A magical tale of following your dreams - Rated 
CASTLES IN THE AIR was sitting on my bookshelf for a while before I got around to reading it - usually I am a faction girl, so this piece of non-fiction was a slight detour from my usual escapism. However, once started, I was hooked. Admittedly, the picture on the cover first drew me in, with its romance and fairytale quality - what I found when I began the book was that the picture on the cover had done the story justice.
CASTLES IN THE AIR tells the story of Corbett and her then future husband's purchase and then restoration of a sixteenth-century mansion, Gwydir Castle in North Wales. Although it was virtually derelict when they first saw it and fell in love with it, years of patience and the foresight to see the potential meant that they were able to bring this gorgeous building back to life.
But, to say that CASTLES IN THE AIR is simply the restoration story of a young couple hooked on accomplishing their dream is to simplify the book and to take away a lot of its credits. Corbett is able to put her passion and love for the building to paper, and this love seeps off the pages. She perfectly manages to 'draw' a picture for the reader, showing the beauty of the house. For me, her telling of their story had bags of romanbce - the way she described the scenery and their way of life, despite at times living in something which was akin to squalor. Corbett has taken just the right amount of history, fact, humour, personal reflection and memoir to create a book which is not about bringing a building back to life, but rather about creating a future and a life with her partner.
For me, a person who loves castles and the landscape of Wales, the only way this book could have been even better would have been for me to be sitting in Gwydir's grounds whilst reading.
Charming - Rated
An utterly charming and refreshing book. I took it to bed to read a couple of chapters and continued reading until the end in the early hours of the morning. Must now visit the castle.
A magical story - Rated
I visited Gwydir Castle with my husband this past October and fell in love with the place. I picked up the book out of curiosity, and once I started reading it, couldn't put it down. It's beautifully written and has left me in awe of what Peter and Judy accomplished.
I absolutely recommend the book and a visit to the Castle itself.
Castles in the Air - Rated
Absolutely fabulous. Makes you fall as much in love with the place as the author is! I can't wait until my next visit to Wales. I will definitely be staying at Gwydir Castle for bed and breakfast!
A charming tale of a labor of love and persistence - Rated
In northern Wales, 11 miles south of Conwy and 4 miles north of Betws-y-coed, across the bridge from the village of Llanrwst, on the floodplain between the River Conwy and the B5106 road, lies Gwydir Castle, the ancestral home of the Wynn family. Largely of 16th century construction, it's actually what remains of a more extensive Tudor courtyard manor house, and is the finest example of such in Wales.
Peter Welford and Judy Corbett, an architectural historian and a bookbinder respectively, pooled their meager life savings and a substantial bank loan to buy the place in the early 1990s. CASTLES IN THE AIR by Corbett is the utterly charming story of the pair's labors to restore Gwydir from its abysmally ruinous condition at purchase to something resembling its former glory.
The book offers a little something for everyone. There are the restoration adventures, of course, and also romance; Peter and Judy subsequently marry in an ancient chapel on a nearby hilltop. There's a fairly convincing supernatural ingredient that involves Peter being the unfortunate focus of animosity coming from the ghost of Lady Margaret Cave, a 17th century mistress of the manor, which resulted in his being struck on the head with a spade. There's hidden treasure, in this case the original carved wooden paneling stripped in totality from the dining room and auctioned off as a single lot in 1921 to (as it turned out) the American millionaire William Randolph Hearst, and later bequeathed to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which still had it stored in the original packing crates in a warehouse on the rough side of town. Throughout the narrative runs Judy's dry English wit, such as when she describes the visit by an impeccably dressed representative ("Please, just call me Bill") of The Met, who was so impressed by his first view of the castle that:
"... he didn't look where he was going and stepped into the biggest pile of peacock guano you have ever seen. Peter silently directed him to a patch of rough grass where he endeavoured to remove the vile-smelling substance from the stitching of his fine Italian shoes."
Above all, CASTLES IN THE AIR is the story of the pair's love affair with and dedication to something old, historic, and worth saving in the face of seemingly impossible odds. And it would seem they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; the recovery and reinstallation of the Dining Room paneling brought a visit by the Prince of Wales himself, though his shoes did stick to the floor varnished only hours before his arrival.
Judy describes herself and Peter as socially reticent almost to the point of misanthropy. Therefore, the fact that they accept paying B&B guests as well as hire out the ground floor halls out for weddings - see the official Gwydir Castle website - is indication of the financial strain imposed by the ongoing refurbishment of the manor house that continues to this day and into the foreseeable future. The Welford's affection for the ancient pile is evident in Judy's words:
"... to walk in the moon-washed shadows of the yew trees and to see the ancient profile of the house silhouetted against a cloudless sky was to feel oneself suspended out of time, as though in that moment we were living in parenthesis. Sometimes, if the night was cold enough, the trails of yesterday's peacock tails would be cast in frost across the patches of lawn we had managed to scythe the day before ... We would walk down to the bottom of the garden and sit on the massive slate bench ... with the sounds of the night rustling and chirruping around us."
How incredibly rewarding the lives of these two must be!
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