Chirk Castle

Chirk Castle, Castell y Waun in Welsh, stands on a bluff above the place where the Dee and the Ceiriog meet, in the community of Chirk in Wrexham County Borough. It was built to command the entrance to the Ceiriog valley from the west. The stone fortress is a hollow square, with bold round towers at the corners and further towers midway along the sides, rising from a battered plinth. A barbican on the north side, between the north-east tower and the centre tower, is reached by a ramped bridge.

The building was designated at the highest grade of listed building on 20 October 1952. The park and gardens were later entered at the same highest grade on the register of parks and gardens of special historic interest in Wales.

The date of the first work is given in more than one way. One account says the castle was built in 1295 by Roger Mortimer de Chirk, uncle of Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, as part of the chain of fortresses Edward I set across the north of Wales. Another says it has overlooked the borderlands since 1295, and that it was never planned as a family home. A third says it was probably begun soon after 1295, for Roger Mortimer, for the newly created marcher lordship of Chirkland, on lands that had belonged to the princedom of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd ap Madog.

The same building account says the outer shell is of the early thirteenth century, and that the east and south sides, and the principal hall range on the north, were rebuilt in the early fourteenth century. Roger Mortimer of Chirk is also said to have begun the castle probably after 1295, possibly to a design by James of St George, the mason of Beaumaris, and to have left it unfinished at his death. By 1310, one history of the house says, the round towers, curtain walls and gatehouse were standing, with a double portcullis, arrow slits, openings for dropping missiles, and a dungeon cut from the bedrock, and the whitewashed stone was meant to be seen across a landscape still marked by an older boundary. The first major stage of building is said to have run until Mortimer’s fall in 1322.

His nephew is said to have finished the castle before his own death in 1330. The royal mason Master James of St George, from Savoy, is described as the probable author of the plan, because the form resembles Beaumaris and Harlech in some respects, and he may have gone on advising as he did at other royal castles in Wales. The west side of the courtyard is still largely of about 1300, though the upper part of the north end was rebuilt.

The land under the castle had a longer border history. Offa’s Dyke, Clawdd Offa, is the great linear earthwork that roughly follows the border between England and Wales. It is named for Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, who is traditionally believed to have ordered it, although archaeological dates show earlier origins and the original purpose is debated. It marked a line between Anglian Mercia and Welsh kingdoms such as Powys and Gwent.

A study in 2014 indicated a roughly late sixth-century date for one part of the dyke, with radiocarbon results of 430 to 652 at 95 percent confidence, which has been read as Offa expanding earthworks that already existed. The bank and ditch could be as much as 65 feet wide, including the ditch, and 8 feet high. The known extent of about 129 kilometres makes it the longest ancient monument in the United Kingdom. At Chirk the dyke passes through the park to the north-west of the castle, within about 200 yards of the walls.

A drawing of 1742 labels it King Offa’s Ditch, with an ornamental lake beyond. Part of the earthwork was submerged when that lake was made, and part of the bank at the north end was removed in the landscaping. The park itself helped to preserve what remained. A length of about 490 metres through the grounds is a scheduled monument.

The bank there reaches about 2 metres in height and about 1 metre in width in the general description of that scheduled length, which also says that recent excavation near Chirk suggests some sections may take in earlier earthworks. The dyke is described as a nominal frontier between Saxon Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms to the west, and as one of the great engineering works to survive from the early medieval centuries in Britain.

In 2013, unauthorised damage to a scheduled section of the dyke near Chirk led to emergency recording. Samples of redeposited turf from that work produced three radiocarbon dates in the period 430 to 651, and a single later date of 887 to 1019. Those results were a terminus post quem, a date after which the bank was built, and the gap between them was not resolved. That damage also sat at the start of the discussions that led to the Historic Environment Act of 2016 in Wales.

Excavation in the castle park in 2018 and 2019, on the stretch where the lake and the landscaping had hidden the line, was a different intervention. The 2018 trench began at 29 metres by 1.5 metres and was later widened on the north side for 20 metres of its length, to a full width of 3 metres. In 2019 that trench was partly dug again and extended east, and a small trench 5 metres by 2 metres was opened to the south. One account of the return in June 2019 says the 2018 work had already shown a steep-sided ditch 3 metres deep and a shallow pit or ditch end beneath the bank.

