Local matters: ‘Castle of the Marshes’

They once called it the ‘Castle of the Marshes’.

On top of that, it once provided a welcome garden retreat for our late 18th-century Lt-Governor William Brown.

And even more remarkably, in its earliest years, the seas propelled from the Little Russel filled its outer moat.

We are talking Chateau des Marais, aka the Ivy Castle, which arguably claims the prize as Guernsey’s most hidden and unexplored public treasure, tucked away as it is between two sets of social housing.

Out of sight, out of mind, you could say.

At more than 800 years old, sure the old chateau has seen better days, but this is no abandoned, crumbling relic.

Far from it.

A recent visit found this ancient gift from Duke Robert of Normandy in surprisingly fine fettle, both its inner sanctum and grassy surround with picnic benches outside the water-filled moat, well maintained and attractively tidy.

Yet, it remains hard to imagine Guernsey’s 52nd Lt-Governor – the green-fingered Lt-Col Brown – wanting to spend large parts of his summers digging his spuds down this way. Surely Lt-Governors have servants to do that.

That we know he did is due to the detailed diaries of the recently published journals of one Charles Mollet, a well-to-do Castel landowner who lived between 1742 and 1819.

Mollet and Lt-Governor Brown were good pals and spent many an hour together at the chateau during the latter’s nine-year tenure as the island’s royal representative, 1784 to 1793.

Mollet knew Lt-Col Brown from their days together in the military and the former regularly records their meetings at the Chateau des Marais, ‘a dilapidated medieval fort on the east coast’, as Mollet described it.

The journal notes Brown had ‘a garden laid out’ there and went this way to relax.

It was off the beaten track then and despite the proximity of the Bouet estate and Guernsey Housing Association’s Victoria Avenue Clos Spurway, remains that more than two centuries later.

In the 21st century it is an incongruous setting for a fort. Standing atop its inner walls, peering through the trees, you realise that you are merely a couple of hundred yards from the brand new Victoria Park football stadium and, likewise, the old Track ground immediately to the west.

When originally built on its hougue though, Chateau des Marais could breathe in its wild surroundings.

There would not have been a building within a long kick of its outer walls and the sea only had to break through the eastern seaboard between Tower Lane and what we know as the Halfway, which it supposedly often did, for the outer moat to receive a salty top-up.

These days that moat is totally dry, in contrast to its inner counterpart that back in the 1980s received a thorough clean with the aid of a JCB.

It used to be assumed that the powder magazine within the castle walls was the ancient chapel of St Mary of the Marsh.

In truth, the chapel stood to the west of the chateau.

Tupper, the famous local Victorian historian, recorded that in 1852 ‘the rocky mound in the centre of the inner bailey was shamefully quarried away to a considerable depth for the purpose of furnishing metal for roads and one of the jambs of the principal gateway removed to allow carts passing through’.

Another highly respected historian, the Guernsey Press’s very own Victor Coysh, penned his own celebration of the chateau after some much-needed initial remedial work in 1972.

These words of his have largely stood the test of time: ‘Le Chateau des Marais is a beautiful place: quiet, wooded, the haunt of birds and beasts, the home of flowers, an oasis in a rather arid corner of the island. It should become something more, for it is a piece of Guernsey history which, up to now, has been sadly neglected.’

Half a century on, other than a small area of crumbling outer wall, the site is shaping up well and you can see why music fair organisers would want to stage a summertime gig or two.

The protected mound is a springtime picture and even that ugly German bunker with recently added graffiti is hidden from view as you enter through the main gateway still affected by that pestered ivy.

If you don’t know it, summer is the perfect time to explore and perhaps even take a picnic.

How did it come about?

A thousand years ago monks of Mont St Michel were thought to be banished north from Normandy to land in Guernsey.

Here they soon made themselves at home and formed a community of their own on the north coast calling it St Michel after the great abbey they had left.

One very stormy day early in the year 1000, those on the lookout saw a fleet of Duke Robert of Normandy’s ships driven past the island’s treacherous Brayes reef and land on the large sandy bay opposite the monastery of St Michel.

Desperate, they cast anchor, which led to the naming of L’Ancresse – meaning the anchorage.

It’s said the St Michel monks gladly offered shelter and hospitality to Duke Robert and his men and, in return for the kindness and goodwill, the all-powerful Frenchman built in 1036 two castles for the protection of the island.

One was at Jerbourg – no longer visible – the other, Ivy Castle, on the marshy land off the east coast. Our very own Chateau des Marais.

Being on a mound commanding the long, low shore and near enough for the outer moat to be flooded by the highest of tides, this site of Chateau des Marais was thoughtfully chosen.

Courtesy of a 1907 Guernsey Press feature, we now know that the area between the inner and outer walls then contained two small cottages, one for the official keeper of the rundown castle.

This government appointee talked of dungeons underneath the ‘inner eminence’, but even then nobody could track them down.

By the end of the 19th century butcher Joe Gargett and his wife Sarah farmed the castle and lived in an old stone house there.

As recently as the 1920s, the Staples family lived in one of the Ivy Castle’s long-gone cottages.

Brian Staples, one of modern Guernsey’s great latter day characters, had a brother (George) and sister (Annie), born there.

That close family link led to Brian spending much of his youth around the Ivy Castle where his grandparents lived in a timber-built cottage with corrugated iron walls, a painting of which proudly hangs from a wall at his home.

He tells a charming story of George returning from extended military service in the early 1950s and, being unable to find somewhere to live, identified a spot just inside the main gates to build a house with wood cut from the slopes of the moat.

Before he could complete it the States got wind of his intentions and found him a house in double-quick time.

George and Brian Staples even grew potatoes in the ground slopes rising out of the moat, while Brian recalls his youth skating in the fields just outside the main walls during a period of heavy snow.

Chateau oddities...

In 1870 and through an unusually cold spell, the low flanks of the Ivy Castle proved perfect for ice skating.

The Star newspaper reported that ‘the low grounds near Ivy Castle afford an excellent field for this exercise, as from the shallowness of the water-skaters there run no risk of drowning’.

The report continued: ‘The place is now resorted to by a considerable number of persons, some being masters of the art’.

A few years later and long before they purchased the College Field off King’s Road, Elizabeth College would take flight to the Ivy Castle for their annual school steeplechase races.

The nature, length and direction of the steeplechase course is not recorded, but given the moat, its accessibility and the marshy surrounding areas the Ivy Castle proved to be a course to test youthful endurance.