Raglan Castle is a fantastic site to visit. It is one of the most refined of the Welsh border castles and incredibly photogenic with an impressive gatehouse, leaning tower and moat as well as being substantially intact so you can walk on the walls in some places. As you can from the map, it is also near a dual carriageway so easy to get to and next to a cafe. Sounds ideal!
Visit Raglan Castle
Raglan castle is an easy place to visit. It is next to a couple of main roads and is a major tourist attraction so has all the usual facilities and is well signposted. It is run by CADW so English Heritage members get in for free.
My Experience
Raglan is a fantastic castle to visit. What it lacks in location it makes up for in architectural magnificence. The polygonal gatehouse towers topped by machicolations are incredibly distinct and set the tone for this statement fortress, echoing both Caernarfon and Byzantium.
Walking a circuit of the outside you can’t fail to be impressed at the scale of the fortifications but Raglan was very much the swan song of a dying era. Before the last blocks were laid the castle was out of date as a defensive structure although that didn’t stop it holding out for a long siege in the English Civil War of the 1640’s.
Looking at the photos you can get an idea of the splendour of the castle in its heyday. Even after the slighting by Parliament, enough remains in a decent state to allow you to climb several of the towers and walls.
The photos are a summary of various visits over the last 20 years but we always seem to have had good weather!
Raglan Castle Photo Gallery
History
The unmistakable silhouette of Raglan crowning a ridge amid glorious countryside is the grandest castle ever built by Welshmen.
We can thank Sir William ap Thomas, the ‘blue knight of Gwent’, for the moated Great Tower of 1435 that still dominates this mighty fortress-palace. His son Sir William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, created the gatehouse with its flared ‘machicolations’.
These stone arches allowed missiles to be rained down on attackers. But Raglan came 150 years later than the turbulent heyday of castle-building. It was designed to impress as much as to intimidate.
Under various earls of Worcester Raglan was transformed into a magnificent country seat with a fashionable long gallery and one of the finest Renaissance gardens in Britain. But loyalty to the crown was to prove its undoing.
Despite a garrison of 800 men and one of the longest sieges of the Civil War, it fell to parliamentary forces and was deliberately destroyed. Among the looted treasures was a piece of Tudor wooden panelling, now proudly displayed in the visitor centre after being rescued from a cow shed in the 1950s.
References
The CADW site for the castle is here and the history above is copied from those pages.
The Wiki page is here.
Stunning photos of one of my favourite castles! I am going to find a new place to visit from your other photographs.
Excellent, glad it’s inspired you! We’re certainly not short of options, there are so many nearby 🙂