Cyfarthfa Castle wins £22m to become ‘Wales’s answer to Ironbridge’
The Merthyr Tydfil ironmaster’s mansion and the furnaces below it will be restored over five years, with 90 jobs and a new museum promised
Cyfarthfa Castle, the mock-medieval mansion built by Merthyr Tydfil’s ironmasters at the height of the town’s industrial power, is to be restored under a £22m programme that its backers say will do for the south Wales valleys what Ironbridge did for Shropshire.
The funding, confirmed on Thursday, combines £12m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, £6m from the Welsh government and £4m from Merthyr Tydfil county borough council and private donors. It will pay for the repair of the castle’s roof and 72 rooms, the excavation of the Cyfarthfa furnaces across the River Taff, and a new museum of ironmaking in the castle’s stable block. Work is to start in the spring and finish in 2031.
Built in 1825 for William Crawshay II, whose works were then the largest in the world, the castle has been a school, a museum and, for the past decade, a building on Cadw’s at-risk register with buckets in the attic. The council spends about £400,000 a year keeping it watertight. “We have been patching a 200-year-old roof with a 20th-century budget,” said Bethan Lewis, the council leader. “This is the first time anyone has put serious money into what is, by any measure, one of the most important industrial buildings in Europe.”
The Cyfarthfa Foundation, the charity set up in 2019 to lead the project, estimates the restored site will draw 180,000 visitors a year and support 90 jobs directly, with a further 200 in the town’s cafes and hotels. Merthyr currently attracts about 40,000 paying visitors a year, most of them to the castle museum, which charges nothing.
The foundation’s director, Gethin Howells, said the aim was to tell the story of the whole valley rather than of one family. “Crawshay built this house to look down on 10,000 people who made his iron,” he said. “The furnaces where they worked are 300 metres away under a car park and a dual carriageway. We want visitors to stand in the drawing room and then stand where the iron was tapped, and understand that they are the same place.”
The plan includes a footbridge over the Taff to the furnace site and a year-round programme of apprenticeships in stonemasonry and conservation joinery, run with the town’s further education college. Twelve apprentices will start in September 2027.
Not everyone is persuaded. A group of residents in the Gurnos estate, which borders the park, said the money would be better spent on the estate’s own derelict shopping parade. “It is a lot of money for a rich man’s house,” said Carol Pritchard, who chairs the Gurnos tenants’ association. The council said the regeneration of the parade was funded separately and would begin next year.
Ironbridge Gorge, the Shropshire site that the project cites as its model, draws about 600,000 visitors a year and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1986. The foundation has not ruled out seeking the same status for Cyfarthfa.
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