Qualla: Oxwich Castle https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:13 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Oxwich Castle https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle Oxwich Castle: Introduction https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle/ Photo credit Joy Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. It looks like a castle from the cliff path, with its six-storey tower rising out of the headland above Oxwich Bay. Walk closer and the appearance shifts. The mullioned windows are too large for defence. The walls are too thin. The courtyard is open. Oxwich is a castle in name only, a grand Tudor manor house dressed up in the architectural vocabulary of fortification because the family who built it wanted to look like the great lords they had once almost been. The construction, more than anything, was an act of ambition, and the ambition appears to have ruined them.

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Image: Joy Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/gcjj-oxwich-castle-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Oxwich Castle: The Mansell Project https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle/ Photo credit Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir Rice Mansell, who died in 1559, started the buildings sometime between 1520 and 1538. The Gateway and the South Range went up first, the entrance plaque carved with the coats of arms of the Mansell family and of the Penrice and Scurlage families to which Sir Rice was related,...

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Image: Pam Brophy | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/gcjj-oxwich-castle-the-mansell-project.mp3 0:06 2 full Oxwich Castle: Elizabethan Excess https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle/ Photo credit Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0. The East Range that Edward Mansell added carried a great Hall, and together with the six-storey South-East Tower it offered enough room to house a substantial household and a small army of guests. This was the architecture of the Elizabethan prodigy house, the kind of building de...

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Image: Pam Brophy | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/gcjj-oxwich-castle-elizabethan-excess.mp3 0:06 3 full Oxwich Castle: Slow Collapse https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle/ Photo credit Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0. Parts of the building collapsed in the eighteenth century. After that the South Range was patched up and rebuilt as a farmhouse, which it remained, more or less, into the twentieth century. By 1949 demolition was being seriously considered. The state took ownership instead, and O...

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Image: Tiia Monto | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/gcjj-oxwich-castle-slow-collapse.mp3 0:06 4 full Oxwich Castle: The Brooch Under the Floor https://qualla.com/oxwich-castle/ Photo credit Nigel Davies, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1968, during routine maintenance work at the castle, a man named Cyril Grove found a gold ring brooch in the ground. It is two inches in diameter and dates to between 1320 and 1340, decorated with two rubies and three cameos, and it is one of the finest pieces of medieval jewe...

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Image: Nigel Davies | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/j/j/oxwich-castle-wp/gcjj-oxwich-castle-the-brooch-under-the-floor.mp3 0:06 5 full