Our Blog - Chepstow, Wales

Another short day of sightseeing as we played golf again this afternoon. We started the day at Chepstow Castle. The Castle is the oldest surviving post-Roman stone fortification in Britain, with construction beginning in 1067. It sits upon the cliffs overlooking the Wye river and has been enlarged multiple times so that now, it has 4 baileys.

Part of the first section was the kitchen with stairs leading down into the cellar. But this was a nice cellar, with a really nice vaulted ceiling and a small section outside that could have been a tiny garden.

The Great Hall was built in 1280 for entertaining and ceremonial purposes. You can tell that it was meant to be pretty grandiose, with finely carved windows looking out over the courtyard (one of the baileys). It is also really large! Inside, there would have been painted plasterwork and a decorative tile floor.

Leaving the first bailey towards the second is this tower, which is now somewhat falling down. Originally, this would have been a defensive tower at the wall before another wall and bailey was created during an expansion.

These are the oldest castle doors in Europe, dating back to before 1190. They actually still were hanging in the main castle gateway until 1962 when they were taken down for preservation. They current doors are a copy of these. The wood in the doors has been dated by dendrochronology (tree ring dating) to the period 1159–89.

The Great Tower (although it seems more like a house), was originally completed by 1090 (expanded 3 different times) It was meant to show strength and was constructed in stone, which is new since most towers built at the same time were done in wood. It was actually part of the defenses and had windows only on the riverside, which was deemed "safe". In fact, if you look out one of those windows and down the cliff to the water, you can understand why they felt that side was fairly safe from invasion. The original building, from the Norman time between 1067 and 1115, and was a 2-story tower. The lower room had 3 little windows and then a ceremonial chamber above.

Then during the Marshal period between 1219 and 1245, the new occupants added new windows (very nice ones) to the upper floor and created apartments on one end. They also built that end of the tower to be a bit higher and added an arcade. The last period, under Roger Bigod from 1293-1300, the upper story was extended again and a gallery was built on the river side. In the last picture, you can see arched niches that were in the apartments.

We played golf that afternoon at The Rolls of Monmouth. I initially thought "Rolls" as in hills, but in fact, it is Rolls as in Rolls-Royce. The building is the Hendre, which is a full-scale Victorian Gothic country house and the ancestral estate of the Rolls family. Charles Stewart Rolls, the co-founder of Rolls-Royce, grew up here. It was built in the 18th-19th centuries and was originally a shooting lodge (go figure!). It remained in the Rolls family from 1767 until 1987. While the course had a few hills, as you can see, there aren't really "rolls" there :-)

Dinner in Hay-en-Wye at the Olde Black Lion. They happened to have live jazz music that night, which was quite nice. Interesting tidbit ... we crossed a national border to have dinner. Our B&B is actually in England in the town of Cusop, and dinner was back in Wales.

Continue to Day 5: Hay-on-Wye to Sennybridge or go back to the main Wales vacation blog page