This post will begin with the moment after we had ascended the flight of stone steps up to the top of the battlements, and that sudden sense of calmness after the (let's be honest here) scruffiness and general noisiness of the castle grounds; the welcome cool shade of the covered walk way itself; the delight in the shear quality of the architecture; the expectation of the looking around somewhere that has been part of one's cultural landscape for a long time but not actually experienced.
As the bell in the Clock Tower above us struck twelve in a small act of theatre, our guide appeared and unlocked the gate and let us in, and we stepped into another world. Is that too cliched a thing to say? I know it's a device I use often enough but I really can't explain it any other way. Just lazy? Only that for me the best places are very often those where we leave the modern world behind and that, I believe, was the intention here of both client and architect. Anyway we had stepped over the threshold in an entirely private world perched some 20 ft above the ground, which when you think about it almost entirely bizarre. Bizarre and beautiful. A place of enchantment. When we entered the Clock Tower and the Winter Smoking room I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it. The room was small, vaulted and heavily decorated (on the theme of time) in a rather Pre-Raphaelite manner. Intense, yes, but not oppressive. Light filled too. Which was a surprise.
And so it went on, room to room, it all slightly incoherent, almost atomised; the rooms (nearly all in the towers) and with the exceptions of the Great Hall and the library directly below it, are on the smallish size and connected by narrow snaking corridors and spiral staircases. I'm still undecided whether it was intentional or accidental, the result, that is, of the castle being developed piecemeal. Perhaps a little of each, though I can imagine both client and architecture being quixotic. I think you could say the rooms also, when thought about, tend to be in conflict with one another such is the divergence of taste between each and which is probably not so obvious experientially. What unites them I have discussed in my previous post but to quickly recap is intensity (that word again) of vision that inspired remarkable craftsmanship and decoration, seclusion, and playfulness and fantasy. The fantastic is deeply important in a house like this, redundancy too. How else could one really explain a room like the two storey Chaucer Room? which owes so much to the centralised spaces of the now demolished Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster with all their connotations of the sublime. It was supposed to be a drawing room for Lady Bute but it must have been perishing in winter.
I have occasionally described churches on this blog as a Schtazkammer; this house certainly is, or rather a series of inter-linked jewel caskets. Such a strange thing it is to suddenly step into the one public room left from the time of Henry Holland all chastely Neo-classical - like a sudden gulp of cold water! In my first post I talked about castle is sort of a mimetic of the Ideal City, I would really like to take that idea further because I see the house as an attempt to contain, at the symbolic level, the whole cosmos. In decorative terms, to give you an example, all over the house both inside and out there are carvings of animals - armadillos, and monkeys, bears and parrots, I could go ad infinitum - all fauna in fact. A proper beastarium. Burges's inventiveness and joy know no bounds. A further example: Lord Bute's wondrous bathroom in the Bute Tower is lined with wood and marble panelling. The marbles are various. All are neatly labelled as though from a scientific collection. The house, then, attempts to bridge the growing materialism of the 19th century, and its apparent need to categorise, with the pre-modern and Bute's deep religious sensibility expressed as in his Roman Catholicism and his occultism. As I type this I return in thought to Hegel and the idea of sublimation. For me it reaches a conclusion in the extraordinary paradise garden, a Hortus Conclusus of sorts, at the top of the Bute Tower. Concealed from below behind the battlements it is in the form of a Pompeian courtyard garden open to the sky and surrounded by a covered walk way. Extraordinary indeed.
Since the death of Burges and the posthumous completion of what was then unfinished the intervening years have, perhaps, been unkind. The Great Staircase and the Moat Garden were destroyed between the wars. In the late Forties the Butes vacated the castle gifting it to the City of Cardiff, and a music college moved in. The west gardens are not what they were and the chapel, and the ornate 'Swiss Bridge' that Burges designed to connect castle and Garden, have been demolished. Thankfully, however, a lot of restoration work has been done on the interiors.
A final word about our visit. Firstly you may have noticed there are no pictures of the exterior of the castle - Castle St is not really photogenic - too much signage, etc. In many ways off-putting but do not be so easily discouraged the rewards inside are great. The castle grounds when we visited were little better and verging on the scruffy. I should also point out that there is limited access to the interiors and it is best, as we did, to take the guided tour. Our guide, David, was very good. The additional cost well worth it.
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