The Celtic Manor Resort began with a wedding present. In 1860 the coal owner Thomas Powell, founder of the Powell Duffryn coal company, built a stone house at Coldra, on the eastern edge of Newport, and gave it to his son Thomas and his bride. More than a century later the same house was bought by a man who had been born in it, in the years when it served as a maternity hospital. Sir Terry Matthews opened it as a hotel in 1982, and the resort that has grown around it now covers some 2,000 acres of the Usk Valley, with two hotels, the Hunter Lodges and three championship golf courses. Couples still marry in the old house, known today as the Manor House, as well as in the newer buildings that climbed the hill behind it.
A coal owner’s gift at Coldra
Powell was at one time the largest colliery owner in the South Wales coalfield. His son Thomas married Julia Jenkins in 1859, and the new house at Coldra was their wedding gift. Ten years later, in 1869, the younger Thomas Powell, his wife and their son were killed in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, while elephant hunting. A portrait of the family, painted around 1862, is in the collection of Amgueddfa Cymru, Museum Wales.
After their deaths the Powell company let Coldra to tenants until 1915, when it was sold to the Beynon family. They added a new wing and set into the house two windows brought from Bryn Ifor Hall, the home of the buyer’s father.
Sixty thousand births
In the 1930s the house passed to the local health authority, and in 1940 it opened as the Lydia Beynon Maternity Hospital, named after the buyer’s mother. More than 60,000 babies were born there before the hospital closed in 1977. One of them, born on 6 June 1943, was Terry Matthews, who later co-founded the telecommunications company Mitel and was knighted in 2001 for services to industry and to Wales.
Matthews bought his birthplace in 1980, and it opened as the Celtic Manor Hotel two years later. Golf courses followed through the 1990s, and in 1999 a new Resort Hotel opened further up the hillside. The original building was renamed the Manor House so that guests could tell the two apart.
Marrying in the Manor House
The Manor House now runs as a four star country house hotel inside the resort, with its own bedrooms, the Asian restaurant PAD, the Cellar Bar and the Manor Lounge Bar, which keeps its period features at the centre of the house. It has two wedding rooms. Hedleys, with stained glass windows, ornate fireplaces and wood panelling, takes 30 to 50 guests for a reception. The Manor Suite, in the original house, has its own entrance and reception area and a paved patio above landscaped gardens that serves as a setting for photographs; it seats 60 to 110 for a wedding breakfast and holds up to 170 for the evening party.
The resort is licensed for civil ceremonies in a number of its rooms, and couples contact the registrar personally to book a ceremony there. The few spaces beside the Manor House are for setting down only; guests park in the larger car parks higher up the slope.
The resort on the hill
The Resort Hotel that opened in 1999 carries the larger weddings. Its Caernarfon Ballroom has high ceilings, chandeliers, its own private bar and room for a dance floor and a stage, and it takes 250 to 800 guests for a wedding breakfast and evening party. The Beaumaris Suite, in the Ian Edwards Conference Centre beside the hotel, is a self contained banqueting room with a separate lounge bar and dining room, for 80 to 120 guests at the reception and up to 170 in the evening. Exclusive use of the Resort Hotel can be arranged.
The Caernarfon Suite is also where the resort holds large Asian weddings, with the Augusta Suite at the golf club as a second setting. Catering is in house, but couples may also bring in one of two approved outside caterers who specialise in Punjabi and Gujarati cuisine.
For a less formal day there is the Rooftop Garden and Terrace at the Resort Hotel, for 80 to 130 guests. The celebration takes place in a summerhouse with its own smokehouse barbecue, while families have the terrace and lawns outside. It can also be booked for exclusive use.
Above the Ryder Cup course
In 2001 the resort won the right to stage the 2010 Ryder Cup, the first held in Wales. It was played on the Twenty Ten, a course designed by Ross McMurray and built for the event, and heavy rain pushed the final session to a Monday for the first time in the competition’s history. Graeme McDowell beat Hunter Mahan to win the deciding point, and Colin Montgomerie’s European team took the cup by 14½ points to 13½. Montgomerie also designed one of the resort’s three courses, which bears his name; the third, Roman Road, is the work of Robert Trent Jones Senior and looks out over the Severn Estuary. In 2014 the resort hosted the NATO summit.
Two wedding settings sit in the Twenty Ten Clubhouse. Rafters, named for its cedar beams, overlooks the course and takes 80 to 120 guests by day and up to 150 in the evening. The Samuel Ryder Suite, for 60 to 96 guests and up to 120 in the evening, has a balcony above the 18th green with the Usk Valley beyond.
At Celtic Manor Golf Club, the Via Julia has its own bar and leads into the Chairman’s Marquee and an outdoor patio facing the Roman Road course, with the Resort Hotel in the distance, for 80 to 180 guests. On the first floor, the Augusta Suite is reached by a staircase, has a private bar and reception lounge outside its doors, and faces the course towards the estuary; it takes 100 to 180 for a reception and up to 300 for an evening party.
A wedding weekend in the valley
Guests can stay in either hotel. Rooms at the Resort Hotel run from Superior rooms to two Presidential Suites, each with large terraces and a private dining area for up to ten, and the Signature floor has adults only rooms and suites with their own lounge. Away from the main resort, the Hunter Lodges have open plan living, private hot tubs and views over the Usk Valley; they also hold small weddings of up to 40 guests, with the ceremony in a double height lounge and drinks on the deck above the Twenty Ten.
The wedding team also arranges the days on either side: a rehearsal dinner in one of the resort’s restaurants, hair and beauty before the ceremony, breakfast together the morning after. The Forum Spa has 16 treatment rooms. Place cards and printed menus are part of every package, and an events coordinator looks after the seating plan, cake, favours and gifts. Prices come from the Wedding Events Team on enquiry.
The resort sits just off junction 24 of the M4. Newport station, about three miles off, has direct trains to Cardiff, Birmingham and London Paddington, which is about 90 minutes from the resort. Cardiff and Bristol airports are each about 45 minutes away, and the resort has its own helipad, free for hotel residents.
For more of Wales, see our wedding venues in Wales and the United Kingdom Wedding Atlas.
The old house or the new
The decision here is which building holds the day. The Manor House keeps a wedding to 110 at dinner, in the rooms of the house the Powells were given in 1860. The Resort Hotel takes it up to 800 in the Caernarfon Ballroom, with the clubhouses, the courses and the valley spread out below. Read the Celtic Manor Resort profile and check your date.
