Beautifully sited in the lovely Gower Peninsula on a headland overlooking Oxwich Bay. A Tudor mansion rather than a true castle, it is a striking testimony in stone to the ambitious of the Mansel family, a dynasty of Welsh gentry which rose to prominence under Henry VIII.

Like many of his Tudor contemporaries, Sir Rice Mansel proclaimed his success by building and converting his ancestral home into an up-to-date mansion between 1520 and 1538. Though it boasted a gateway emblazoned with the family arms, its defences were mainly for show, and the house itself is compartively modest. Not so the work of his son Sir Edward, who added a stupendous multi-storey wing during Queen Elizabeth's reign.

Dwarfing his father's house Sir Edward's towering E-shape extravaganza piled room upon room, surmounting all with a fashionable long gallery. Ironically, his monument to Elizabethan family pride was not long occupied: Sir Edward's block fell into ruin after the Mansels moved elsewhere, leaving the older wing to soldier on as a farmhouse.