Standing on the side of a wooded valley with terraced gardens sloping down to the Bristol Channel in the south of the rich, agricultural lands of the Vale of Glamorgan, St. Donat's Castle has a most beautiful position.

'I'he castle has also had a most varied and interesting history. It is built in a place where there was probably an early Iron Age fort, which legend believes was occupied by Caradoc, or Caratacus as the Romans called him, when they captured this brave British chieftain and took him to Rome. Here he is said to have met St. Paul and become a Christian, and it was on his return from Rome that he is thought to have lived in St. Donat's and organised the first preaching of the Christian Gospel in Wales.

The earliest parts of the existing castle were built about 1300 by the Stradling family who lived at St. Donat's for over 400 years. They were a most distinguished family, who besides managing their extensive estates and holding many offices in the service of the county, were widely travelled and well-known for their scholarly and literary tastes. The last male heir died in 1738 and the castle passed into other hands. However a nineteenth century owner, Dr. Nicholl Carne, could trace his ancestry back to a marriage of an ancestor with a daughter of the Stradlings at St. Donat's and there are many Stradlings of collateral descent, some of whom take a continuing interest in the castle.

Architecturally, the castle was little altered in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In 190t it was bought by Mr. Morgan Stuart Williams of Aberpergwm, Nr. Neath, a man of old family and cultivated taste, who made many improvements to the castle without altering its medieval character. In 1925 it was bought by Mr. William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper millionaire, who was also a great collector of medieval things, many of which he incorporated into the fabric of the castle.

In 1962, the Atlantic College, the first international sixth-form school in the world, opened at St. Donat's Castle. The grounds and buildings which are ideal for such a purpose, have been adapted with as little external change as possible to the needs of a boarding school for 16-18 year old boys from all over the world.

The buildings of the castle are a witness to its varied history. They consist basically of a Tudor country house of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, contained within a castle of the early fourteenth century, parts of which have been greatly enlarged to include medieval roofs, fireplaces and many other things from elsewhere. Within this structure a library, laboratories and all other necessities of a modern school have been incorporated.