The Tower, Tan-y-Coed, Old Colwyn, Clwyd

This little sham castle, once on an open hillside but now surrounded by trees, was erected in the grounds of a house called Tan-y-Coed (Foot of the Woods) in Old Colwyn. It was the home of Charles Frederick Woodall, a retired woollen draper from Manchester, who settled on the North Wales coast in the 1880s for the benefit of his health. He created pretty gardens around his house, with the sham castle the most prominent feature. The tower is a prime example of a folly where the tales told about it don’t bear close scrutiny…

One will read that it was home to ‘Sir Charles Woodall’, a Manchester ‘shipping tycoon’. But in reality Woodall (1841-1901) was never given a peerage, and he described himself as a ‘Retired Woollen Merchant’ on the census returns. It is also said that Woodall built the tower because he enjoyed pipe-smoking. Apparently, his wife would not allow him to smoke in the house, so as the story goes he had to retreat to the tower to enjoy a smoke ‘in peace’. This is particularly curious as Woodall was a bachelor. Local histories record that Woodall was often seen walking up to the tower in his velvet smoking jacket and cap – but if he did it was not at the behest of a nagging spouse. Less dramatically, it was presumably built as a belvedere with views out to sea and as a decorative object in Woodall’s gardens.

What is known is that Woodall was in a position to spend money on creating his retirement seat in the ‘beautiful and sheltered dingle’. In 1893 he added a pretty coach house, which survives today, and by 1890 he had employed the respected Richardsons of Darlington to build glasshouses. The tower must also have been built in the 1880s, as it is shown on the 6″ Ordnance Survey map revised in 1888 and published in 1900.

Woodall died in February 1901 and, after a memorial service at St Catherine’s, Old Colwyn, was buried in a family plot in Manchester Southern Cemetery (the new church of St John’s in Old Colwyn, for which Woodall was the largest subscriber to the building fund, was just across the road from Tan-y-Coed but at the time of his death it was incomplete).

In the 1920s the Tan-y-Coed property was bought by the local authority for the ‘purposes of road improvement and provision of public gardens’. The tower became a shelter enjoyed by local residents, and ice-creams were sold from an adjacent kiosk. Woodall’s house was later demolished.

From the earliest days of the park there were problems with vandalism: the windows were broken and had to be fitted with iron bars and in 1947 the tower was boarded-up after hooligans lit fires on the oak floors.

In the early 1990s a campaign was launched to save the tower after Colwyn Bay Borough Council announced plans to demolish it. CADW (the Welsh Government’s historic environment service) listed the tower at Grade II as ‘an ornamental structure of considerable local importance as an eye-catcher in Tan-y-Coed gardens’ and funding was found (with the usual ups and downs) to restore the building under the auspices of the Clwyd Historic Buildings Preservation Trust. The money was to be recouped when the tower was sold as a ‘delightful studio apartment’ after the renovation.

The folly remains a private home and, although it is now largely hidden by foliage, the round tower is easy to spot in the public park. The view to the sea that it must once have enjoyed is now blocked by development, including the four lanes of the North Wales Expressway, but this is what Woodall might have seen (minus the distant offshore wind farm).

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