Wanna Buy a Castle?

St. Donat's Castle, where I worked in Wales, had been in the same family for hundreds of years. It sat empty for a while and was purchased by William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900's. He bought a bunch of other buildings and glommed them onto the edges of St. Donat's. He used the castle as a hide-away for his mistress, and had a phone line installed in the summer house below, so she could get calls from Hollywood. He only visited the castle a few times.
Fonmon Castle, up the road from St. Donat's, belonged to a friend, and her family has lived there for hundreds of years. Her brother is the hereditary peer and does all sorts of things to keep the place in the family and out of the hands of the tax man.


Caerphilly Castle, the second largest castle in the UK, after Windsor, was always a big favourite of mine. It was nine miles exactly from our house, and I would drive over on summer evenings and walk around the perimeter of the castle and its two moats.
Even Cardiff had two castles, a twelfth century one and a Victorian-era one, both ringed with a Victorian-era stone wall with all sorts of animals climbing their way over it. I should post the rest of these guys sometime...The entire country of Wales was encircled with an Iron Ring of Castles to keep the English out from the land side and the Celts out from the sea side. So every where you go, there are castle ruins - around every corner, along the coast, peeping out of the woods.
There are three castles currently for sale in the UK, but none are in Wales. One's a ruin in Scotland, but the heritage trust will help you rebuild it. One was home to Catherine Parr, but it's really a semi-detached house, so you'd have to share it. The third has eight bedrooms, so you could have loads of friends over for the weekend.I'd rather have any one of these than almost any one of Damien Hirst's pieces, which just sold for £70.5 million! Which one do you like the most?