Castles In The Air: The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists and a Crumbling Old Mansion [Paperback]

Castles in the Air is a beautifully written, autobiographical story of rescuing an ancient mansion. Gwydir Castle was inhabited by ravers and rats until Judy Corbett and her husband Peter Welford found and acquired this 500-year-old house mouldering in the foothills of Snowdonia. Despite the toads, strange smells and squatters, they decided to mortgage themselves to the hilt to bring the castle back to life.

This is an evocatively written and genuinely moving book and is infused with an extraordinary sense of place. The couple's adventures in a gothic wonderland lead them through plots both supernatural and historical. In a museum storeroom in a Bronx warehouse they find a missing room, in the castle's Solar Tower the ghost of a young woman appears and from the far edges of the woods a silent man called Sven emerges to befriend the couple and their beloved castle.

For everyone who has ever wanted to live in a glorious house or escape from the mundanity of life - Castles in the Air is pure magic.

Finding the Castle

We found the castle on a warm afternoon in late spring. Peter and I had spent a lazy day in Llanrwst, which was then to us an anonymous little market town about fifteen miles south of Conwy, in the heart of northern Wales. The distant mountains were streaked with white where a late snow had gathered in the contours of the slopes: Cnicht, the Carnedds, the Glyders, and mighty Snowdon itself, Yr Wyddfa in Welsh, which towered eagle-spans above the others.

Ostensibly we were house-hunting, but a town with an antique shop and a good parish church always delayed us. There were lines of very shabby bunting criss-crossing the streets which appeared to have been hanging there since the previous summer. A string of home-grown shops lined the narrow streets, a few boarded up with FOR SALE signs in their windows and leaves banking the doorways, but mostly the town still retained a gentle pre-war atmosphere.

We found the parish church of St Grwst on the banks of the River Conwy.We arrived on the hour as a bell chimed from a stone tower. The door to a side chapel was open.We slipped in and were engulfed by the smell and the atmosphere of the past. Inside, the cool, green flagstones were dappled with squares of light from the leaded windowpanes. There was dust on the mouldings of the wooden panelling and a strong smell of candle grease; it was a balm to the senses. The past was a refuge where we both hid from the rigours of the modern world. Peter’s enthusiasm for history was boundless. He had a way of speaking of the distant past as though it were yesterday. My interest was more instinctive, less academic. It was simply that I felt more comfortable with the dead than I did with the living.

There was Llewelyn the Great’s sarcophagus conspicuously resting in the shadows. The massive stone chest which had once held the body of the great Welsh prince now held only spiders. The walls of the chapel were covered with memorial brasses to the Wynn family: ‘Heere Lyeth The Body of Sr John Wynn of Gwedvr Kt And Baronet who Died Ye First Of March 1626.’ A tablet erected to the memory of his sons on the far wall also caught my eye with its enigmatic inscription: ‘FUNUS, FUMUS, FUIMUS, ECCE’ (‘Death comes, Breath is a vapour, We have been, Behold’).

Gwedvr, we were told by a helpful churchwarden, was the ancient seat of the Wynn family, now called Gwydir Castle, a house nearby I vaguely recalled visiting as a child when it was open to the public. Somewhere beyond the thick walls of the church I heard the mew of peacocks.

A memory stirred. I remembered the peacocks at Gwydir Castle but nothing more of my visit there. I must have been no more than four or five. My recollections of the day had been overshadowed by the trauma of finding my hand resting next to the sleeping body of an adder, on a wall in nearby Betws-y-Coed.

Usually, the only way I could persuade Peter out of an historic building was by offering to take him to another. The use of this tactic meant we would sometimes spend whole days plodding around a string of historic sites, which could include anything from a grand country house to a prehistoric burial chamber. After spending two hours scrutinising every possible iconographic detail of the late medieval rood screen in the church, I suggested we visit Gwydir Castle. His eyes lit up.We left the churchwarden polishing the brass candlesticks on the altar.

We harboured a dream of one day buying a ruinous old mansion and renovating it as accurately as possible and living in it without electricity or any concessions to modern life. My dream was to wear a chatelaine round my waist, and keep wolfhounds and tend bees in some quiet corner of a walled garden. I had a strong sense of the Gothic in me, and neglected houses, in particular, appealed to something deep within my psyche. Peter said he would be happy to fall in with anything, provided the house was pre- 1670 and had held Royalist allegiance during the Civil War; living in a Parliamentarian house was out of the question. My mother said we had ‘allusions’. I’d lost count of how many times we’d trudged across water-logged fields to see crumbling old farmhouses with trees growing out of the chimneys. We were skilled in the art of trespass and had learnt to judge the amount of real menace in a collie dog’s bark. The whole thing was a pipe dream really but the fantasy kept us sane!
. Without proper jobs or a steady income, buying somewhere seemed an unlikely eventuality. Peter had trained as an architectural historian at the Courtauld Institute in London and I had trained as a bookbinder at the London College of Printing. Neither profession was likely to make our fortune or fund the megalomaniac restoration schemes we fantasised about.

When I was younger, growing up on a hill farm in North Wales, I forged stronger bonds with houses than I did with people. Houses were secure, reliable; they provided unconditional sanctuary from a world I didn’t quite fit into. The landscape of my childhood was littered with abandoned farmhouses. Often the families had just walked out and left all their belongings behind. I wondered what could have happened that would make a family abandon their past in such an abrupt way. These were solitary, lonely places. One in particular stays with me. It was an old stone farmhouse built into the side of a hill, surrounded by gorse bushes and mossy walls that the sun never reached. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.