Cardiff Castle

We set the alarm for 4:30 a.m. this morning and left the Fitzwilton Hotel at 7:00 a.m., early morning sunshine just starting to brighten the Waterford riverfront.  It was an hour drive to Rosslare Harbour, where we were scheduled to catch the early ferry back across the St. George's Channel to Cardiff, Wales.  On our drive to the ferry, Steve played us a CD of Irish music by a young man named Dan O'Sullivan.  We thought that, with its fiddle and a surprising banjo, it sounded a lot like Bluegrass music.

Hay bales were stacked in the fields, waiting for harvest.  We have watched summer turn into fall on this trip.

The ferry was smaller than the Ulysses that had taken us here over a week ago, and it was a rougher passage.  I opted for the smoked salmon wrap for lunch . . . instead of the James Joyce burger.

It took over four hours to reach Wales, and the rest of the afternoon in Cardiff we spent touring Cardiff Castle, a medieval castle and Victorian Gothic revival mansion located in the city center.  The original castle was built in the late 11th century by Norman invaders on top of a 3rd-century Roman Fort.  But in the 18th century, the 3rd Marquess of Bute transformed the castle, using his vast wealth to back an extensive program of renovations under the supervision of architect Willliam Burges.  Burges remodeled the castle in a Gothic revival style, lavishing plenty of money and attention on the place.  The interior is considered, according to Wikipedia, to be "among the most magnificent that the Gothic revival ever achieved."

Our tour referred to it as "Bizarre Cardiff Castle," and it was a good description.  From the outside it was not unlike other castles that we had seen, like Blarney Castle the previous day. 

 

But the inside was filled with fantastic paintings, carvings, tapestries, Islamic art, and gold gilt everywhere.  Hand-painted scenes from Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales and Aesop's Fables adorned the nursery and other rooms.

I don't think we have anything comparable in this country except perhaps the Hearst Mansion or the Biltmore House.  It is hard to imagine this vast amount of money going toward such architectural and artistic beauty these days.

We climbed up the keep, or tower, at the other end of the fortification, and took in the view of Cardiff, spread out all around us.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the castle were these walls, buried for centuries and unearthed in 1922, adjacent to the gift shop.

On the way to our lodging for the night, the Park Inn in City Centre, we passed this shop selling Brains - that is, brews from Cardiff's regional brewery founded in 1882 by Samuel Arthur Brain.