The completed section was then described as a bank about 11 metres wide at the base, with lower layers surviving up to half a metre at the centre, and a pit at least 3 metres across and 0.45 metres deep. Charcoal and samples for optically stimulated luminescence were taken from the bank and from the base of the pit. The published section of the same seasons describes the pre-dyke feature as a large shallow pit at least 1.5 metres in diameter and 0.4 metres deep, filled by four deposits of silty clay, the earliest containing charcoal. The surviving base of the bank was a firm silty clay up to 0.4 metres deep, with shale and cobbles, extending about 7 metres across the trench, and mottled pale grey clay with iron panning that may be a buried turf.

Under it, a pale silty clay under a crust of iron panning could not be shown to be an older bank layer rather than an old ground surface. The ditch was at least 6 metres wide and up to 2.8 metres deep, with a V-shaped profile and a vertically sided trough at the bottom, 0.5 metres wide and 1 metre deep, of a kind not observed before on this earthwork and likened to an ankle-breaker. Elsewhere the ditch of the dyke is more often a rounded U. An older cutting about 400 yards north-east of the north boundary of Chirk Park recorded a flat-bottomed ditch that was almost square.

Most of the fills in the castle trench seemed to have weathered from the bank. The lowest was a fine blue silt with iron panning and rounded cobbles, 0.14 metres deep and partly waterlogged. Above it lay 0.3 metres of silty clay, then 0.9 metres of stiff blue-grey clay that contained bone fragments and one undiagnostic unglazed sherd. Six bulk samples and two luminescence cores were taken from the lower fills.

Later silty clay and stone, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century glass and ceramics, were read as the demolition of the bank and its dumping into the ditch. There was no counterscarp on the west lip. A rifle cartridge of .303 calibre, of the early twentieth century, came from a peaty surface over silt that contained coal, and was used to show at least two phases of re-landscaping, one in the mid-eighteenth century and one in the early twentieth. At the time that account was written, the scientific dates were not yet known.

A later paper describes the radiocarbon and luminescence dates obtained by 2021 from the Chirk Castle trench and from Wat’s Dyke at Erddig, after the first report had gone to press without them and after further delay. A public account of dates from complementary methods at Chirk, at Chirk Castle Park, at Plas Offa, at Erddig and at Gobowen provisionally places the building of both dykes in the late eighth to early ninth century, the period of Mercian hegemony. That provisional placing sits beside the earlier radiocarbon results from the damaged section near Chirk, and beside the wider evidence that some parts of the dyke were begun in the late sixth century. The castle summary that says the park was dug in 2018 and 2018 is the same pair of seasons otherwise given as 2018 and 2019.

About thirty-five people a day visited the castle trenches, and guided tours drew 550 people over two days in 2018. Those figures leave out the volunteers. More than a thousand people in all met the work at Chirk and at Erddig.

The Battle of Crogen belongs to the same valley, more than a century before the castle. It is an engagement said to have taken place in the summer of 1165, during the campaign of Henry II of England against an alliance of Welsh princedoms led by Owain Gwynedd. Later Welsh chronicles recorded that a detachment of Welsh troops inflicted casualties on the Anglo-Norman army in the Ceiriog valley, and that Henry then abandoned the campaign after severe weather stopped an attempt to cross the Berwyn mountains. It is not agreed whether the valley saw a pitched battle, a series of smaller fights, a minor skirmish, or no fighting at all.

One reading treats the battle as folklore rather than a settled event. Contemporary accounts are few. Nineteenth-century and later tellings lean heavily on David Powel’s Historie of Cambria of 1584, which is an unreliable source. Austin Lane Poole concluded that no fighting took place in 1165.

The background was the March. William the Conqueror’s marcher lords held their own courts and a licence to fortify. In July 1163 several Welsh princes did homage to Henry II at Woodstock and gave guarantees of peace. Henry planned a punitive campaign in 1164, aimed especially at Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth, who had broken that settlement along the border.

