Wales is blessed with so many wonderful castles that it’s easy to see why Cardiff Castle sometimes slips under the radar. Some sources tell us that Wales has had more than 600 castles, and even Cadw (the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage) say that the country had 427. Obviously it depends on what you think constitutes a castle, and Wikipedia puts it into a more realistic context by saying that there are over a hundred still standing, but whichever way you look at it, it’s still an awful lot of castles for such a small country.

You don’t need to be a budding Geoffrey of Monmouth to work out that the reason Wales had so many was because the land was always under attack for one reason or another, and the first outsiders to make their presence felt were the Romans. About five years after their invasion of Britain in 43 AD, they reached what we now consider as the Welsh border. Wales wasn’t a country as such back then, but a land made up of different independent Brythonic (Celtic) tribes, one of which was the Silures who occupied an area in the south.

If the Romans thought they could just walk in and tell the Silures what to do then they were sadly mistaken because this tribe weren’t in the habit of taking things lying down. The Romans were a formidable fighting force themselves, but they also had brains as well as brawn, and in an early example of the carrot and big stick, they allowed the Silures to retain some of their cultural customs providing they towed the Roman line.

The arrangement seemed to be amicable enough but the area still needed some form of control, and so a fort was built in the south-east corner of the territory at the lowest crossing point of the River Taff – at a point where Cardiff (and the current castle) now stands.

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Originally posted 2024-03-14 14:00:30.