The façade of a brick structure—with a sidewall jutting out to form a kind of corner—and a tree with a serpentine trunk take up the right half of the oval-shaped image. Light shining through the arched portal punctuates the façade and illumines the patch of grass before the entrance. A blind (blocked up) window is built into the wall just above this portal. A grassy area occupies the center foreground. Land stretches into the distance, past a field and a row of trees to a body of water. In the far background a mountain range is silhouetted against a sky vaguely brushed with clouds. This historically artificial ruin does not look like a ruin. Consequently, Raglan Castle serves to reveal some of the compositional practices of the picturesque aesthetic.

Of the damages inflicted on the castle by Oliver Cromwell, William Gilpin writes: “Raglan-castle owes its present picturesque to Cromwell; who laid his iron hands upon it; and shattered it into ruin.” Although Cromwell’s exploits were meant to destroy Raglan, Gilpin is here referring to contemporary practices of artificial ruination. Gilpin himself advocated manually damaging ruins “[t]o give the stone its [desired, picturesque] mouldering [sic] appearance” (Gilpin qtd. in Lowenthal: 157-58). Raglan Castle was artificially modified to look like a ruin, but the structure itself is sound, and gives no signs of ruination. No part of the façade is in any state of decay, and the portal, like the blind window above it, is perfectly formed.

I would refer to Raglan Castle as a “neo-Gothic ruin” because of its parallels with the early nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic movement, otherwise known as the Gothic Revival (“Gothic Revival”). This trend in architectural design began in Britain, derived its inspiration from medieval structures, and usually entailed the embellishment of modern gothic architecture with medieval gothic themes. Similarly, the ruin-like features of Raglan Castle were artificially created or exaggerated in an attempt to make it adhere to the picturesque aesthetic; however, Gilpin has also effaced any sign of decay. As a result, this image presents an unusual contradiction in comparison of other depicted, picturesque ruins.