Welsh chronicles answered that Henry’s own marcher lords, particularly Roger de Clare, Earl of Hertford, had failed the agreement first. Rhys attacked the castles of Mabwynion and Aberrheidol and overran much of Ceredigion. By the autumn of 1164 Owain ap Gruffydd of Gwynedd was in open rebellion and wrote to Louis VII of France, asking to be counted among his friends. The Welsh annals speak of a joint effort, unusual among princedoms that usually competed, to throw off Angevin rule.

Early in 1165 Owain’s son Dafydd ravaged the cantref of Tegeingl and threatened the Norman castles at Rhuddlan, Basingwerk and Prestatyn. Henry returned from Normandy in May and gathered a large force at Shrewsbury, including continental mercenaries. Welsh annals said he meant a complete conquest. A more limited reading is that he wanted the submission of Rhys and Owain on harder terms than in 1163.

The road from Shrewsbury led first into the minor princedoms of northern Powys, which had not been at war with him. The later move toward Oswestry and the Ceiriog may mean he had decided to strike Owain first. Owain raised an army at Corwen, in the cantref of Penllyn, with his brother Cadwaladr, with Rhys ap Gruffydd from Deheubarth, with Iorwerth Goch ap Maredudd from Mochnant, and with Owain Cyfeiliog from southern Powys, who had been on good terms with Henry until then. Powysian support may have been reluctant, because Gwynedd had lately overrun Powysian land in Penllyn, and Henry may have hoped a show of force would bring the lords of Powys back.

The Brut y Tywysogion, drawing on material now lost, says that after a long wait in the tents, with neither side daring to attack, the king moved his host into the wood of Dyffryn Ceiriog and had the wood felled. A few picked Welshmen, in the absence of their leaders, met him there, and many of the doughtiest fell on both sides. The king and the advanced forces then camped on the Berwyn. Henry’s woodsmen may have been clearing a pass, or trying to force an open fight.

The chronicles suggest an ambush, possibly near a gap in the dyke. Powel, in 1584, claimed the fight happened while Henry lay at Oswestry and involved only a party sent to try the passages. The Gwynedd chronicle O Oes Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu places the fight at Coed Ceiriog. Powel was the first to put it at a narrow gap in Offa’s ditch at the castle of Crogen.

The name Battle of Crogen first appears in 1778, in Thomas Pennant, who wrote that the conflict is sometimes called the battle of Corwen but more properly that of Crogen, because it happened beneath Castell Crogen, the present Chirk Castle. Later work has confirmed that the medieval Castell Crogen was near Llandderfel. Pennant may have confused that name with the townships of Crogen Iddon and Crogen Wladys in the Ceiriog valley. A story that Hubert de St Clare, constable of Colchester, died by taking an arrow meant for Henry is the siege of Bridgnorth in 1155, inserted by Powel from another chronicle.

It does not belong to 1165.

Henry went on into the Berwyns, perhaps by the pass still called Ffordd y Saeson, the English Road, making for Corwen. High wind and torrential rain made resupply impossible and men began to die of exposure. He retreated within days without bringing the main Welsh force to battle. The Brut says the army was oppressed by a mighty tempest and great torrents of rain.

Gerald of Wales tells the same story and adds that Henry failed to listen to local advisers. Modern historians generally think the losses in the valley were relatively light. The place of the skirmishes is called Adwy’r Beddau, the gap of the graves. The dead were said to have been buried in the fosse of the dyke, and an account of 1697 claimed the graves were still visible.

One early nineteenth-century account also calls the place Adwy’r Bedwen, the gap of the birch. Parcels of land on either side were Tir y Beddau, the land of the graves. Henry returned to Shrewsbury and ordered the blinding of twenty-two hostages held since 1163, two of them sons of Owain. He moved the army to Chester.

Welsh annals said he was waiting for a fleet from Dublin, under a recent treaty, but he abandoned the plan and went back to Anjou. The failure encouraged his opponents. Within a year he was again on good terms with the princes of Powys. Owain Cyfeiliog and Iorwerth Goch were in friendly contact with his court within months.

