Castles to Coast - 28th June

Today we are heading for Tenby.
But first there is a castle at Pembroke. It sounds good.
The castle was built in 1093. Most of Britain's castles were built between 1067 and 1300, this is because they didn't know how to build castles until the Normans invaded in 1066 (William the Conqueror at Hastings)
The castle suffered many assaults and was only ever taken once, that was by Oliver Cromwell in 1648 and that was because the castle surrendered after a seven week siege. 
He then ordered the castle to be demolished and encouraged locals to reuse it's stones.
Cromwell became locally known as 'Oliver Crumble' for this.
It lay in ruins after that until 1880 when a restoration program was started and again in1928. It is the largest castle in Wales to be privately owned.
Under the castle is a cave, there is direct access to it from the castle. The cave has been used since prehistoric times as a store and shelter. Excavations of the cave have yielded Mammoth and Sabre Tooth Tiger bones, a large cache of Roman coins and many other old relics. 
King Henry VII was born here, only son to Margaret Beaufort when she was only 13, she was married at the age of 3 but this was not recognised as she was under 12. She was up to husband number 3 at the age of 17.
Back to the castle.

It was designed with a double entry door, the second one being at right angles to the first one. When the castle was attacked and a battering ram was used to access the first door there was not enough space to turn the ram around, so the invaders found themselves in a confined space called 'the killing floor' where many loopholes (arrow slits) were in three walls surrounding them. A good archer could shoot well aimed arrows every four seconds. 
If they were lucky enough to survive that there were the 'murder holes' above the portcullis, the first one poured molten rock on them. The second one poured red hot sand that would get through their chain mail vests and burn them from the inside and the third one would have Urine that had been boiled down to make nitric acid.
No-one ever made it through. 

 So we headed off to Tenby because there's a great photo that needs to be taken from the docks.
Except on the way we saw a sign post for a castle.
Carew castle which is still owned by Carews.
This castle has a similar history to others in the area.
In the mid 1600's Sir Roland Rhys added an extension of 10 rooms on 2 levels at great expense, instead of sending his cash to support the war effort. He made his bedroom with a lovely window overlooking the town, however he got annoyed at the sight of the peasants going off to work in the morning. He had them all evicted from their homes and then had the entire town demolished. A new town was built on the other side of the castle so that he wouldn't have to watch them.
He was supposedly killed by his pet Ape.
Visitors have reported seeing the ghost of the ape in the castle.

 

While we are in Carew there is a Tidal Mill.
Very clever, it is built on an estuary with a dam wall and a lock, when the tide comes in the lock is closed and retains water to run the mill when the tide goes out.
It was built in 1801 but there had been a mill here for over 400 hundred years.





On to Tenby
We arrived a bit late in the day so the light wasn't quite right for Steven's photo.

 
We had a look around and took some more photos.
Tenby is gorgeous, it has retained it's old character. Narrow winding streets and beautiful old buildings. We walked until our legs ached.
Tenby has much of it's 13th century Medieval town wall still standing, we walked around that too.  
We decided to get up early tomorrow morning and come back to see if the light had improved.

We found a caravan park near a pub where we could have tea and, of course, an ale or two.