Old Beaupre Castle
| Old Beaupre Castle | ||
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 The porch of Old Beaupre Castle |
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| Alternative name (s): | Beaupre Castle | |
| Creation time : | 14th century, rebuilt and expanded in the 16th century | |
| Conservation status: | ruin | |
| Geographical location | 51 ° 26 '16.8 " N , 3 ° 25' 32.9" W | |
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Old Beaupre Castle ( Welsh Castell Hen Gastell y Bewpyr ) is the ruin of a manor house in South Wales . Classified as a Grade I cultural monument and protected as a Scheduled Monument , the ruin is located 2.5 km southeast of Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan . The medieval mansion was expanded into a magnificent Tudor-style property in the 16th century , but fell into disrepair since the end of the 17th century.
history
The name of the property comes from the Anglo-Norman language and is a corruption of Beau Repaire , which means beautiful retreat. Parts of today's manor house were built shortly after 1300. Around the middle of the 14th century, John acquired Basset, whose ancestors are first mentioned in 1262 in the neighboring village of St Hilary, through marriage to the heiress of the Kardiff family. His descendant James Basset died in 1502 without male descendants, and the guardianship of his underage daughter Eleanor was taken over by Rhys Mansel from Oxwich Castle on the Gower Peninsula . In 1511 he married Eleanor, but his wife died around 1516 with no children. Mansel received a lifelong right to use the manor house. From 1540 he had the manor house expanded to include the north wing of the middle courtyard. However, his main residence was Margam Abbey , which he had bought in 1540 and converted into a mansion. Mansel's daughter Catherine from his second marriage married William Basset, the nephew of James Bassett and future heir to Beaupre. William Basset and his son Richard continued to expand the property. The last major construction project was the construction of the entrance porch, which was completed in 1600 by Richard Basset. After that, only minor modifications were made to the manor house. Richard Basset's great-grandson of the same name, Richard, was on the side of the royalists during the English Civil War , as sheriff of Glamorgan he took part in the siege of Gloucester in 1643 and was knighted for it. After the end of the Civil War, however, he became impoverished and had to move to Fishweir, a small family estate near Cowbridge. Eventually the family could no longer maintain the large property, so that it partially fell into disuse. Philip Basset finally sold it to the Jones family in 1709. However, this decided not to inhabit Old Beaupre and instead used New Beaupre's new mansion. Parts of the property served as a farm house, the manor house fell into ruin. Today the inner courtyard is still used for agriculture, the manor house around the middle courtyard was handed over to the state after the Second World War. The ruin is managed by Cadw and can be visited.
investment
As the name suggests, this secluded house is on the east bank of the River Thaw. The medieval mansion was probably lightly fortified, it consisted of several buildings that were loosely grouped around what is now the inner or southern courtyard. The main house was completely rebuilt in the 16th century and the buildings around the central or northern courtyard were added.
The driveway leads from the north through the outer courtyard, which is surrounded by a low wall, to the roofless ruins of the three-storey gatehouse. The property is surrounded by a high crenellated wall with an open battlement, which at the time of its construction was no longer used for defense, but as a status symbol. This wall and the few outer windows make the property look repellent from the outside. The ornate gate passage of the gatehouse is crowned by a coat of arms relief, through the gatehouse one reaches the middle or inner courtyard, where the main buildings of the former manor house are located. Opposite the gatehouse is the old two-storey mansion, the core of which dates back to the 14th century. It once contained the living hall on the upper floor with a huge fireplace. During the renovation in the 16th century, the building received larger windows and the old portal was bricked up. The courtyard is dominated by the richly decorated new portal porch in the Renaissance style , which was completed in 1600. The double columns on the sides of all three floors are in the classical order Doric , Ionic and Corinthian . Above the portal there is a magnificent relief with the coat of arms of the Bassets and their initials, on the top floor there is a large window that is now walled up. The contrast between the magnificent facade with the smooth, yellow cuboids of the porch and the raw stones of the other wings is irritating, but originally the facades were all clad with smooth cuboids. Bricks were used from the inside in the construction of the porch, making it the oldest preserved brick building in Glamorgan. The bricks have graffiti from the 17th and 18th centuries. On the eastern side of the courtyard is a short, gabled wing, which also dates from the Middle Ages. The west wing was built around 1540. The three-story building is roofless, but it once contained luxurious living spaces with large windows, chimneys and a new kind of square staircase around a central column.
The other buildings from the 14th century around the inner or southern courtyard cannot be visited. On the east side there is a simply plastered, two-story residential building. Some of the buildings on the south side date from the Middle Ages, but have been changed several times and are now also partly in ruins. On the west side of the inner courtyard is a terrace garden that overlooks the valley, dating from the 16th century. There were once eight fish ponds north-west of the facility, but they have silted up.
Old Beaupre in the movie
The ruin was one of several filming locations in Vale of Glamorgan in 2008 for the two episodes The Temptation of Sarah Jane of the series The Sarah Jane Adventures .
literature
- Royal commission on ancient and historical monuments in Wales: An inventory of the ancient monuments in Glamorgan. Vol. 4, Domestic architecture from the reformation to the industrial revolution, p. 1, The greater houses. RCHAW, Cardiff 1981. ISBN 978-0-11-700754-3 , pp. 46-63
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ British Listed Buildings: Old Beaupre Castle, Old Beaupre, Llanfair. Retrieved January 2, 2014 .
- ↑ Ancient Monuments: Old Beaupre Castle. Retrieved January 2, 2014 .
- ↑ Cadw: Old Beaupre Castle - Conservation to the Inner Porch. Retrieved January 15, 2014 .
- ^ Elisabeth Whittle: Glamorgan and Gwent. HMSO, London 1992. ISBN 0-11-701221-1 , p. 182
- ↑ Visit the Vale: Old Beaupre Castle. Retrieved January 15, 2014 .