About

Raglan Castle has an unmistakable silhouette crowning a ridge amid glorious Monmouthshire countryside, and is the grandest castle ever built by Welshmen.

We can thank Sir William ap Thomas, the ‘blue knight of Gwent’, for the moated Great Tower of 1435 that still dominates this mighty fortress-palace. His son Sir William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, created the gatehouse with its flared ‘machicolations’.

These stone arches allowed missiles to be rained down on attackers. But Raglan came 150 years later than the turbulent heyday of castle-building. It was designed to impress as much as to intimidate.

Under various earls of Worcester Raglan was transformed into a magnificent country seat with a fashionable long gallery and one of the finest Renaissance gardens in Britain. But loyalty to the crown was to prove its undoing.

Despite a garrison of 800 men and one of the longest sieges of the Civil War, it fell to parliamentary forces and was deliberately destroyed. Among the looted treasures was a piece of Tudor wooden panelling, now proudly displayed in the visitor centre after being rescued from a cow shed in the 1950s.

Raglan Castle Renaissance Gardens

The landscape surrounding Raglan Castle is recognised as one of the most significant surviving gardens from the Renaissance period in Britain. Although only the structure of the gardens is visible today.

The castle gardens had their heyday in the 1620s when there were terraces, knot gardens, a moated walk, and a water parterre, one of only a handful made in Britain at that time. Water channels were cut in diamond shapes to create islands at the head of the lake. Boggy channels and mounds, which can still be seen today in the meadow below the kitchen tower, provide evidence of this unusual feature. After the Civil War the castle was abandoned and the gardens have been left overgrown and largely untouched. However, the original structure can be clearly seen in earthworks surviving on the ground.