking about (what I think was called) Merehall House. Like I say it was on the junction of Merehall Street and Vernon Street (adjacent to what was then Wentworth Street).


(I also remember Mere Hall being boarded up - I think it was a nursery for a time too - before the Council finally decided to spend money on restoring it in more recent years).

My mum worked there when it was a nursery...

[General Mannerheim]

My gran and grandad had a caravan in Abergele, just down by the beach there, and i remember going up to Gwrych a few times, unfortunately i was only six in 1985 so my memories are scarce - the one that does stick in my mind is my dad taking a family photo of us all in front of the giant gates, he was walking backwards to get us all in the shot, and he tripped over and fell backwards into this horse feeding well, he was splashing about in this shitty black swamp with his arm in the air trying to keep his new 10lb Nikon dry!

Then later on we used to go up there on our bmx's and mess about.

Ah, happy days.

[Montreal Wanderer]

My grandmother had a house in Llanbedrog on the LLeyn Penisula, and we drove there every summer from 1946 until she died in 1958. It was a long trip since there were no bypasses and traffic jams in every town including Abergele. Still there were far fewer people and buildings than there must be now. I was rather keen on castles and pottered around Conway, Caernavon, Cricieth, Harlech, etc. We did once visit Gwrych Castle but I can only remember disappointment that it was not authentic (I felt similar disappointment when I found out the romantic ruins on the edge of the Rivington Reservoir had been built by Lord Leverhulme). Some of the buildings and rooms were actually in pretty good shape as I recall, while other like the towers were bare stone steps, and yet others (I think) actually constructed as ruins. Still it was all a very long time ago - probably before the 1953 Cup final. We did not visit Bodelwyddan Castle because it was at the time a private girls school and not open to the public.

[TANGODANCER]

Castles and cathedrals, and the sense of history with them, totally fascinate me. Favourites are mainly in Spain; the Alhambra Palace in Granada, The Alacazaba in Malaga, the Alazar and cathedral in Sevilla etc. In UK, York Minster takes some beating for a sense and atmosphere of times past. Edinburgh Castle and the Roslyn Chapel are on my list for the future as, despite having been to Scotland several times, I've never seen either yet, and I'd also like to see the Templar Chapel in London. Fascinating stuff.

[communistworkethic]

expect to be completely underwhelmed by edinburgh castle TD

[TANGODANCER]

expect to be completely underwhelmed by edinburgh castle TD

That bad huh?

[David Lee's Hair]

And knackered from the walk to it as well TD

[communistworkethic]

And knackered from the walk to it as well TD

soft arse!

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

We did once visit Gwrych Castle but I can only remember disappointment that it was not authentic

Yes, I felt the same disappointment a couple of weeks ago, but it is still a very impressive example of the trend a couple of hundred years ago to build in the old gothic style.


Very few castles of real age stay in one piece, so it's inexcusable that this relatively young one has been allowed to slide so dramatically as well.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

On the subject of disappointment at a lack of authenticity - I felt something similar when I discovered the "Ancient Greek" I was learning at school was written in a medieval script, attractive though it was, that would have been incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks themselves.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

I climbed into another ruin this afternoon - Hafodunos Hall, hidden in the undergrowth in Llangernyw, North Wales.

This once magnificant gothic mansion was in quite good nick until some mindless arsonists got to it in 2004. Since then, it has crumbled to little more than a shell, but there are a lot of places where the ornate stonework has survived, and the stone staircase to the bell tower is still climbable.

http://www.uer.ca/locations/show.asp?locid=21797
http://www.hafodunos-hall.co.uk/


And yes, I am a sad bastard with nothing better to do this week while I'm not working, before leaving for the Netherlands on Sunday.

[Montreal Wanderer]

I had to look that one up - oddly I've never been there since I either took the coast road or went back via Denbigh (didn't even know the road it is on existed). It was a beautiful house and a spectacular ruin judging by the pictures. I presume the locals didn't want a hotel and caravan site, so torched it.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

I had to look that one up - oddly I've never been there since I either took the coast road or went back via Denbigh (didn't even know the road it is on existed). It was a beautiful house and a spectacular ruin judging by the pictures. I presume the locals didn't want a hotel and caravan site, so torched it.

Wednesday, 17 November, 2004, 17:07 GMT
Pair admit Gothic hall arson

Two men have admitted setting fire to a Victorian Grade I listed hall in north Wales causing damage put at £8m. Llandudno magistrates court heard Christopher Szabo, 22, and Adam Kaluzny, 20, had later fled to Spain.

However, realising they had no money and would be on the run for the rest of their lives they returned and sought legal advice.

The blaze broke out in the Grade 1 listed Hafodunos Hall in Llangernyw near Abergele early on 14 October.

The judge said the charges were too serious for the case to be dealt with other than at crown court.

The pair will be sentenced at Caernarfon Crown Court on 17 December.

Szabo, from Eglwysbach near Colwyn Bay, and Kaluzny, from Llandudno, were allowed conditional bail.

When the pair first appeared in court at the end of October the prosecution said the motive was not clear other than that they had wanted to do something silly.

It was claimed they had gone to the hall with two other people, who were witnesses, had bought petrol and after entering the hall had splashed it about.

The prosecution said the 140-year-old hall went up with "something of an explosion".

The pair left the scene but later returned and took photographs with mobile phones, it was alleged.

Just mindless vandalism I think, Monty.

It is a cruel irony that this has happened as a result of the locals' desire for the building not to lose its integrity in the development that was proposed.



It's a strange hobby, but I'm quite into this "Urban Exploration" stuff (which largely consists of gaining unauthorised access to interesting derelict buildings).

My next target is "Wales' Versaille" - Kinmel Hall.

http://icnorthwales.icnetwork.co.uk/new ... _page.html
http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/sho ... 530&page=3

[Montreal Wanderer]

They certainly don't sound Welsh names! More like Hungarian. Times have changed in North Wales from the time everyone was Jones, Williams, Evans and Davies! There sure were some really rich people knocking around that area in the C19th.

[sluffy]

We did once visit Gwrych Castle but I can only remember disappointment that it was not authentic

Yes, I felt the same disappointment a couple of weeks ago......

I felt the same too, when I visited Castle Drogo - 'The last Castle to be built in England'! - designed by Lutyens. A marvellous building but it lacked the 'history' and thus the authenticity for me.



http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w- ... stledrogo/

But strangely enough I was disappointed with Leeds Castle too - 'The Loveliest Castle in the World!'..



The structure and setting were outstandingly beautiful - the castle was original - but the interiors are renovated in a modern style and thus it felt to me as though I was walking around the inside of a modern hotel rather than a centuries old castle.

I guess however that if Leeds Castle and many other 'stately homes' had not gone down the hotel / conference centre route then they would probably have ended up in a similar state as Gwrych, Hafodunos and so many others.

http://tinyurl.com/33ysbx