No garden update this week — the plot’s still going strong, but we took a Sunday off and went for a drive through the South Wales countryside instead. Misty lanes, a field of horses, and two beautiful medieval castles. Here’s the full journey:
The road opens up
Half the joy of a Welsh Sunday drive is the lanes themselves — narrow, hedge-lined, hush-quiet, the branches almost brushing the van. And then, without warning, the hedges drop away and the whole valley opens up in front of you. We stopped to say hello to a field of horses (there was a foal), picked a moment to just take it in, and carried on to the real destination: two of the medieval castles that guard this stretch of the border.
The Three Castles: Grosmont & Skenfrith
Grosmont and Skenfrith — together with White Castle — are known as the “Three Castles”. The Normans raised them after 1066 to control this troublesome corner of the Welsh Marches, and by 1135 they were run together as a single lordship. From 1201 they were held by Hubert de Burgh, who rebuilt them in stone.
Grosmont was the site of a battle in 1405, during Owain Glyndŵr’s revolt — a 17-year-old Prince Hal, the future Henry V, reported the victory here in a letter to his father. It’s also where we found a magnificent gnarled old tree you can stand right inside — a veteran English oak. Oaks hollow out with age as the heartwood decays while the tree keeps living, which is exactly why the old ones become walk-in giants. This one has very likely stood beside the castle far longer than a lot of the surviving stonework.
Skenfrith sits right on the banks of the River Monnow, guarding one of the main routes between Wales and England. Its distinctive round keep was built in the 1200s, and the castle is now cared for by the National Trust. Walking its wet grounds in the drizzle, you really do feel the 800 years.
The short version
If you’ve only got a minute, here’s the quick trip:
How we made it
As always, this is real footage narrated in Peter’s real voice. The edit was assembled with Claude Code; the captions and the “did you know?” cards were rendered with Pillow; the music is from the YouTube Audio Library; the clips were reviewed with AI to build the shot list; and it was all stitched together with ffmpeg. Part of our ongoing “fuel your curiosity” experiments in AI-assisted filmmaking — the tools change, the journey is always real.
More from us: late-summer garden jobs and a whole week’s harvest, plot to plate.