Country: United Kingdom
Key Area: Buildings
Services: Heritage,Structural Engineering

Opus are planning supervisors and lead consultants for heritage and conservation work at Castell Coch on the outskirts of Cardiff.

The castle is a Victorian Gothic fantasy built for the Third Marquis of Bute. His architect, William Burges, transformed the site of a ruined medieval castle into a family summer residence based upon a classic Romantic theme. Conservation work undertaken includes work to the roof and stonework of the castle’s Keep Tower and Lord Bute’s bedroom. This will prevent further damage caused to the monument’s ornate interior as a result of rainwater ingress.

This work required a complex scaffold system taking no support from the ground.  The scaffold design incorporated gallows frames at high level, forming a collar around the tower from which the scaffold was erected.  The gallows frames were fixed using a single bolt into the original putlog holes and were installed in advance of the main scaffolding using abseil techniques.

We have refurbished the castle’s portcullis and drawbridge mechanisms, as well as the Well Tower and roof level wall walks. Other work has involved the design for new underground water storage cisterns and improvements to the castle’s access road.

We have improved visitor facilities, including the creation of a car park with a hundred-car capacity whilst remaining environmentally sensitive to the woodland setting. In addition we have designed a new access footbridge. 

An interesting feature was the design of a new visitor centre based upon the castle’s original architect William Burges' sketches for woodland summer houses from the 1800s. 

We carried out assessments to the existing masonry walls of the towers using on-invasive geophysical techniques and undertook structural investigations within the Lady Bute bedroom. 

We have also refurbished the castellation shutters and made improvements to conserve the general external decoration of the castle.