 | Name:
Pete Thomas
Building:
Carreg Cennen Castle
Location:
Trapp, Carmarthenshire
What is your relationship to this building?:
Frequent visitor on family picnics.
Why do you love this building?:
To Welshmen brought up in plain, white, rectangular, slate-roofed houses, the castles we could see from our windows represented a dreamscape: an ideal world of rugged beauty, romanticism, pre-Raphaelite cheekbones and noble aggression. And true to the estate agents' mantra of location, location, location, Carreg Cennen is the mother of Welsh castles. Perched on top of a 100 metre limestone outcrop and silhouetted against the Black Mountain behind, it dominates the green Carmarthenshire farmland below it. Most people remember it as children on parent-led outings: the humorously-named village below (Trapp), the walk through Castle Farm, a serpentine climb to the top, then the usual castle playground of ruined chambers and four-county views.
But most of all, we remember the cave. A vaulted staircase descends downwards through a fault in the limestone cliff-face. The arrow slits reveal precipitous drops - if you try to spit on carrion crows flying below, the wind blows back twice as hard! At the bottom is a long, tunnel-like cave that digs deep into the hill. This becomes dark, darker, then pitch black as you descend. The terror increases. You wish you'd brought a torch. You hit your head on the sides of the cave, step on invisible feet, listen to mysterious noises of trickling water. And it leads... exactly nowhere.
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Night Waves Debate: "This house believes that Prince Charles has been good for architecture"
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