Musical Chairs

The teaching of history perpetuates the names of certain sites of battle, where history changed course and a new age began: Culloden, Tewkesbury, the Boyne river, Worcester, Bosworth Field, Hastings of course. My guess is that Cardigan Castle - barely recorded in national history - has seen more bloody days than any of them. For over 130 years, between its foundation on this site in 1110, after Henry I had driven out Owain ap Cadwgan, and 1244, when a Norman lord reconstructed it and added a wall to the entire town, it ping-ponged back and forth between the Norman occupiers and the Welsh resistance. Who knows how many unsuccessful attacks there were between the nine times (by my count) that one side or the other succeeded in taking and holding it

In the midst of all this fighting, the Welshman Rhys ap Gruffydd found time to replace the wood and earth construction with stone (1171), and host the first recorded national cultural competition - the Eisteddfod - in the grounds. North Wales won the poetry, the South won the singing, which probably avoided even further bloodshed

I doubt if the following 400 years were entirely peaceful, but the castle next surfaces as a scene of major conflict in the English Civil War. Initially taken by Royalists, it was recaptured and badly damaged by Parliamentary forces - deliberately rendering it useless for military purposes. It was never repaired, and languished until 1808 when a large house was built within the remains of the castle walls. This became the cause of the last (bloodless, as far as I know) battle on the site, when the council spent 20 years trying to prize the castle and house (which by then they considered unfit for human habitation) out of the posession of its last surviving, elderly resident

This giant replica of the Eisteddfod chairs (given as prizes in that first 1176 competition) was commissioned from a local artist to celebrate the rennovation of the castle in 2015. All very appropriate, but my eye was caught by the stone steps on the right, lesding to an opening in the castle wall. This was a 'garderobe' - a toilet. The positioning ensured that the products of its use fell into the Teifi river beyond and were washed past Poppit sands beach into Cardigan bay - a practice recently reinstated by privatised Welsh Water, in a spirit of historical reconstruction