Castell Aberlleiniog

Castell Aberlleiniog, whose name means the castle of the mouth of the Lleiniog, is a motte and bailey on the left bank of the Afon Lleiniog, near the village of Llangoed on the Isle of Anglesey. It stands on a very steep hill in a strategic position beside the Menai Strait, opposite the Norman castle at Abergwyngregyn, a siting that shows how much visual communication mattered to the Norman invaders. It is about two miles from Beaumaris Castle, and one landscape account places it 3.2 kilometres north of Beaumaris, across the Lleiniog ravine. One account places the structure on the north side of the river, about half a kilometre from the coast, along a trackway north and west of a country road toward Penmon and west of Llangoed.

The surrounding ground is a low, flat tract of about 110 hectares, or 272 acres, rising slowly toward the limestone ridge near Penmon, with the ravine of the Afon Lleiniog dividing Trecastell on the south from Aberlleiniog on the north. The Afon y Brenhin joins the Lleiniog at the southern boundary of Llangoed.

The Normans were a people formed in the Duchy of Normandy from Norse settlers and the inhabitants of West Francia. After Rollo’s agreement with Charles III in 911, their dukes held Normandy from the king of France while keeping a large measure of their own control. They were famed for war, for castle-building, and for pushing into new lands. Even before the conquest of England, Edward the Confessor had set Ralph up as Earl of Hereford to defend the Marches and fight the Welsh, and those early ventures made no headway into Wales.

After 1066 the Marches passed to trusted barons, among them Bernard de Neufmarché, Robert Fitzhamon, Roger of Montgomery in Shropshire, and Hugh Lupus in Cheshire. From those bases a slow conquest began, and almost all of Wales was at some point subject to Norman interference. Norman words, including the word for a baron, entered Welsh in that period.

Hugh d'Avranches, 1st Earl of Chester, also styled Hugh d'Avranches, Earl of Chester, was the man to whom the castle is attributed. He was born about 1047 in Normandy, the son of Richard le Goz, Viscount of Avranches. His mother was traditionally said to be Emma de Conteville, a half-sister of William the Conqueror, but that identification rests on unsatisfactory evidence and his mother is otherwise unknown, while another reading still argues for some relationship between Hugh and William. He was nicknamed le Gros, the Large or the Fat, from his obesity, and he was later called Lupus, the Wolf, for reasons that are still debated.

In 1071 Gerbod the Fleming, the first Earl of Chester of the first creation, was taken prisoner at the Battle of Cassel. The king treated the title as vacant and granted Hugh the earldom together with the powers of a county palatine, Cheshire being a strategic holding on the Welsh border. Hugh’s term is given as 1071 to 1101. He appointed hereditary barons, including his cousins Robert of Rhuddlan and Nigel of Cotentin, and he received many of the local manors that had been held by Edwin, the last Saxon earl of Mercia, who died in 1071.

After his father’s death, as late as 1082, Hugh succeeded as Viscount of Avranches and inherited large estates in the Avranchin and across western Normandy. He regarded Anselm as a friend. He founded the Benedictine abbeys of Sainte-Marie-et-Saint-Sever at Saint-Sever-Calvados and of Saint Werburgh in Chester, and he gave land to Whitby Abbey. He stayed loyal to William II during the rebellion of 1088, and he later served Henry I as one of the principal councillors at the royal court.

Hugh spent much of his time fighting in Wales. With Robert of Rhuddlan he subdued a good part of the north. At first Robert held north-east Wales as a vassal of the tenant-in-chief. The castle on the Lleiniog is the only certain evidence of a Norman foothold on Anglesey, and the only recognisable intrusive Norman fortification on the island.

It is large enough to suggest an attempt at consolidation rather than a mere campaign base. Domesday Book records that Robert of Rhuddlan, Earl Hugh’s military commander, held North Wales directly from King William at a fee-farm rent of forty pounds. In that same setting, in 1093, Earl Hugh was able to redirect the revenues of two Anglesey manors, and the profits of fishing rights in the Straits, to the building programme at Saint Werburgh’s Abbey in Chester. Fishing with nets from boats in the Straits is attested in the eleventh century, and the likely stretch was between Penmon and Trecastell.

An exceptional concentration of large fish traps lies on the shoreline north and south of the outflow of the Afon Lleiniog. Their date is uncertain, but their origins are likely to have been medieval, and there is clear evidence that they were repaired and realigned.

The date of the castle itself is not a single date. One account has it built between 1080 and 1099. Another says it was probably erected when Hugh conquered Gwynedd in 1088. Others place the building between 1088 and 1090, or in 1088 and 1089, or in the 1080s.

