Usk Castle

On an impromptu trip to Wales, I came across a castle that felt like it had stepped out of the imagination of Dodie Smith. 'How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light!' wrote Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, a novel in which she chronicles the life of her family amid the crumbling ruins of their castle. It's a mouldy, mouldering place, its vestigial grandeur just intact enough to allow the place to be romanticised. 'I was too young to know much of history and the past,' noted Cassandra, 'for me, the castle was one in a fairy-tale.'

Entering Usk Castle, which sits just up a path with a gateway crowned by lions, past a still-inhabited house with a fine topiary duck in the garden, it was as if I, too, had wandered into a storybook. Around the lush green carpet of lawn rose the grey stone walls, covered in ivy so that they seemed almost to merge into the hills beyond. The place had a charm of its own: a topiary cross to mark the chapel, chickens running free, and a tree with a branch that had grown downwards, bent and twisted, forming a perfect seat. In the derelict banqueting hall, a fireplace was beached halfway up the wall, above the line of the floor, which had long since fallen away, like the disappearing sea.

And in another corner, reached by walking along the top of a wall with rather rickety fencing, stood the round tower, its stone green with moss, its walls roofless and open to the sky and trees. Just the kind of place that Cassandra might have locked up her creatively-blocked father, in order to force him to write his next novel.