By the next year Rhys and Owain had resumed attacks on marcher lands. Henry then turned to diplomacy. Rhys later met him, was confirmed in lands the Normans had held, and sent troops to Normandy, becoming in effect one of the great feudatories of the Angevin empire. It has been suggested that Henry’s withdrawal of support from the marcher barons after 1165 pushed them to seek lands elsewhere and contributed to the Norman invasion of Ireland.

The Oak at the Gate of the Dead, Derwen Adwy’r Meirwon, also called the Crogen Oak, is a Quercus robur near the dyke. It is thought to be more than a thousand years old, and it has been associated with the reign of Ecgberht of Wessex, from 802 to 839. If that age is right, the tree was standing in 1165 and has been called the only living witness to the fight. It lies on the path that follows the dyke, at the entrance to the Ceiriog valley, next to the public road.

One account puts it about 300 yards from the castle. Another puts it around 300 metres, or 980 feet, from the castle. A plaque honouring the link was unveiled in March 2009. In cold weather in February 2010 the tree split in two, and Wrexham County Borough Council then protected it with a tree preservation order.

It was identified and named in 2007 by Rob McBride, a recorder for a woodland charity, and it has been shown on BBC Wales television and on BBC Radio Wales, and on BBC Radio Shropshire and a countryside programme. BBC Cymru Wales is the division, established in 1964 and based in Cardiff, which operates the Welsh television services and the radio services that include BBC Radio Wales. The first broadcast in Wales was on 13 February 1923 from the station 5WA at 19 Castle Street in Cardiff. During the Second World War the regional services ceased and the Home Service was broadcast from London, though some Welsh content continued, and the Bangor base housed the variety department, a fact that was not officially announced.

That wartime arrangement of the broadcaster is separate from the later opening of rooms at the castle to evacuees.

The castle itself is a creation of the conquest under Edward I, not of the twelfth-century campaign. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been recognised as Prince of Wales by the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267, holding land he had conquered in the Four Cantrefs of Perfeddwlad. His rule was heavy-handed, especially on the March, where he used hostages and intimidation, and he quarrelled with the Welsh church. In 1272 he lost a major fight to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and left south-east Wales.

His brother Dafydd and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys fled to the English court. Llywelyn refused homage, planned to marry Eleanor, daughter of Simon de Montfort, and was suspected of intrigue with her brothers. In November 1276 Edward declared war. The first operations were under Mortimer, the king’s brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and William de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick.

In July 1277 Edward invaded with 15,500 men, 9,000 of them Welsh. There was no major battle. By the Treaty of Aberconwy in November 1277 Llywelyn kept only Gwynedd, and the title of Prince of Wales.

War returned in 1282. For the Welsh it was about national identity and Welsh law, after the English legal system had been used to dispossess landowners. For Edward it became a war of conquest, to put an end to what he called the malice of the Welsh. Dafydd rebelled first, discontented with his reward of 1277.

Llywelyn and others joined, and the opening Welsh attack succeeded. In June, Gloucester was defeated at Llandeilo Fawr. On 6 November, while Archbishop John Peckham was negotiating, Luke de Tany, Edward’s commander on Anglesey, crossed a pontoon bridge and was ambushed at the Battle of Moel-y-don. On 11 December Llywelyn was lured into a trap and killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge.

Dafydd was captured in June 1283, taken to Shrewsbury, and executed as a traitor the following year. His head was set on London Bridge. One account of the Mortimers says that Roger Mortimer of Chirk and his brother Edmund were implicated in the plot that drew Llywelyn out of Gwynedd with promises of allegiance, and that Chirk helped Edmund kill Llywelyn in 1282 and carried the severed head to Edward I. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 incorporated the principality into England, with sheriffs and English criminal law, while some Welsh custom remained in property disputes.

Edward planted English towns at Flint, Aberystwyth and Rhuddlan, and banned the local Welsh from living in them. James of St George, whom Edward had met in Savoy on the way back from crusade, directed the great castles of Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech, meant as fortresses, palaces and seats of justice. Four of the eight castles Edward founded in Wales were concentric. Arrow slits spread in castle walls across Europe from this programme.

