UK 2014, Llansteffan Castle

Christine and I went over to see the house that they are gutting and renovating, that Chris has been working on every day. Built in the mid to late 1800s. He's put on a new roof and put solar panels on it so he can start to earn some money back by selling electricity to the grid. Now he's knocking down interior walls and replacing all the windows, then insulating and vapour barrier in attic and outside walls, then taking up the floors and adding vapour barrier before replacing them. That's before he gets to electrical, plumbing, dry wall, whew! This is something they have done with their last 2 houses and this one they think they will live in for a while.
Christine had to work today so I went to Llansteffan (pronounced Clanstevan but the Cl is at the back of the throat with a bit of a gurgle thrown in). Many of the local place names start with Llan and when we looked it up on the computer, in Welsh, it means "an enclosed area".
Christine and I had popped to look at the beach yesterday. In was periodically sunny and quite pretty.

Looking out to sea from Llansteffan Beach, tides out. The castle, out of the picture
up to the right.

Today however it was raining, on and off, periods of drizzle, periods of downpour. It didn't look nearly as pretty.

I went up the footpath next to the beach parking lot.

The castle is high over the village and the beach.

I walked first up a footpath, then a road, about 1 car wide, then a track and then a footpath again. I caught glimpses of the castle every now and then.

Front of the castle with the estuary behind.

Through an arch in the walls and your in. The sign says its open 10 to 4 but there's no gate or door and
Christine said she'd been up and slept overnight in one of the towers. Free too.

The first fortification was of wood, in about 1100. That was replaced by stone fortification and this
gatehouse in 1225 (yes, there were plaques, which of course I read).

The weather was very kind to me when I was actually at the castle, very windy but only occasional drizzle. There was no-one else there for the entire time, about an hour, that I walked around.

This is the inside of the multistory gatehouse built in the mid 13th century. The lord would have lived here,
big fireplaces on each floor and 2 portcullis and "murder holes". This was built at the same time as the additional
walls that made it a much larger castle.

A carved stone that supported the mantle of the huge fireplace in the lords great room.

The views up the river Towys estuary and out to the ocean would have been magnificent on a clear day but the pictures I took are quite uninspiring. I walked back and into the village, stopping at the Norman church, but it was locked up.

Base of one of the gravestones. A sign in the cemetery said it was part of a project and the grass would only
be cut once a year, once the wildflowers and grasses had been inventoried.

I made my way down through the village to the beach carpark again and decided, as it was bucketing rain by now, to forego the next village visit I had planned, and return home.