Sker House

Sker House stands alone on a limestone promontory above Swansea Bay, about 4.2 km north of Porthcawl. Cadw lists it Grade I as one of the major Elizabethan houses of South Wales: a Cistercian grange that Margam Abbey passed to Neath Abbey between 1173 and 1178, rebuilt as a mansion by the recusant Turbervilles after 1561, and raided in December 1678, when the Jesuit Philip Evans was arrested here. The ghost it is given is Elizabeth "Betsy" Williams, the Maid of Sker, a tenant farmer's daughter kept from the harpist Thomas Evans of Newton Nottage and married off to Thomas Kirkhouse. The registers give a plainer life: married in 1766, four children baptised, buried at Llansamlet on 6 January 1776. And R. D. Blackmore's novel The Maid of Sker (1872), always cited as the fictionalised version of her story, borrows only the title — its heroine is a child washed ashore from a wreck. Declared unsafe in 1977 and left part-collapsed, the house was rescued for about 1.2 million pounds between 1999 and 2003 and is today a private family home with no public access.

The land came before the house. A Cistercian grange at Sker — Blakescarre in the medieval documents — belonged to Margam Abbey and passed to Neath Abbey in an exchange that Cadw's listing places between 1173 and 1178. That exchange is the firmest date in the whole file, and it is worth holding on to, because the two heritage records do not agree about what came before it. Cadw says the grange was granted to Margam "by Earl William in the early C12"; the Royal Commission says only that it "originally belonged to Margam Abbey, but passed to Neath Abbey in the twelfth century"; and the Rev. H. Hey Knight, reading the Neath charters in 1853, understood that Robert the Consul had given "the first portion of Sker" to Neath in the first place, with Earl William adding to it later. The popular formula "more than 900 years" rests on the loosest end of that record. In 1291 the grange was assessed at four carucates and twenty acres of arable, and the Royal Commission notes that its buildings stood around a walled court west of the present house, with medieval fabric surviving in the south gable of the barn range, Ty'r-ychen. By the later fifteenth century the monks were letting Sker out: the Abbot of Neath leased it to Richard Loughan in 1467. When John Leland came through in about 1540 he found a layman in charge, and Knight quotes his words: "There is a Manor place, cawled Skir, a two miles from the shore, where dwelleth one Richard Lougher, a gentleman." After the Dissolution the estate was bought by Richard Williams in 1543 and almost at once re-purchased by Christopher Turberville of Pen-llin, sheriff of Glamorgan in 1550 and 1569. The house standing today was begun after Jenkin Turberville came into the property in 1561: a first-floor great hall open to the roof and lit by mullioned and transomed windows, gabled three-storey wings on the east front, a stair tower behind, all wrapped around the medieval range. The Turbervilles were, in Cadw's word, recusants, and the isolation that now makes Sker feel haunted made it useful. On 2 December 1678, in the panic that followed Titus Oates's disclosures, the Jesuit Philip Evans was arrested at Sker, the house of Christopher Turberville, after John Arnold offered fifty pounds for his capture; the informer was Edward Turberville. Evans was tried in the Shire Hall at Cardiff on 8 and 9 May 1679 and hanged, drawn and quartered on 22 July, aged thirty-four. He was beatified in 1929 and later canonised among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. One detail from his Dictionary of Welsh Biography entry belongs in a file about Sker: after sentence, "he returned to the prison and sang to his own accompaniment on the harp, as a contemporary broadside shows." The only harp player documented at Sker House plays it in a condemned cell, a century before the legendary one. The family sold up soon after — Cadw dates the sale to Charles Price of Badminton to 1685-87, the Kenfig Society to 1697 — and Sker became a tenanted farm, held by the Margam Estate until 1941. It is from the tenants that the ghost comes. Isaac Williams farmed Sker in the mid-eighteenth century, and his daughter Elizabeth, called Betsy, is the Maid of Sker of the Welsh ballad Y Ferch o'r Sger. In the story she meets Thomas Evans of Newton Nottage — a carpenter who played the harp — at the mabsant held in the guildhall at Kenfig; her father forbids the match, the household dogs betray the elopement, and she is shut in her room and married to Thomas Kirkhouse of Neath. The registers, as reported by the local historians who have worked through them, give a flatter version: married at Llangyfelach on 9 September 1766, children baptised in 1768, 1769, 1771 and 1773, buried at Llansamlet on 6 January 1776. There is a second Maid of Sker, told far less often and much happier: Martha, daughter of Morgan Howells, who farmed Sker from about 1772, eloped with a labourer named William David and married him at St James's, Bath, in 1793. The house did not survive its own fame. Abandoned, declared unsafe in 1977 and left ruinous when the southern gable end fell, it was compulsorily purchased by Bridgend County Borough Council and passed straight on, in a back-to-back agreement, to the Buildings at Risk Trust for one pound in 1997. Repairs ran from 1 March 1999 to autumn 2003 and cost about 1.2 million pounds, including 413,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and 250,000 from the Historic Buildings Advisory Council for Wales. The architects, Davies Sutton, deliberately left the collapsed west wing unreconstructed as a record of what had happened and threaded a new external gallery through it; they recovered the decorated plaster frieze and the timber screen of the first-floor hall, and took RIBA awards for both design and conservation in 2004. In November 2004 The Herald reported that the restored house had sold at offers over 900,000 pounds to the historian Niall Ferguson, who moved in with his family.

Sker House is a private family home and there is no public access. Cadw locates it on a limestone promontory jutting west into Swansea Bay, about 4.2 km north of Porthcawl, reached by a long farm road running west from the minor road between Porthcawl and Kenfig; the grid reference is SS 7952 9838, which is 51.5046 N, 3.7371 W. It is a working farmstead as well as a house, and that farm road is not a right of way to the door. One loose end is worth knowing before anyone tries. Writing while the restoration was still under way, the Kenfig Society said the house would be sold "on the condition that it is opened to the public on a specified number of days in the year". The Building Conservation Directory's case study, updated in 2003, says only "It is now a private house", and no open-days scheme was advertised anywhere I could find in 2026. Treat the condition as unconfirmed and do not turn up expecting to be let in. What is open is everything around it. Sker Beach and Sker Point lie below the house and are reached on foot along the shore from Porthcawl or from the Kenfig side; the Wales Coast Path runs along this stretch, and the house is visible across the fields from it, which is where almost every photograph of it is taken. Inland is Kenfig National Nature Reserve, a large dune system with Kenfig Pool at its centre, and its reserve centre is where the Kenfig Society's booklet on the house has been sold. The Samtampa and lifeboat dead are commemorated in Porthcawl. Come in winter if you want the view the legend describes: the house is at its most exposed, and the fields between it and the sea flood.