Their house, their castle

For years Cargill's Castle has been a ruin, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s, former Dunedin woman Val Wilson called it home. Janice Murphy goes with her on a trip down memory lane.

• Saving the ruins

• 'All that art and science could accomplish'

It's been 50 years since Val Wilson (nee Neilson) set foot inside Cargill's Castle, but the decades melt away as she reminisces about her time there. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she, her then husband Rupert Winter and his parents, Tom and Gladys Winter, called it home.

Tom and Gladys ran a popular cabaret there on Saturday nights, with entertainment provided by Rupert Winter's Band (later the Manhattan Skyliners).

The castle was also open for afternoon teas, which attracted older patrons, and private functions, notably parties for sailors from the USS Brough.

"That's my wee ticket office; I sold the tickets from there," Val says, pointing to the former conservatory to the right of the front door.

"And I hung the nappies from a clothesline over there," she adds, pointing past the partly demolished ballroom to the left, where her clothesline used to be strung between two trees.

"It was so windy the nappies didn't hang down, they stuck straight out. I carried the wet washing out through the ballroom."

The remains of a shelter belt planted by the Cargill family on the southern side of the ruins grow at an angle that shows the power of the almost constant wind.

"The Castle" wasn't the perfect place to be a young mother, but Rupert and Val's first two children, Earl and Gale, were born while the couple lived there.

"That was my bedroom, the middle one there," she says, pointing to the first-floor window. "And the lounge was below."

Val remembers tripping at the top of the front steps and rolling down them while clutching baby Gale. "She didn't even cry". Luckily nobody was injured.

A cannon sat either side of the steps in those days, she says, but only the concrete plinths remain.