Margam Castle

The Margam estate was occupied in the Iron Age, and the remains of a hill fort from that period, Mynydd-y-Castell, stands north of the castle. After the Norman invasion of Wales, Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, and Lord of Glamorgan, granted the lands at Margam to Clairvaux Abbey, for the establishment of a new Cistercian monastery which became Margam Abbey. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536, the Margam estate was bought by Sir Rice (Rhys) Mansel. His descendants built a substantial Tudor mansion in the park.

Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot succeeded his father in 1813 at the age of ten. Enriched by the development of Port Talbot in the early 19th century, and after making a Grand Tour of Europe as a young man, Talbot returned to South Wales and from 1830 re-established Margam as his main seat. A new house, Margam Castle was designed by the architect Thomas Hopper (1776–1856), with Edward Haycock Snr (1790–1870) as supervisory architect, and designer of parts of the interior and exterior of the house, the stables, terraces and lodges.

Talbot also took a keen interest in the project, encouraging his architects to borrow elements from Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire (ancestral home of the Talbots and home to his cousin William Henry Fox Talbot) and Melbury House in Dorset (home of his mother's family, the Fox-Strangways, Earls of Ilchester). William Henry Fox Talbot was a frequent visitor to Margam, and the castle featured as an image in some of his early photographic experiments.