A further account says that while Gruffudd ap Cynan was a prisoner, Earl Hugh and Robert of Rhuddlan took possession of Gwynedd and built castles at Bangor, Caernarfon, and Aberlleiniog. The original work was a timber castle on a large, flat-topped artificial mound, with a small bailey between the motte and the ravine. The timber has long gone. The mound has also been described as a conical knoll, partly natural and partly shaped by art, the shaping shown by the ditch from which the earth was dug.

Gruffudd ap Cynan was King of Gwynedd from 1081 until his death in 1137, and a central figure in Welsh resistance to Norman rule. He was born about 1055 in Dublin and reared near Swords, in the Hiberno-Norse kingdom. His father, Cynan ab Iago, was an exiled claimant to Gwynedd and probably never its king in fact, though Gruffudd’s grandfather Iago ab Idwal ap Meurig had ruled Gwynedd from 1023 to 1039. When Gruffudd first appeared in Wales the annals several times called him grandson of Iago rather than son of Cynan, a sign that his father was little known there.

His mother was Ragnailt ingen Amlaíb, a granddaughter of Sigtrygg Silkbeard and a member of the Uí Ímair dynasty. Sigtrygg had two sons named Amlaíb, one dying in 1013 and another in 1034, and either could have been her father. A story that a monk prophesied great power for her son has been rejected as a later embellishment. Through his mother Gruffudd was also descended from Brian Boru, and during his struggles he drew aid from the Hiberno-Norse of Dublin, the Isles, and Wexford, and from Muirchertach Ua Briain.

He gained the throne of Gwynedd and lost it three times before regaining it in 1099 and keeping it until his death. He laid foundations that his son Owain Gwynedd and his great-grandson Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Llywelyn the Great, would build upon. A near-contemporary biography, the History of Gruffudd ap Cynan, survives. Scholars long placed it in the third quarter of the twelfth century, in the reign of Owain Gwynedd, but it has also been suggested that it may date from the early reign of Llywelyn the Great, around 1200.

The author is unknown. Most manuscripts are in Welsh and are translations of a Latin original. The usual view is that the original Latin is lost and that surviving Latin copies are translations back from Welsh, though one Latin copy, Peniarth 434E, has been argued to contain the original Latin, later amended to match the Welsh.

Gruffudd first tried for Gwynedd in 1075, after the death of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn. Trahaearn ap Caradog had seized control but was not yet secure. Gruffudd landed at Abermenai Point on Anglesey with an Irish force. With troops from the Norman Robert of Rhuddlan he defeated and killed Cynwrig ap Rhiwallon, an ally of Trahaearn who held Llŷn, then defeated Trahaearn at the Battle of Gwaed Erw in Meirionnydd and took Gwynedd.

He led his forces east to recover lands the Normans had taken, and, despite the help Robert had given, he attacked and destroyed Rhuddlan Castle. Tension between his Danish-Irish bodyguard and the local Welsh brought a rebellion in Llŷn. Trahaearn counter-attacked and defeated him the same year at the Battle of Bron yr Erw, above Clynnog Fawr. Gruffudd fled to Ireland.

In 1081 he returned in alliance with Rhys ap Tewdwr, prince of Deheubarth, who had been attacked by Caradog ap Gruffudd of Gwent and Morgannwg and forced to flee to the cathedral at St Davids. Gruffudd sailed from Waterford with Danes and Irish and landed near St Davids, joined supporters from Gwynedd, and with Rhys marched north. Trahaearn, Caradog, and Meilyr ap Rhiwallon of Powys had made their own alliance. The armies met at the Battle of Mynydd Carn.

Gruffudd and Rhys won, and Trahaearn, Caradog, and Meilyr were killed. Gruffudd seized Gwynedd a second time.

He had not been king long when he was drawn to a meeting with Hugh d'Avranches, Earl of Chester, and Hugh of Montgomery, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, at Rhug, near Corwen. He was seized and imprisoned. His biographer says this was by the treachery of one of his own men, Meirion Goch. He was held for many years in Earl Hugh’s castle at Chester.

One story of the escape says he was in fetters in the marketplace at Chester when Cynwrig the Tall, visiting the city, saw his chance while the burgesses were at dinner, picked him up, fetters and all, and carried him out on his shoulders. The year of the escape is debated. Orderic Vitalis mentions a Grifridus attacking the Normans in 1088. The History says in one place that he was imprisoned for twelve years and in another for sixteen.

Capture in 1081 would then put release in 1093 or 1097. John Edward Lloyd favours 1093, taking Gruffudd to have been involved from the start of the Welsh rising in 1094. K. L.

