Roch Castle - History

Roch Castle was first constructed in 1195 on what is known as the “Landsker Line”. This imagined line crosses east to west through southern Wales, and represents the historical division between English and Welsh-speaking Wales. At the time of its construction, Roch Castle served as one of a group of border strongholds that fortified Anglicised Wales from the independent Welsh to the North.

The first known inhabitant of the castle was a Norman knight by the name of Adam de Rupe. A legend recounts that Adam de Rupe erected his abode on a rock as a result of a prophecy that he would die from the bite of a viper. His precaution was in vain, as he met his fate when a viper, carried into the castle in a bundle of firewood, bit and killed him.

Many years after the “de la Roch” family died out, Roch Castle exchanged owners on numerous occasions until it became the home of the Walter family of Rosemarket in 1601. The Walter family was an important family of Pembrokeshire. About 1630, William and Elizabeth Walter gave birth to a daughter, Lucy, who became a mistress of King Charles II bearing his child, the Duke of Monmouth.

During the English Civil War, King Charles garrisoned many of the castles in South Wales and supplied a garrison for Roche Castle under the command of Captain Francis Edwards of Summerhill. On 17 February 1644, the castle was attacked by Cromwell's troops under the command of Colonel Roland Laugharne. After a fierce siege, the castle was surrendered on 25 February, having been badly damaged by cannon and by fire.

For the next two hundred years, the castle was evidently unoccupied and slowly fell into ruin, the roofs and interior crumbling away but the walls remaining intact. In 1900, the then owner of Roche Castle, the first Viscount St David's, needing a country seat in the northern part of Pembrokeshire, embarked on the rebuilding of the castle in earnest, and, in 1902, he had completed a remarkable restoration from a very real ruin. In addition, he added a wing on the north in the same style and he and his family occupied the castle for many years. One of his frequent house guests was David Lloyd George, Great Britain's Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.