Tretower Court and Castle

Two buildings, one field, three hundred years apart, and between them the whole argument about what a gentleman's house is for.

The castle

A Norman motte with a shell keep, raised by the Picard family in the twelfth century, and inside it a circular stone tower of the early thirteenth. The round keep is the interesting bit: it was dropped inside the existing shell wall rather than replacing it, so you have a tower standing within a ring.

It is defensive and it is uncomfortable. Thick walls, small openings, vertical living, everything arranged round the assumption that somebody might come.

The court

A hundred metres away is Tretower Court, begun in the fourteenth century and much enlarged in the fifteenth by the Vaughan family. It is a manor house built round a courtyard: a great hall with a fine roof, a wall walk, a gatehouse, and a good deal of glass.

There are defensive gestures. There is a wall, and a gate, and the wall walk. But nobody looking at it could mistake the priority. This is a house that wants light, warmth, entertaining space and privacy, with just enough fortification to deter a raiding party.

The Vaughans held it. Henry Vaughan, the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, was born at Newton nearby and is buried at Llansantffraed a few miles down the Usk; the family connection is close.

Why it matters

Most places let you see one phase. Here you can walk from a building designed for a world where a lord expected to be attacked to a building designed for a world where he expected to be visited, in the time it takes to cross a field.

That transition is the single largest change in the domestic architecture of Wales and it happened across the fifteenth century, once the country settled after the Glyndŵr revolt. Tretower is the clearest illustration of it anywhere in the country.

Visiting

Cadw, charged, open most of the year, with parking and a shop. The court is furnished to a fifteenth-century scheme, which is unusual and considerably more effective than empty rooms.

Crickhowell is two and a half miles away, and Table Mountain above it carries the Iron Age fort that gave the town its name.