Maund favours 1097, noting that contemporary annals do not name Gruffudd until 1098. D. Simon Evans allows that Orderic’s 1088 could be right, and treats an argument from the silence of the annals as unsafe. He was free by 1094.

He took refuge in Ireland again, then returned to lead assaults on Norman castles, among them Castell Aberlleiniog.

In 1081, at the time of the capture near Corwen, Robert of Rhuddlan took over Gruffudd’s kingdom and held it directly from the king. When Robert was killed by a Welsh raiding party in 1093, Hugh took over those lands and became ruler of most of North Wales. He then lost Anglesey, and much of the rest of Gwynedd, in the Welsh revolt of 1094, led by Gruffudd after his escape. Few documents detail what this castle saw.

One that does is the record of a siege in 1094 by Gruffudd ap Cynan on his return from Ireland. The siege was successful, and 124 Norman defenders died. Another account says that Gruffudd attacked and burnt Aberlleiniog while pursuing his claim, and spells his name in that passage as Gruffudd ap Cyan. A landscape summary of the same ground uses the spelling Gruffydd ap Cynan for the man who besieged it.

Gruffudd was later successful in driving Hugh out. After that, Anglesey remained under Welsh control until the arrival of Edward I of England two hundred years later. It is not known whether the Welsh made use of Castell Aberlleiniog.

The rising that began in 1094 had spread to many parts of Wales by late 1095. That brought William II, William Rufus, into North Wales in 1095. His army could not bring the Welsh to battle and returned to Chester having achieved very little. He invaded again in 1097, again without much success.

The History of Gruffudd mentions only one invasion by Rufus, which may mean that Gruffudd did not take part in the resistance to the first. At that time Cadwgan ap Bleddyn of Powys led the Welsh resistance.

In the summer of 1098 Earl Hugh of Chester joined Hugh of Montgomery, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, to relieve besieged castles, pillage Anglesey, and recover what he had lost in Gwynedd. Gruffudd and Cadwgan retreated to Anglesey, then had to flee to Ireland in a skiff when a fleet Gruffudd had hired from the Danish settlement in Ireland took a better offer from the Normans and changed sides. A Norwegian fleet under Magnus III of Norway, Magnus Barefoot, also called Magnus Barelegs, then attacked the Norman forces near the eastern end of the Menai Strait. The Earl of Shrewsbury was killed by an arrow said to have been shot by Magnus himself.

The Normans had to evacuate Anglesey altogether. One account of the same withdrawal says they went east across the River Conwy. Gruffudd, who had returned from Ireland, took possession the following year. Hugh apparently made an agreement with him and did not again try to recover those lands.

These events, which settled the fate of a hard-pressed Gwynedd, were played out in large part along the shoreline of the Aberlleiniog and Trecastell ground.

Hugh fell ill and on 13 July 1101 became a monk at Saint Werburgh’s, dying there four days later on 17 July 1101. Another statement of the same death gives the day as 27 July 1101. He was remembered for gluttony, prodigality, and profligacy. His heir was his son Richard d'Avranches by his wife Ermentrude of Claremont, daughter of Hugh I, Count of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis.

He also had illegitimate children, including Robert, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, Otuer fitz Count, and, less certainly, Geva, wife of Geoffrey Ridel. Richard married Matilda of Blois, a granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Both Richard and Matilda died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120, and the earldom passed to Hugh’s nephew Ranulph le Meschin, son of his sister Margaret and Ranulf de Briquessart, Viscount of Bayeux.

With Hugh’s death in 1101 Gruffudd could consolidate Gwynedd, as much by diplomacy as by force. He met Henry I, who granted him the rule of Llŷn, Eifionydd, Ardudwy, and Arllechwedd, and so extended the kingdom. By 1114 he was strong enough that Henry invaded Gwynedd, one detachment led by Alexander I of Scotland. Faced with that force, Gruffudd did homage and paid a heavy fine, but he lost no territory.

By about 1118 his advancing years meant that most of the fighting was done by his three sons by his wife Angharad, daughter of Owain ab Edwin of Tegeingl. In his last years Ceredigion, Meirionnydd, Rhos, Rhufoniog, and Dyffryn Clwyd were under the rule of Gwynedd. Rhos and Rhufoniog were annexed in 1118, Meirionnydd was taken from Powys in 1123, and Dyffryn Clwyd in 1124. Another invasion by Henry I in 1121 ended in military failure.

The king came to terms and made no further attempt on Gwynedd during Gruffudd’s reign. The death of his son Cadwallon in a battle against Powys near Llangollen in 1132 checked further expansion for a time.

