page_title: William Burges
section_title: Castell Coch
hierarchical_section_title: William Burges / Partnership with the Marquess of Bute / Castell Coch
caption_attribution_description: Drawing room at Castell Coch, Wales
context_page_description: William Burges ARA was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
  Burges's career was short but illustrious; he won his first major commission for Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork in 1863, when he was 35, and he died, in 1881, at his Kensington home, The Tower House, aged only 53. His architectural output was small but varied. Working with a long-standing team of craftsmen, he built churches, a cathedral, a warehouse, a university, a school, houses and castles.
  Burges's most notable works are Cardiff Castle, constructed between 1866 and 1928, and Castell Coch, both of which were built for John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute.
context_section_description: In 1872, while work at Cardiff Castle was proceeding, Burges presented a scheme for the complete reconstruction of Castell Coch, a ruined thirteenth-century fort on the Bute estate to the north of Cardiff. Burges's report on the possible reconstruction was delivered in 1872 but building was delayed until 1875, in part because of the pressure of works at Cardiff Castle and in part because of an unfounded concern on behalf of the Marquess's trustees that he was facing bankruptcy. 
  The exterior comprises three towers, described by Newman as "almost equal to each other in diameter, [but] arrestingly dissimilar in height." Burges's main inspiration was the work of the almost contemporaneous French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who was undertaking similar restoration and building work for Napoleon III. Viollet-le-Duc's work at the Château de Coucy, The Louvre and particularly at the Château de Pierrefonds is echoed at Castell Coch, Burges's Drawing Room roof drawing heavily on the octagonal, rib-vaulted chambre de l'Imperatrice at Pierrefonds. Burges's other main source was the Château de Chillon, from which his conical, and conjectural, tower roofs are derived.
  Severely damaged during Welsh rebellions in the early fourteenth century, Castell Coch fell into disuse and by the Tudor period, the antiquary John Leland described it as "all in ruin no big thing but high." A set of drawings for the planned rebuilding exists, together with a full architectural justification by Burges. The castle reconstruction features three conical roofs to the towers that are historically questionable. According to Crook, Burges "supported his roofs with a considerable body of examples of doubtful validity; the truth was that he wanted them for their architectural effect."
  The Keep Tower, the Well Tower and the Kitchen Tower comprise a series of apartments, of which the main sequence, the Castellan's Rooms, lie within the Keep. They begin weakly, the Banqueting Hall, completed well after Burges's death, being described by Newman as "dilute [and] unfocused" while Crook considers it "anaemic." It contains a colossal chimney piece, carved by Thomas Nicholls. The identity of the central figure in the overmantel is uncertain; Girouard states that it is King David while McLees suggests that it depicts St Lucius. The Drawing Room is a double-height room with decoration that Newman describes as illustrating the "intertwined themes (of) the fecundity of nature and the fragility of life." A stone fireplace by Nicholls features the Three Fates, spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of life. The murals around the walls draw on Aesop's Fables with delicate drawings of animals in the Aesthetic Movement style.
  The octagonal chamber with its great rib-vault, modelled on Viollet-le-Duc's chambers at Coucy and Pierrefonds, is decorated with drawings of butterflies and birds. Off the hall lies the Windlass Room, in which Burges delighted in assembling the fully functioning apparatus for the drawbridge, together with murder-holes for expelling boiling oil. The Marquess's bedroom provides some spartan relief before the culmination of the castle, Lady Bute's Bedroom. Crook considers this room "pure Burges: an arcaded circle, punched through by window embrasures, and topped by a trefoil-sectioned dome." The decorative theme is 'love', symbolised by monkeys, pomegranates and nesting birds. The decoration was completed long after Burges's death but his was the guiding spirit. "Would Mr Burges have done it?" William Frame wrote to Thomas Nicholls in 1887. Burges's original design for the castle included a chapel to be built on the roof of the Well Tower. It was never finished and the remains were removed in the late nineteenth century.
  Following Burges's death in 1881, work on the interior continued for another ten years. The castle was little used, the Marquess never came after its completion, and its main function was as a family sanatorium, although the Marchioness and her daughter, Lady Margaret Crichton-Stuart, did occupy it for a period following the death of th
caption: The Three Fates chimneypiece, Castell Coch
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