Whitchurch Castle

Wow! The penultimate blog. There are so many things still to look at, but I’ve run out of numbers!

I thought that Whitchurch Castle would be an appropriate last look; probably the oldest bit of the village

I can’t believe that the motte and bailey castle in our village has been literally razed to the ground while lesser mottes at Rhiwbina and Morganstown have rightly been given statutory protection

There’s nothing left of the castle now, buried under 1960s three-storey flats

So, what might it have looked like? There are aerial photographs which show the extent of the motte (the mound), and the old OS maps give a good indication of what was there in the 1920s

Earlier archaeological explorations suggest that the castle was a motte and bailey, that is a mound with a small enclosure over. There are suggestions however, that the motte was built over an ancient bronze-age burial barrow, and there have been some finds to support this

This old barrow was increased in height to form a defensive mound sometime around the time of the Conquest, with tales of skirmishes between the local Welsh Princes and the Norman invaders. The Nant Waedlyd stream was diverted to form a partial moat, and the stream still follows that line even today

Who built it? Either the local Welsh chieftains to defend their patch, or more likely, the Norman invaders to secure their tenuous hold on the area

How high would the motte have been? Possibly 5-6m high (taller than a double-decker bus), and the earth bank would have had a slope of 1 in 1.5, so plenty of space at the top for a bailey (or castle)

The archaeologist GT Clarke in the 19th century excavated the motte and found the remnants of an old stone keep on the top. He talks about a stone ’forcelettum’ dating from the 12th century

There is no way of establishing what the castle might have been, but the sketch below gives a flavour of a defensive motte and bailey with a stone keep and a substantial wooden perimeter. There would have been some form of wood and stone ramped access up to the castle. Not big enough to live in, the local chieftain and his family would probably have lived nearby

Over the following centuries, the mound would have been reduced in height, by both soil erosion and to provide easier access. It was lowered even further in 1848 to about 3.6m (12 feet) and landscaped as part of the garden

What were the finds from the various excavations? There were no burial remains found when the barrow was first excavated, but there were some bronze-age pottery crumbs found in the ditch. However, there was some minor abraded Roman material found between the barrow and later mound layers. Interestingly, an iron caltrop (a metal device to prevent animals galloping over open ground) and 14th century pottery shards were found in a second sifting of the motte ditch

Sometime in the last 200 years, a house was built in front of the castle, and in recent time this was called Treoda House. In the first census of 1841, it was called ‘Castale Motte’. This house too has been lost, demolished as part of the 1960s development

There was a final archaeological dig in 1966 by JK Knight, EJ Talbot and I Rowlands for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works (the predecessor of CADW), as part of the site preparation for the flats, using a mechanical digger, but nothing further was found

We’ve been told that Sir Mortimer Wheeler (the television archaeologist of the 1950s) was part of an excavation of the castle, but there is no confirmed knowledge of this. Does anyone know?

So, here we are in 2023, knowing very little about (probably) the oldest building ever to have been built in the village. The lack of record is bad enough, but there is not even a sign to tell people!

Surely Whitchurch deserves better than this. What do people think?

 

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