Gruffudd was powerful enough to have his nominee, David the Scot, consecrated Bishop of Bangor in 1120. The see had been effectively vacant since Hervey le Breton had been forced to flee by the Welsh almost twenty years before, because Gruffudd and Henry could not agree on a candidate. David rebuilt Bangor Cathedral with a large contribution from Gruffudd. In 1136 Owain and Cadwaladr, in alliance with Gruffudd ap Rhys of Deheubarth, won a crushing victory over the Normans at Crug Mawr, near Cardigan, and took Ceredigion.

The latter part of the reign was remembered as a golden age, and the Life says Gwynedd was bespangled with lime-washed churches like the stars in the firmament. Gruffudd died in his bed in 1137, old and blind. The annalist of Brut y Tywysogion mourned him as the head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales. He was buried by the high altar in Bangor Cathedral, which he had helped to rebuild, and he left gifts to many other churches, including Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, where he had worshipped as a boy.

The poet Meilyr Brydydd sang an elegy. His wife Angharad survived him by twenty-five years. Owain Gwynedd succeeded him. His daughter Gwenllian, who married Gruffudd ap Rhys, son of his old ally Rhys ap Tewdwr, is remembered for her own resistance to Norman rule.

With Angharad he also had Cadwallon, Cadwaladr, Mared, Susanna, Rannillt, and Agnes, the names of the daughters varying as Mareda or Marared, Ranulht or Rannillt, and Agnes or Annest. Susanna married Madog ap Maredudd, prince of Powys. A legend credited to later tradition says he reformed the Welsh bardic order on the Irish model and sponsored an eisteddfod at Caerwys. The FitzRery family of Swords, prominent in Dublin into the seventeenth century, claimed descent from him, and the claim is not implausible given his birth there and his lasting Irish links.

After the Norman withdrawal the land at Aberlleiniog and Trecastell would have fallen within Gruffudd’s interest. The ravine makes the two look like separate places, but it is reasonable to think that the township or manor of Trecastell takes its name from the earthwork and may include it. In the early thirteenth century several townships in the king’s possession were granted to the heirs of Ednyfed Fychan, steward and principal administrator of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. Trecastell was one of those grants.

The tenure was exceptionally free. It required only suit of court, and an obligation that a member of the Trecastell family go to the lord’s war, at his own cost within the Marches of Wales and at the lord’s cost outside them. Unusually, Trecastell was allowed its own court, which the tenants had to attend every three weeks. Goronwy, son of Ednyfed Fychan, held Trecastell, Penmynydd, and Erddreiniog, all in the commote of Dindaethwy, in the thirteenth century.

His grandson Goronwy ap Tudur held those townships and also Tregaian. They passed to Tudur Fychan, who is thought to have kept Trecastell as his principal residence, and then to Ednyfed Fychan ap Tudur in the later fourteenth century. Ednyfed’s daughter Angharad, heiress of Trecastell, married Ieuan ap Adda ap Iorwerth Du of Pengwern in the late fourteenth century. Their son Ieuan Fychan married another Angharad, daughter of Hywel ap Tudur.

That Angharad, an heiress of Mostyn, brought Trecastell into the Mostyn dynasty in the first half of the fifteenth century. The medieval township, which can probably be taken as the whole of this ground, including Lleiniog, belongs to the period when the princes of Gwynedd were building a coherent feudal state. Trecastell was in the king’s hand from the time the Normans were pushed out, and the grant to Ednyfed’s descendants recognised past service and expected more.

Trecastell farmhouse stands close to the shoreline toward the southern end of the ground. It was rebuilt in more recent times, but a sixteenth-century depressed-arched fireplace survives. The house now looks like a nineteenth-century farmhouse, of roughly coursed limestone rubble with some gritstone, a projecting wing at the rear south-west corner, and a wide blocked fireplace of sixteenth-century form in an externally projecting stack. In 1810 more of the old house was still visible: remains of some little consequence in the arches of two fireplaces, very similar to one at Gloddaeth, and an inscription over one of them that was already quite obliterated.

Trecastell occupied 167 acres. Its land tax was assessed at seventeen shillings in 1752 and at one pound, three shillings, and nothing in 1789. William Hughes occupied the premises in the 1750s. Richard Broadhead acquired it in 1756.

Richard Owen was the proprietor in the 1780s. Henry Williams owned it in 1847, when the tithe assessment was drawn up.

