Rising high above the floor of the Taff Valley, north of Cardiff, the conical towers of Castell Coch are a familiar sight to travellers driving along the A470. The Victorian architect William Burges designed the castle for the 3rd Marquess of Bute between 1875 and 1881, resulting in a masterpiece of High Victorian romanticism. The castle is particularly striking for its use of red paint for its windows, doors, shutters, fascias, and gutters – together forming a bold contrast with the bright green of the surrounding beech woods.
That red colour is central to Castell Coch’s identity and to its very name (Castell Coch means ‘Red Castle’), but conservation work being carried out by Cadw, the Welsh heritage agency, shows that the current shade is very different from that of Burges’s original vision. During the current conservation programme, architectural paint researcher Lisa Oestreicher discovered traces of older paint schemes, showing that the original colour was an orange shade of red, markedly different from the dark red that evolved over 135 years of repainting.
The original colour will be used for all future external redecoration so that visitors, and drivers along the main road below, will experience something closer to what Burges intended. Repointing of the masonry also revealed the pink/orange mortar used in the medieval parts of the building, making it easier to see the contrast between the surviving stonework from the castle’s predecessor, a 13th-century hunting lodge, and the Victorian fantasy that Burges built above it.
Meanwhile, in Somerset, the historic red lighthouse standing at the entrance to Watchet Harbour has been found to be in contravention of maritime law. The lighthouse has been painted bright red since 1862, but Trinity House, the authority responsible for lighthouses in the UK, has recently pointed out that sea-facing navigational marks on the starboard side of a harbour entrance should be painted green. Mariners entering the harbour have reportedly been confused by the contravention of the normal rules and have narrowly avoided colliding with the harbour wall.
The 22ft-tall (6.7m) lighthouse dates from 1862, when it was designed by James Abernethy, a Scottish civil engineer, who won the contract in competition with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The tower is hexagonal, and Watchet’s mayor Loretta Whetlor says that the three panels facing the sea will now be painted green, but the back panels will stay red in honour of the 160-year tradition.
Save our trig points
Historic England is being urged by the Twentieth Century Society (C20) to mark this year’s 90th anniversary of the UK’s first triangulation pillars by granting listed status to two examples: the first-ever trig point – erected at Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, on 18 April 1936 – and the pillar that was used for the final observation made in 1962 at Thorny Gale, Cumbria. Both pillars survive in excellent condition and have large bronze plaques set into their flanks, commemorating their bookending role in mapping the British landscape.
More than 6,000 of the original 6,500 trig points survive. Branding them ‘heritage in high places’, C20 argues that they are modest but significant symbols of modernity – remnants from a nationwide surveying project of unprecedented scale. Designed in 1935 by Brigadier Martin Hotine, trig pillars have a flat top inset with a brass plate called a ‘spider’ into which a theodolite could be secured for taking line-of-sight measurements. Typically 4ft (1.2m) in height, they rest on solid rock for stability, with a buried section that can be as much as 15ft (4.6m) underground, but is more usually about 30in (0.8m).
Rendered obsolete by satellite-based surveying methods, trig points were planned for removal by the Ordnance Survey, but campaigning by the Ramblers Association and other groups led to the OS relenting and launching an adoption scheme in 1992, encouraging individuals and local groups to take over basic maintenance tasks. Trig points have thus acquired community value as well as becoming the target for recreational ‘trig baggers’ seeking to visit as many as possible. A letter to The Times on the C20 campaign asked whether designating just two trig points was enough: surely, it said, the Society should be seeking to list three trig points given the clue in their name (being trigonometrical stations or triangulation pillars).
Sir Neil, much missed
When the history of heritage over the last 50 years comes to be written, Sir Neil Cossons will be shown to have been a pivotal figure, and his recent death (on 29 March 2026, at the age of 87) was greeted with much sadness by his many friends. Sir Neil was a champion of grassroots heritage and the role of the amateur and volunteer, honouring the people who effectively created the new discipline of industrial archaeology in the 1950s by refusing to let the nation’s canals and railways become obsolete, and working for their preservation.
He famously referred to an unspoken hierarchy in heritage, in which Renaissance paintings reigned supreme at the top of the pyramid, followed by Greek and Roman Classical archaeology, and so on down to industrial heritage at the bottom of the heap. He considered it ironic that the only period in history when Britain dominated the world should be valued least by heritage professionals. He set about changing that by taking on Ironbridge, which he believed to be as important as Athens or Rome in its cultural impact, being the place that saw the birth of modern industrial society. It is fitting that one of his last public engagements was to attend the handover of Ironbridge to the National Trust in November 2025, securing a great long-term future for the ten museums within the World Heritage Site, which he had done so much to preserve.
On a personal note, Sir Neil was a generous supporter of Sherds’ efforts, and he several times provided references for jobs that I applied for. Whenever I failed to secure a role he would reassure me that the right job for me would come in the end: he was right, and in 2024 I was appointed Chief Executive of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.
As the Chair of English Heritage, he was a tower of strength when I set up the Heritage Alliance in 2002. At the time, various organisations sought to challenge the new charity’s role as the voice of the voluntary heritage sector, seeing the Alliance as a threat to theirown leadership role. Sir Neil quietly reassured me that he would not be presenting me with a generous English Heritage cheque to get established if he thought those other bodies were effective in that role.
Sir Neil’s obituary in The Times summed up his character perfectly: ‘Cossons’s distaste for bureaucracy remained undimmed, especially its seeming determination to foist an official view of diversity on to the nation’s museums. “Everybody in the museums and heritage world believes in widening access, but it doesn’t actually help being sent letters telling you how to do it,” he complained. “My dilemma is, am I here to serve my audiences or am I here to serve a set of government directives? My heart and mind tell me I’m here to serve my audiences”.’
Remembering Gillian Tindall
Another inspiring obituary well worth reading is that of Gillian Tindall, the historian, who died on 1 October 2025, aged 87. Catherine Dille’s eulogy, published in The Guardian, reminded us of Gillian’s passionate commitment to conservation. With her encyclopaedic knowledge of local planning law and her incisive thinking, Gillian ‘had little patience for developers who had not done their research or failed to appreciate the history or needs of an area they intended to use’.
She was a warm advocate of anyone with an interest in history, and always had time to discuss a historical question or local planning issue over a cup of tea. Her principal concern was that London should remain a city where families could continue to go about their everyday lives as they had done for centuries. Like Sir Neil, she championed the contribution of working people to the history of the nation in books like The Fields Beneath (1977), Three Houses, Many Lives (2012), and The House by the Thames (2006), which traced the diverse lives of those who have lived at 49 Bankside, the 450-year-old house in Southwark.
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