The Great Castles of North Wales
By Jim Hargan

British Heritage  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Like all true castles, Conwy was both an aristocratic residence and a military base. It had to meet the daily needs of a fine lord and his lady, it had to house a bunch of rough soldiers and it had to withstand the most brutal and prolonged attacks. These needs converged to serve one overarching goal: to project power, both practically and psychologically. As a military base, the castle could completely control a 20-mile radius with just a small force of mounted knights, and it could defend itself so well that only the most powerful would dare challenge it. As a noble residence, it demonstrated the overwhelming power, prestige and wealth of its owner. In this case, its owner was Edward I, the richest and most powerful lord of them all, and the era’s greatest warrior. Conwy wasn’t just meant to awe; it was meant to scare the living daylights out of anyone who dared challenge its power.

Bear in mind that Edward started Conwy Castle after he had killed Llywelyn and won all of Wales for himself. Although anti-insurgency operations would continue for another 13 years, Edward didn’t need a castle on this scale to fight insurgents. He needed it to scare them. To gain the site, Edward demolished a palace of Llywelyn’s and a monastery in which Llywelyn the Great was buried. Eight mammoth cylindrical towers bulge out from the walls, each one seven stories high and 30 feet in diameter, set so close together that the castle appears to be little more than a collection of towers. Outside, more walls enclosed—and enclose to this day—a sizable town, first populated wholly by English colonists intent on profiting from the newly conquered lands. All this construction was plastered and whitewashed, a gleaming intrusion from an enemy state.

And it was all ludicrously expensive. Built in just five years, Conwy Castle consumed an amount of money equal to the English government’s entire tax receipts for a year. It was not only physically and technologically beyond anything Gwynedd could have produced, it required more wealth than the principality could have hoped to produce in a century. No one could hope to succeed against anyone powerful enough to build such a castle; at Conwy, no one even tried. And Edward built three more castles nearby, just like it.

Harlech. Amazingly, Edward started Harlech at the same time as Conwy, finishing it in 1289. Its purpose was straightforward; it anchored the southwest corner of Gwynedd, just as Conwy anchored its northeast. This squarish castle occupies the top of a tall, rocky outcrop that, at the time, rose as a near-cliff 200 feet out of the sea.

It’s even larger than Conwy, with a lower wall that encloses and protects the sea approach at the bottom of the cliff, then a stunning inner wall (a “curtain wall” in castle parlance, as it seems to hang like a curtain between the towers) rising 35 feet above its leveled platform on the knoll’s top.

Inside, it has a single large inner bailey, with one of the most massive gatehouses in Britain, providing housing for its lord and its garrison, as well as protection from attack. It worked; in 1294, 37 men held off a determined attack and long siege by Welsh insurrectionists. Today, its mountainous location makes it an impressive and romantic sight, even though two miles of sand deposits now separate this former headland from the sea.

Castles such as Harlech and Conwy were not only foreign intrusions in Wales, they were foreign to all Britain. Castles evolved on the Continent during the 9th century along the Rhone and Rhine rivers, from hill forts built using a design that placed wood palisade walls around a large enclosed area (“outer bailey”), then a wood tower on a high spot protected by its own inner palisade, which formed an inner bailey around the tower.

During the 10th century, French warriors discovered that they could throw up one of these compounds anywhere, in just a few weeks, by impressing the conquered locals as a slave labor force. From inside, they could send parties of mounted knights out to protect or oppress the countryside and be back in time for dinner.

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, British Heritage, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.