Edward I of England was born on 17 or 18 June 1239 at the Palace of Westminster and died on 7 July 1307 at Burgh by Sands. He reigned from 20 November 1272, was crowned on 19 August 1274, and was buried at Westminster Abbey on 27 October 1307. The two centuries of Welsh control on Anglesey after Hugh’s expulsion sit against his conquest of Wales. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had gained a temporary advantage after the Barons’ War.

The Treaty of Montgomery in 1267 recognised the land he had conquered in the Four Cantrefs of Perfeddwlad and his title of Prince of Wales. His rule was heavy-handed, especially on the Marches, where he used hostages and intimidation, and he fell into a damaging quarrel with the Welsh church. In 1272 he suffered a major defeat at the hands of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and had to leave south-east Wales. A failed attempt to assassinate him exposed divisions.

The chief suspects, his younger brother Dafydd and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, fled to the English court. Llywelyn refused homage, citing the ongoing fighting and Edward’s harbouring of his enemies. A further provocation was his planned marriage to Eleanor, daughter of Simon de Montfort the Elder. He was also suspected of placing a Montfortian spy, Nicholas Waltham, at Edward’s court, and of intriguing with Eleanor’s brothers, Simon the Younger and Guy.

In November 1276 Edward declared war. The first operations were under Mortimer, Edward’s brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and William de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Support for Llywelyn among his own countrymen was weak. In July 1277 Edward invaded with a force of 15,500, of whom 9,000 were Welsh.

There was no major battle. Llywelyn surrendered. By the Treaty of Aberconwy in November 1277 he was left only with Gwynedd, though he kept the title of Prince of Wales. War broke out again in 1282.

The Welsh saw it as a war over national identity and the right to their own law, and it had wide support, provoked by the use of English law to dispossess prominent Welsh landowners, many of them Edward’s former opponents. For Edward it became a war of conquest, aimed at putting an end finally to what he called the malice of the Welsh. It began with a rebellion by Dafydd, discontented with his reward from 1277. Llywelyn and other leaders soon joined, and at first the Welsh attack succeeded.

In June, Gloucester was defeated at the Battle of Llandeilo Fawr. On 6 November, while John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was negotiating peace, Edward’s commander on Anglesey, Luke de Tany, made a surprise attack. A pontoon bridge had been built toward the mainland. Shortly after Tany and his men crossed, the Welsh ambushed them and they suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Moel-y-don.

Welsh advances ended on 11 December, when Llywelyn was lured into a trap and killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge. The conquest of Gwynedd was completed with the capture of Dafydd in June 1283. He was taken to Shrewsbury and executed as a traitor the following year, and Edward ordered his head to be exhibited on London Bridge.

By the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 the principality of Wales was incorporated into England, with counties policed by sheriffs. English law came in for criminal cases. Welsh customary law was allowed to remain in some property disputes. After 1277, and more so after 1283, Edward settled English people in new towns such as Flint, Aberystwyth, and Rhuddlan.

The local Welsh were banned from living in them, and many of the towns were walled. A programme of castles followed, directed by James of Saint George, an architect Edward had met in Savoy on his return from crusade. The castles included Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy, and Harlech, meant to be fortresses, royal palaces, and centres of civilian and judicial administration. The programme helped to spread arrow slits in castle walls across Europe, drawing on eastern models.

The concentric castle, also a product of the crusades, was used for four of the eight castles Edward founded in Wales. The buildings drew on imagery of the Byzantine empire and of King Arthur, to lend legitimacy to a rule that was meant to be permanent. The Welsh aristocracy were nearly wholly dispossessed, and Edward was the greatest beneficiary. Local rebellions in 1287 and 1288 were partly caused by his failure to reward former Welsh allies.

A more serious revolt came in 1294 under Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Its causes included resentment of the occupation, poor colonial-style governance, and very heavy taxation. Both risings were put down. The 1294 revolt was followed at once by punitive measures, including the taking of 200 hostages.

Measures to stop the Welsh from bearing arms or living in the new boroughs probably date from this time, and the administration of Wales continued to be almost wholly imported. Nothing in these campaigns says that Edward’s armies occupied or rebuilt Castell Aberlleiniog. The older statement stands: it is not known whether the Welsh, or anyone else in those centuries, made use of it. Beaumaris Castle, about two miles away, belongs to Edward’s new system, not to the eleventh-century mound.

In 1284 Edward’s son, the later Edward II, was born at Caernarfon, probably as a statement of the new political order. In 1301 at Lincoln that son became the first English prince to be invested as Prince of Wales, and he received the Earldom of Chester and lands across North Wales. Edward began a more conciliatory policy through his son, but Wales stayed volatile, and a deep distrust remained between the English settlers and the Welsh. Edward was about six feet two inches tall.

