Qualla: Coity Castle

Coity Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martyn Winters, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sir Payn de Turberville was called "the Demon" by the people whose land he took. He was one of the Twelve Knights of Glamorgan in the legend, the band who rode in behind Robert FitzHamon at the end of the eleventh century and carved Welsh territory into Norman lordships. Where Payn built his stronghold around 1126, the Romans had probably built a fort before him, and locals had walked the dead-straight track of Heol Spencer past it for centuries. He raised a ringwork - a circular bank topped with timber - on ground that already remembered being defended. Nine hundred years later, the walls of the castle that grew from it still stand thirty feet tall, and the road still bends, only slightly, only at the castle, around what Payn put there.

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Image: Martyn Winters | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coity Castle: From Ringwork to Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Ridley, Public domain. The earliest castle was earth and timber: a high circular bank crowned by a wooden palisade, the kind of fortification a Norman lord could throw up in a season with the labour of the conquered. By the twelfth century, Payn or his successors had begun to build in stone. A rectangu...

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Image: Martin Ridley | Public domain

Coity Castle: A Siege of One Month

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Finch, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the early fifteenth century, two men named Thomas Gamage had a problem of inheritance and decided to solve it with a private army. The Coity lordship had passed through marriage to the Gamage family, but the legal claim was contested. So William Gamage, with the help of Sir Gi...

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Image: John Finch | CC BY-SA 2.0

Coity Castle: Comforts of the Tudor Century

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celia Kozlowski, CC BY 3.0. By the sixteenth century, the Gamages were no longer planning sieges; they were installing chimneys. The old keep stayed, but the domestic range was remodelled almost completely. A new storey went up. New mullioned windows let in light the original builders had refused. Two big c...

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Image: Celia Kozlowski | CC BY 3.0

Coity Castle: What Stands Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cath Mudford, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk up the lane from Bridgend and the castle appears suddenly through trees, a tight cluster of curtain walls and a roofless keep set on slightly rising ground. The wall heads still bear faint traces of the merlons and embrasures Payn's masons cut. Inside the inner ward, the spi...

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Image: Cath Mudford | CC BY-SA 3.0

Coity Castle: A Castle in the Hedgerows

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kenneth rees, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the air, Coity is harder to spot than its size suggests. The trees of the Coity Higher community press up against it, and the village's modern houses sit just outside the medieval ditch. Look for the dark circular footprint of the inner ward and the bright cut of the parish ...

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Image: kenneth rees | CC BY-SA 2.0