Penhow Castle

Caradog ap Gruffydd held Penhow before the Norman advance. Roger de St Maur, serving the lord of Striguil, established his family here by 1129 and built the early fortified home. The de St Maurs later became the Seymours, ancestors of Queen Jane Seymour, before Penhow passed through the Somersets, Lewises and other owners.

There is no recorded great siege. Instead, each age changed the house: a stone tower and enclosing wall came first, a two-storey hall followed in the later Middle Ages, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century owners reduced military features to gain warmer, more comfortable rooms. The castle survived the Civil War when many stronger places did not.

Buildings and walls form an uneven court about twenty-eight by twenty-three metres. The much-changed western tower is the oldest part; the hall, later house rooms and farm buildings preserve later work. Viscount Rhondda bought the estate in 1914, and film director Stephen Weeks rescued and reopened the decaying castle after 1973 before it returned to private use.

Penhow is often called Wales's oldest continuously inhabited castle, although other houses also claim that distinction. The claim matters less than the visible continuity: one small lordly seat adapted rather than being abandoned. Its fabric follows a family of local Norman knights toward national importance while retaining the working farm and domestic life around them.