Contemporaries feared him and, in England, respected him as a soldier, an administrator, and a man of faith. Later judgment is divided. He is credited with restoring royal authority after Henry III and with making Parliament a permanent institution for tax and statute. He is also condemned for vindictiveness toward Wales and Scotland, for a colonial approach to their government and to Ireland, and for duplicity.

He took the fragment of the Holy Cross from Wales after the defeat of 1283. He was interested in Arthur. In 1278 he visited Glastonbury to open what was then believed to be the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere, and he gained what was called Arthur’s crown from Llywelyn after the conquest of North Wales. He held Round Table events in 1284 and 1302.

The Arthurian material served his claim in Wales and undercut the Welsh belief that Arthur might return as a political saviour.

The castle’s own record then goes quiet. One account says it has no recorded history following its destruction soon after the Norman defeat, until Thomas Cheadle, constable of Beaumaris, built a fort on the summit during the disturbances of the mid-seventeenth century. Another says the timber was replaced by a stone structure at some point before the mid-seventeenth century, and that Thomas Cheadle, the constable of Beaumaris, then destroyed it. A third calls the masonry a late medieval fortification, or a ruinous rectangular structure that is probably late medieval, with the remains of angle towers at three corners, which housed a garrison during the Great Rebellion.

A fourth says the masonry walls and circular corner towers are of uncertain age but were probably in place by the sixteenth century, when Thomas Cheadle took it upon himself to fortify the site. A fifth divides the development into four phases: the Norman motte and bailey of the 1080s, a re-fortification of the late seventeenth century, or in another wording a seventeenth-century re-fortification during the Civil War, then the addition of a stone fort or folly dated between 1701 and 1770, and partial repairs and reconstruction from about 1840 to the Second World War, when the north tower was used as an observation post. The earthwork was said to be 560 years old at the outbreak of the Civil War, and still to have a role. The earthworks would have been modified to some degree when the later fort was built.

The place is also known as Lady Cheadle’s Castle, written in one designation as Lady Cheadles Castle.

Cheadle had become deputy constable of Beaumaris Castle, effectively the mayor, and subsequently sheriff, in 1642. He was not popular. Many local people thought his works at Aberlleiniog had more to do with local politics than with the defence of the island. The Bulkeley faction answered by digging earthwork defences on the hill of Bryn Britain, on the south side of the town, overlooking the harbour.

Beaumaris Castle itself was in a poor state of readiness. The castle on the mound acted as a Royalist outpost for Beaumaris, and the stone keep was used in the Civil War first by the Royalists and then by the Parliamentarians. Toward the end of the first Civil War, Cheadle appears to have gone over to the Parliamentary side. One account, drawing on a manuscript from Plas Gwyn that has since been lost, holds that Sir Thomas Cheadle held Aberlleiniog for Parliament in 1645 and 1646.

Chester had surrendered, and the way into north Wales lay open. A number of prominent local men tried to make terms. In June 1649 a Captain Rich, on the ship Rebecca in Fryars’ Road, landed men and munitions at night at Lleiniog. The following week Parliamentary commissioners were in Beaumaris to secure terms.

They sensed hostility and returned to Lady Cheadle’s house and fort. An agreement was reached that same day. The motte was fortified and munitioned for Parliament against the king, one of the few incidents of the war to touch Anglesey. Excavation in 2004 found extensive evidence for Civil War occupation of the site.

An infobox of the castle’s life gives it as in use from the late eleventh century to the mid-seventeenth century, which leaves the later phases outside that span.

The Cheadles had several houses, of which Lleiniog was one. In the later seventeenth century Lleiniog passed by purchase to William Bold of Tre’r Ddol. In the first half of the eighteenth century it was in the hands of the Hughes family, later of Rowland Williams, and in the 1780s of the Reverend Edward Hughes. The Lleiniog lands occupied about 100 acres and carried the highest land-tax assessment in this ground, with only Tros yr Afon and Trecastell coming close.

Lord Dinorben, son of the Reverend Hughes, held the property in the early nineteenth century. Tros yr Afon was in the hand of Rowland Hughes in the third quarter of the eighteenth century and was acquired by Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, in the 1780s. The north tower was converted into a summer house in the mid-nineteenth century and was later reinforced as a defensive position.

In 1810 the castle was described as very old, overrun with an almost impenetrable wilderness mixed with some large trees, and as consisting of four round bastions with a curtain wall connecting them and forming a square of sixteen sticks and a half on each side. The builder in that account is Hugh Lupus. A descriptive account, with an interpretation, was made when the place was visited in August 1860. It has also been called Castell Lleiniog and Aber Lleiniog, and it is listed among the early castles in Wales.

