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.
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