Cyfarthfa Castle

Situated within 160 acres of parkland, Cyfarthfa Castle is widely regarded as the best-preserved and grandest Ironmaster’s house in Wales. The building, which is Grade 1 listed, is of national, historical, and architectural significance and was built in 1825 for the Ironmaster, William Crawshay II. Its museum and art gallery – first opened in 1910 – continues to this day and has often been described as a ‘hidden gem’ due to its spectacular art and eclectic social history collections.

Visitors to the museum and art gallery can learn about Merthyr Tydfil’s rich heritage from the Roman conquest to the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

Across Cyfarthfa Castle you will find an assortment of hardware, software and video content suppplied by blackbox-av, each one dedicated to a portion of Cyfarthfa’s history, including mining and industrialisation in the area, as well as focusing on the history of the castle itself, such as the reason for its construction, who lived there and the army of servants who accompanied them.

A number of video screens ranging from 22″ to 32″ in size present different archival content, such as the one pictured above, which when triggered via a push button shares a fascinating history of the Hoover factory that once brought 5000 jobs to the area.

Or this 32″ MediaScreen introduces visitors to the wine seller which once held over 15,000 bottles…

Various touchscreens using our off-the-shelf museum software Liightbox 3 offer a fascinating insight to the history of the area and those who once called it home. This includes one 32″ touchscreen that shares a timeline of the Ironworks.

While another 22″ and 32″ touchscreen share the history of mining in the area alongside our full selection of Games – including Memory, Match and Puzzle, which are simple and easy-to-access for all ages.

A combination of the Lightbox 3 Hotspot and Collection applications are put to great use throughout the museum and art galleries, bringing the subject matter to life – one topic of particular interest is that of the servants who once worked here.

One of the biggest additions is our Touchscreen Table – a sizeable interactive screen located in the centre of the last art gallery on the tour, this presents puzzles and quizzes to visitors with a selection of easy to very difficult options – each with educational outcomes upon their successful completion.

While in the basement you’ll find a huge 86″ screen with accompanying 22″ touchscreen that creates the impressive ‘cinema room’.

Here visitors can sit and watch a series of videos that are selected, paused and scrolled through via the linked touchscreen on the podium in front.

We were commissioned to not only supply and install all of the hardware / software and cabinetry required for this extensive project but also to produce all of the content associated with each video and touchscreen.

Working closely with the wonderful client team at Cyfarthfa Castle we took the media and copy supplied by them (and produced some additional content as required) and built this into the Lightbox 3 platform to create the finished interactives. The result is an impressive range of interactive equipment that helps educate and engage visitors at this fascinating heritage site.