The battlements have probably been restored. In the designation the west corner bastion has a serious crack and part of it may fall shortly, and the site is overgrown with tall trees and vegetation. Another account has the motte and ditch covered with trees and overgrown with bramble, and the south and west towers in a very poor state, leaning outwards at a dangerous angle. Those accounts sit beside the repair campaigns of the twenty-first century and are not the same moment in the life of the walls.

The measurements do not agree, and each set belongs to the survey that took it. One inventory gives a mound 150 feet in diameter at the base, rising some 30 feet above a dry ditch 40 to 50 feet wide. Another gives a motte 29 metres in diameter and 8.8 metres high, with a ditch 11 metres wide and up to 2 metres deep, and no trace of a bailey other than two terminal mounds. Another puts the top of the motte about 8 metres above the ditch, with a diameter across the top of 28 metres, a dry ditch 11 metres wide and between 1 and 2 metres deep, and on the south a bailey of two mounds lying against the ditch on the east and west, slight traces of a bank on the east, and a steep gully outside the west mound.

Another describes a steep-sided, generally circular mound, roughly 50 metres across and 5.4 metres high, with a ditch about 16 metres wide and 1.2 metres deep, and a level summit now roughly 25 to 27 metres square because of the later building. Traces of a bailey have been identified on the south side above the Afon y Brenhin valley, where two small mounds, 40 metres apart, are thought to be the remains of its ramparts. A small bailey on the south is also described as two terminal mounds, with traces of the east ditch running to the edge of the ravine. The standing building is an eleventh-century mound rising to a square platform of about 50 square metres, with retaining walls of rubble masonry.

A much smaller castle mound stands at the mouth of the Lleiniog, some 500 metres to the east.

The fort on the summit is a square with its corners oriented to the cardinal points. One survey makes it 18 to 19 metres across overall, with broad ramparts 2.5 to 5 metres wide, fronted by a narrow wall rising to a parapet roughly 2.5 metres high. Another makes the stone structure about 18 metres square, the walls surviving to 2 or 3 metres and about 0.75 metres wide. The keep had broad ramparts fronted by a narrow wall rising to a parapet, and each corner contained a round tower.

Each tower was about 4 metres in diameter and had three small rectangular openings, or three rectangular loops with splayed reveals. The enclosure walls each have three evenly spaced buttresses, except the south-east face, where the main entrance is. Another wording says each length of walling is supported by three small buttresses, and that the buttresses are additions to the original structure but may be replacements of earlier ones. The entrance was probably on the south-east, where there is now a gap about 2 metres wide.

There is a small doorway in the north-west wall. On the north-west side a projecting garderobe is formed by rough corbels supporting a stone slab. The east tower no longer exists in one description, and only three of the four round corner bastions remain in another, matching the three angle towers of the older inventory. In 2015 the lost outer arc of the east tower was given a new outline, so the absence and the restored curve both belong in the account.

The north tower has been rebuilt and stands about 4.5 metres high, lit by five rectangular loops. A separate count of the same north tower gives five viewing slits or loopholes in all, with good views of the approaches to the north.

During the Second World War the interior of the north tower was heavily reinforced with concrete for the Home Guard, possibly to defend a nearby transmitter that broadcast the Home Service. The same tower is described as an observation post in the phase of repairs from about 1840 to the war. The fields around the two holdings are large, with boundaries that are in general ruler-straight hedges. On the Trecastell side occasional trees have grown out of the hedges, and there are clumps, mostly near houses.

On the Lleiniog side more hedges have grown wild into bushes and trees. The steep sides of the ravine are covered with trees and bushes. In 2019 a group of trees on the mound on the coast at Lleiniog was identified, including orange-berried whitebeam, and the mound was associated with Castell Aberlleiniog through a link made by Frances Lynch in 2010.

The monument is of national importance for what it can add to knowledge of medieval building and fortification. It retains significant archaeological potential, with a strong probability that structural evidence survives, and the protected area takes in the remains and a margin around them where related evidence may be expected. It was designated a listed building at Grade II* on 30 January 1968, as a substantially intact late medieval fortification surmounting an earlier mound, and it is also a scheduled monument. A 2007 notice said the site was then scheduled for restoration with the aid of a heritage lottery grant.

Restoration began in 2008. A photograph of 2009 shows two of the towers and the keep wall after that work had begun. By 2016 the place was open to the public, and it was then described as ruined and still undergoing restoration.

