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More men arrived from Bristol later in the month. The nub of this particular problem was that the men left to work on the harvest, 'but thank god the wether is fine at presant and the harvist will soon be over and all the labourers will return againe to there work as they have promised to do'. On 23 August Hawkins had sixteen masons at work; by 1 October there were thirty. As far as one can gather from Roberts's letters building operations must have begun early in 1776 since the foundations were almost all ready by 29 April. And it would appear that the surveyor fulfilled his ambition of getting the roof on by Christmas. The letters end in March 1777 when Birt was on his way, via Bristol, to Wenvoe. Presumably the house was far from ready for occupation by the family by that date; there is in fact no evidence to tell us when the Birts were able to move in. A remark of the Hon. John Byng's, in his account of a visit to Wenvoe on 3 August 1787, seems to suggest that the interior decoration was not actually completed even ten years later: knowing Mr. T[raherne], and seeing us in his grounds, he [Peter Birt] rode up, and desired us to come in, and survey his new-built house, and all his (sterling) improvements it is a single house, with (of course) an immense front, a gallery from one end to the other towards the cool north, and all the rooms towards the hot south ;-which are to be well gilded &c &C.27 Notwithstanding Byng's supercilious remarks, some description of Wenvoe castle may be of interest since only a small part of the building now remains. It was in some ways a typical country house of the mid-eighteenth century; there was a large symmetrical and basically rectangular block from either side of which stretched low wings each terminating in a rectangular pavilion, a building much smaller than the main part of the house. The entire length was no less than 374 feet. The unusual features were that the architect had surmounted the entire length with battlements (where a neo-classical building would have been balus- traded) and that the main block was provided with semi-hexagonal towers at either corner rising one storey above the general level; there was also a central section rising to a similar height. This was the Castle seen from the Lawn. The entrance front, on the north side, however, was quite contrasting; the projecting wings were invisible behind screens of trees and shrubs, and there were only two main storeys, where on the south side there were three. The dimensions of the Castle thus appeared quite different from north and south. On the left as one approached the main entrance were the stables, which still stand. They were reached from the house by a stone-balustraded double staircase, but from the east the court- yard was entered through a rounded archway beneath a clock tower. The whole of the stable block is purely neo-classical and quite without the Gothic trimmings of the house itself. J. B. Hilling surmises that the courtyard is probably better architecture than the pseudo-Gothic castle, and the present writer sees no reason to disagree with him28. The only near-contemporary writers to have recorded their impressions of Wenvoe Castle were both also more than a little disparaging. The Hon. John Byng mentions the 'air