Sceneframing Da Vinci’s Demons at Castell Coch

Castell Coch is a beautiful 19th-century Gothic Revival castle high above the village of Tongwynlais north of Cardiff. As fans of, well, basically every show that ever used this as a filming location we decided to go for a little visit! This time we concentrated on framing a scene from the Starz original series, Da Vinci’s Demons. 

If you decide to visit this magnificent castle and do like we did and drive up there from Cardiff, you can view the castle sitting on the mountainside when you approach the exit for it. It’s what we’d call a princess castle, looking more like something we doodled as kids than something that was built to defend and protect. However, that was exactly the purpose and use of it, as a quick glance to the castle’s Wiki page reveals.

Castell Coch has a lot of stairs to climb, but at the end of stairways and tunnels you’ll find some very beautiful rooms, hallways and nooks to explore. Don’t forget to have a little peek through the windows! Amazing views alert!

There’s a small entrance fee and they do close the gates in the evening, so check their website before visiting. The road up there is pretty steep, you can ride your car right up the hill and park quite near to the castle. That’ll save you some of the climbing.

However, if you hike uphill a little more and visit Fforest Fawr, you might find Three Bears Cave which is another popular filming location for the BBC folks. It set the scene for the ghastly encounter with the Hound of Baskerville in the second season of Sherlock and featured in an episode of Torchwood. Apparently this cave was also where they released the wilddeoren in Merlin.

Funnily enough, Peter Capaldi‘s Doctor hung out with Tom Riley‘s Robin Hood up there as well, so these hoods and woods seem to be very familiar for mister Tom Riley!

(Oh, and we strongly recommend following Tom Riley, Eros Vlahos, Laura Haddock and Elliot Cowan on Twitter. Very funny folks!)

Useful links:

• Castell Coch’s website
• Village Tongwynlai’s blog
• Da Vinci’s Demons official website
• Da Vinci’s Demons on IMDb
• A list of Da Vinci’s Demons cast members on Twitter
• Da Vinci’s Demons writers on Twitter
• Fforest Fawr info site
• Three Bears Cave on CavingUk

These sceneframes are from the amazing episode called “The Devil” (season 1, episode 6).