Raglan Castle

Raglan, begun c.1435, is regarded by many as one of the most handsome castles .
The Great Gate was built, in the 1460, as the main entrance to the castle by Sir William Herbert ap Thomas who was knighted as the Blue Knight of Gwent. He fought at the Battle of Agincourt with King Henry V in 1415. William was responsible for building the great tower at Raglan, which became known as the Yellow Tower of Gwent.

The entrance passage stands between the two half-hexagonal towers. The windows are narrow because larger ones would have weakened the defensiveness of the gate. The circular openings beneath the ground-floor windows of the gate and the adjacent buildings are gunloops of a type common in the 15th century. The outer doorway was protected by its own machicolations running between the two towers.
A soothing atmosphere permeates the rambling interior of the cold ruin. Some visitors have been startled by fleeting glimpses of what they describe as a bardic figure, beckoning to them from the vicinity of the wing over which the library was once situated. He is thought to be the ghost of the castle’s librarian, who hid the valuable books and manuscripts in a secret tunnel beneath the castle.

There is no denying that Raglan Castle possesses a mysterious aura, and no one who treads its gloom-laden passageways and dark, twisting stairwells, or gazes upon its huge, hollow windows, can deny that a certain spine-tingling strangeness hangs over the entire foundation.



Jeffrey L. Thomas