The house was originally the home of the Mathews family,[1] reputedly built by a Robert Mathews in the 15th century.[2] At the time of construction, it was among the largest late-medieval houses in Glamorgan.[3] A later owner was Thomas Mathew, High Sheriff of Glamorgan in 1614. Known as the "bullying squire",[2] tradition suggests that his death was brought about by a disgruntled tenant who inserted an awl into the cushion of Mathews' favourite chair at Castell-y-mynach, causing his demise.[4] The Mathews family line ended in 1720[2] and the house passed into the possession of the Lords Dynevor.[5] By the mid-19th century, when the site was visited and described by Samuel Lewis in his A Topographical Dictionary of Wales, it had descended to the status of a farmhouse.[6] The name of Castell-y-mynach, suggesting a fortified monastic grange, has been challenged in the 20th century, and it is thought more probable that the name reflected a late-medieval wish to attribute antiquity to the site.[7] The house is now entirely surrounded by a 20th-century housing estate.[8]
Architecture and description
The house is built of rubble stone, which was originally lime washed.[2] The present building consists of two long, two-storey, ranges to an L-plan. John Newman, in his 1995 Glamorgan volume in the Buildings of Wales series, suggests that these form the two remaining sections of an original courtyard house.[3] The quality of the stonemasonry is high.[3] The interior contains some notable wall paintings,[8][a] which Peter Smith, in his study, Houses of the Welsh Countryside, records as "unusually well-preserved".[9] The staircase wall is decorated with red and black lozenge patterns and grotesques with a date of 1602, while the upper hall has a "still more impressive fragment" depicting two male nudes bearing a cartoon of ships in a storm.[3] Newman considers the murals as "worthy of court art of the period".[3]
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