The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the South and West CoastsVarious
History
The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the South and West Coasts
Various
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Rivers -- Great Britain
The last of these may be first visited. Its situation at the head of
a dammed tidal inlet, low-lying and with no prominent hills near, is
unworthy of so noble a ruin. But Gerald de Windsor, the Norman lord
who built it (having received the land as a dowry with his Welsh wife,
Nesta, daughter of Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr of Dinefawr, or Dynevor),
probably cared little for the picturesque. The strong western towers
still bear witness to him; but to the mere tourist by far the most
interesting part of the castle is the east side, over against the
water, with its high wall and the lofty great, flaunting skeletons of
the windows of the palace above, their white mullions bowing forward
with inimitable grace. Unfortunately, one cannot romance about the
rooms to which these majestic oriels and bays belonged. This part of
the castle is of the sixteenth century, and was left unfinished.
Carew Castle (Caerau = fortified camps) still belongs to the Carews.
The Windsors took the name of this possession of theirs, and held the
castle for more than three hundred years. Then their line of lordship
was interrupted; and it was during this period that the great Sir Rhys
ap Thomas (whom Henry VII. made a Knight of the Garter for the part he
played before and at Bosworth Field in aid of the House of Tudor) held
such revels here as have made Carew almost a by-word. Among other shows
was a "feate of arms" of five days' duration, to which knights flocked
from all parts of England and Wales. These guests filled the castle and
more: five hundred, "moste of them of goode ranke," were accommodated
with tents in the park adjacent, of which no trace remains. Sir Rhys
himself, in gilt armour, on a "goodlie steede," attended by two pages
on horseback and a herald, "was the judge of the jousts." This same
mighty noble received Henry VII. at Carew before Bosworth Field was
fought; and, if tradition speak true, with his own hands killed Richard
of Gloucester, who would dearly have liked ere then to have killed him.
Sir Rhys lies in the parish church of Carmarthen, with about seven feet
of armoured stone for a monument; and a very small effigy of a wife
lies by his side. With the Civil Wars came the castle's destruction.
The Carews of Crowcombe, in Somersetshire, are now lords of the castle,
and anyone may tread its grass and broken stones on payment of a
threepenny bit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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