So I talked before about how Castell Coch was built by romantic lunatic the Marquis of Bute and his architect best mate William Burges, because they both had Views on what a proper castle should look like. But the Marquis also owned Cardiff Castle! He inherited it when he was just a year old, and grew up hating it because it wasn't suitably Goffik.
So, on coming of age, he decided to renovate. Apologies for the lack of image descriptions in these, I genuinely don't know how to describe most.
This is the clock tower and one detail from the outside. The inside, though, is fucking spectacular.
This is the smoking room, for example:
Inside the castle proper, they renovated everywhere; the banqueting hall, library, bedrooms, nursery, guest tower, and a whole bunch of others besides, many of which were named after the decoration they received such as the Chaucer Room and the Arab Room. The Arab Room is my personal favourite, actually, look at its ceiling:
While here's the banqueting hall, and its fireplace:
The library includes a sculpture of the tree of knowledge with monkeys on it looking at a book, which was a nod to the zippy new scientist Charles Darwin:
The Chaucer Room is in one of the towers, and is decorated with scenes from Canterbury Tales. Here is its fireplace:
But! The outside deserves love too! So they made a rooftop garden, and then created one of Cardiff's best loved landmarks: the Animal Wall, running around the castle grounds and modern day Bute Park, featuring stone carvings of both exotic and domestic animals on every other crenellation.
Although the animals have weird eyes. We deduct points for that.
Anyway, in addition to all that, the castle has a fairly lurid history, starting in Roman times, moving through such highlights as the Glyndŵr Rebellion and Hugh Despenser's Whole Shit, and winding up in the Second World War when air raid shelters were built in its grounds to save people's lives from the bombs. These days, it's right in the middle of Cardiff city centre, making it an excellent landmark for navigation and also, nowadays, it has a dragon.
Anyway, vote Cardiff is what I'm saying
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