William Burges was the most single-minded of the High Victorian Goths. Where his contemporaries argued about which century to revive, Burges settled on thirteenth-century France and never moved, treating early French Gothic as a complete system of building, sculpture, metalwork, glass and furniture that an architect should control down to the last hinge. The son of a wealthy marine engineer, he had money enough to work slowly and refuse what bored him. Winning the competition for Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork in 1863 gave him, at thirty-five, his first large commission and the only one he saw completed to his own designs throughout. For the Marquess of Bute he then remade Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch as saturated medieval fantasies. He died at fifty-three, leaving a small body of work of exceptional density.