In 2008 a geophysical survey covered most of the bailey. The defences of the bailey, possibly spread by later activity, were detected, together with a possible entrance and slight areas of magnetic noise indicating a road leading to a bridge across the motte ditch. Around the edge of the ditch the results were mostly masked by modern ferrous material, so nothing further could be recovered there, and no further structures were detected within the bailey. The absence of a signal does not prove that no archaeology survives, because a gradiometer does not detect every feature.

In 2015 the repair and recording of the east tower and the adjoining length of the south-east curtain wall were the last part of a programme of consolidation and reinterpretation that had run since 2004. The aims were to stabilise what remained of the east tower and that stretch of curtain, to recreate the outline of the lost outer arc of the tower, to take down and rebuild the jamb of the entrance through the south-east curtain, and to repair and repaint the buttresses and the north tower, so that the fabric would resist further decay and meet the demands of visitors. The work filled eroded paths that climbed the rampart inside the south-east entrance and supported the terminals of the curtain walls. Digging was limited to the removal of vegetation and topsoil so that those features could be partly exposed and recorded.

No finds or other datable material were met with, except unstratified fragments of roof slate and oyster shell, and a single modern coin, in the turf and topsoil.

On 1 March 2023 a watching brief monitored the repair of two footpaths whose surfaces had failed under heavy use on clay-rich ground. The work scraped away a thin layer of leaf litter and surface soil, about 50 millimetres, and exposed reddish-brown clay immediately below. There was no real topsoil or subsoil in the scraped strips. That may be the result of earlier work at the castle, or it may be glacial clay dug from the motte ditch and used to form the apron of the bailey.

No archaeological activity associated with the castle was identified in either path. The lengths and widths were recorded more than once and do not match. One statement gives the first path as about 55 metres long and 1.2 metres wide, and the second as about 15 metres by 1.2 metres. The results give the south-eastern path as about 63 metres long, varying from 1.2 to 1.8 metres wide, and the north-eastern path as about 10 metres long, varying from 2.3 to 2.9 metres wide.

A further note gives about 60 metres by 1.2 metres and about 14 metres by 1.2 metres. The edges were lined with felled ash in the round, between 75 and 150 millimetres thick, held with wire gripples. Sheep fleece was laid as a textile, and green Gwna schist from a local quarry, chosen to match stone already used on the site, was rolled to a flat surface. The stone was brought to the end of the hard standing left from earlier renovation and barrowed in, to limit the impact.

The paths were repaired by Kehoe Countryside for the owner.

A community excavation was carried out at the castle in 2024. Other places on Anglesey are not this castle. Cymyran Strait is the channel between Anglesey and Holy Island, from Beddmanarch Bay to Cymyran Bay, opening at either end into the Irish Sea. It was crossed by a permanent bridge in the 1500s, by an embankment in 1823, by a railway on that embankment in 1848, and by a separate expressway in 2001.

The stretch between the embankment and the older bridge is often called the Inland Sea and is almost a lagoon. Lligwy Burial Chamber is a Neolithic chamber near the east coast, a circle of upright stones under a roof slab estimated at 25 tonnes. Excavation in 1909 found the remains of some 15 to 30 people and pottery of a Late Neolithic date. It lies about half a mile west of Moelfre.

Llyn Alaw, the lily lake, is a shallow reservoir built in 1966 and managed as a water supply, a site of special scientific interest and a place for overwintering birds. Llyn Cefni is a small reservoir in the centre of the island, about a kilometre northwest of Llangefni, with its fishery under a local angling association. Llyn Cerrig Bach is a small lake of about 1.8 acres between Rhosneigr and Valley. In 1942 more than 150 Iron Age metal objects were found there, apparently placed in the water as votive offerings, a major collection of La Tène metalwork and the most important of its kind in Wales.

Llyn Llywenan, the yew tree lake, lies just over a kilometre north of Bodedern and about nine kilometres east of Holyhead. It is about 1.1 kilometres long and 0.4 kilometres wide, with a surface of about 0.4 square kilometres, which makes it the largest natural lake on the island, since Llyn Alaw and Llyn Cefni are larger but man-made. It sits about 34 metres above sea level, is a site of special scientific interest for uncommon aquatic plants, and is very shallow.

The castle is owned by Menter Môn and managed by a steering group of local representatives, with priorities of historical and cultural interest, nature conservation, and public access. It stands in a woodland nature reserve close to the Menai Strait, within the Isle of Anglesey National Landscape, near Penmon. It is open to the public all year, and admission is free. Dogs are allowed to enter.

Parking charges may apply. The place is not recorded among world-heritage inscriptions.