A visit to Castle Freke

Two more pages from the family album, early in the last century: the Jones family on a visit to their people at Castle Freke.

The castle earns its drama. It began as a fifteenth-century Barry stronghold called Rathbarry, passed to the Freke family in the sixteen hundreds (they withstood a siege in it in 1642), and grew into the great castellated house of the Evans-Frekes, Barons Carbery. In these photographs it is in its ivy-covered prime, with the family party small against the walls and the round tower.

The years after were less kind: a bad fire, then the last Lord Carbery selling up after the First World War, a spell as a barracks, and the roof coming off in the 1950s. But the story turns again, and well: in 2005 a descendant of the Evans-Freke family bought the ruin back, and restoration has been under way since.

Readers of the family book will know the name already: Freke is one of the four coats on the decorative quartered arms of its cover, the family's own nod to this connection. The full story of those arms, including exactly how much of that quartering is heraldry and how much is affection, is on the Arms page.