Powis Castle

Almost every castle in Wales is a ruin. Powis is not, and the reason is a political decision taken in the thirteenth century that Welsh tradition has never entirely forgiven.

The castle was built by the princes of Powys Wenwynwyn, the southern half of the old kingdom, in red sandstone on a ridge above Welshpool. In the 1260s Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn came to terms with the English crown rather than accept Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as overlord. Llywelyn took the castle from him in 1274; the conquest of 1282 gave it back.

His descendants held it. It passed by marriage to the Herberts in 1587, and the Earls of Powis hold the title now. The 4th Earl gave it to the National Trust in 1952 with the family retaining part of it, so the occupation has been continuous for seven hundred years.

That continuity is why it survived Cromwell's slighting of Montgomery, the eighteenth-century fashion for demolition, and the twentieth-century collapse of the great estates.

The gardens

The terraces are the reason most visitors come, and they deserve to be. Cut into the rock face below the castle in the late seventeenth century, four of them, with balustrades, an orangery and a lead statuary group, and yews grown to enormous irregular masses over three centuries.

They are the best surviving formal terraces of their period in Britain. They survived because the family did not have the money to landscape them away in the eighteenth century when everyone else was doing exactly that.

The Clive Collection

In 1784 Edward Clive, son of Robert Clive, married Henrietta Herbert. The collection that came with the Clive family is one of the largest holdings of South Asian material in Britain outside a national museum: arms, armour, textiles, jade, ivory and the ceremonial tent of Tipu Sultan.

Most of it derives from the East India Company and from the wars in Mysore. The National Trust's interpretation of that has changed substantially over the last two decades and now addresses the acquisition fairly directly, which was not always the case.

The collection is often described as loot.

Visiting

National Trust, open most of the year, charged. The gardens are steep and the drop from the top terrace to the bottom is substantial.

The medieval fabric is largely encased in later work, so this is a house that was a castle rather than a castle with a house in it. For upstanding Marcher castle, go to Montgomery or Tretower; for what happened to the families who held them, come here.