Local rebellions in 1287 and 1288 followed Edward’s failure to reward former Welsh allies. A more serious revolt came in 1294 under Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, fed by occupation, colonial-style government and heavy taxation. It was put down, 200 hostages were taken, and rules against the Welsh bearing arms or living in the new boroughs probably date from then. In 1284 Edward’s son, the later Edward II, was born at Caernarfon.

In 1301 at Lincoln he became the first English prince to be invested as Prince of Wales. The king’s wars of the 1290s, including the fight with Philip IV of France over Gascony, laid four lay subsidies on his subjects in 1294 to 1297 and raised over £200,000, beside the wool duty called the maltolt. The castle at Chirk belongs to the years of that pressure, after the revolt of 1294.

Roger Mortimer, first Baron Mortimer of Chirk, was born about 1256 and died on 3 August 1326. He was the third son of Roger Mortimer, a marcher lord, and Maud de Braose. The family had been raised for loyalty to the Plantagenets. He was said to be a lecherous and violent man.

He married Lucy de la Wavre, daughter of Sir Robert la Wavre of Hampton Wafer in Herefordshire, and they are presumed married by 8 June 1286, when he was presented at Tedstone Wafer. They had one legitimate son, also Roger. In 1269 Gruffydd II, prince of Powys Fadog, died and his lands were split among four sons. In 1277 the eldest, Madog II, died.

His brothers Llywelyn and Owain were children, exposed to their brother Gruffydd Fychan. Edward appointed Mortimer guardian of the two boys. Four years later their bodies washed up in the River Dee. Mortimer was accused of their murder.

Guilty or not, he received their lands, the cantref of Swydd y Waun. He may have needed those lands to raise his nephew Roger, whose guardian he was. Chirkland, Swydd y Waun, is described as a marcher lordship created in 1282 from parts of Powys Fadog and granted to him, the third son of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, and administered from the castle he then built. The cantref contained the commotes of Cynllaith and Nanheudwy.

The lordship remained separate until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 to 1542, after which it became the hundred of Chirk in the new county of Denbighshire. Most of the former lordship now lies in Powys. He is also said to have been created Lord of Chirk on 6 February, in the same passage that records him at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, when William Wallace was defeated. The year of that February day is not stated there.

He and his brother Edmund supported the king’s policy in Scotland and on the March. He was with the young Edward II for the negotiation of the marriage to Isabella of France, arrived at Dover on 19 January 1308, and then left the king to cross the Channel. He held the constableships of Blaenyllfori and Dinas in north Wales and was effectively a surrogate prince. He avoided an early clash when Piers Gaveston was made regent.

He was ordered to break the siege that Gruffydd de la Pole, of the line of Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, laid to Welshpool Castle in a claim against Hawise, the heiress, and her husband John de Charlton. Gruffydd refused royal arbitration. John de Cromwell could not pacify him. Abandoned by Thomas of Lancaster, Gruffydd found support from the Earl of Arundel, which was treated as treason.

Mortimer took him prisoner. Lancaster rowed with him at the inquiry in Westminster and swore the Mortimers everlasting enmity. At Caerlaverock in 1300 Mortimer had been with the royal bodyguard. In March 1314 the king ordered him to find 3,000 Welshmen for Scotland.

They left the March on 27 May. The larger force left Berwick on 17 June, reached Edinburgh three days later, and on Sunday 23 June the lead knights saw Stirling. The battle was on Monday 24 June. Mortimer was probably with the household guard, among about 500 knights who rallied to the king, and he may have been in the rearguard under the Earl of Pembroke as Edward fled into the castle.

He has been read as an adviser to the Welsh archers. At the York parliament of November 1314 the Mortimers were in the ascendant, aligned with Pembroke and Arundel in a middle party against the Despensers. Hugh Despenser the Younger nursed a grievance over Evesham in 1265, where a Mortimer grandfather had killed his grandfather.

On 28 January 1316 Llywelyn Bren attacked the sheriff of Glamorgan outside Caerphilly, in a rising against Payn de Turberville after famine and heavy tax. The Earl of Hereford and the Mortimers were ordered to crush it. A royal army of 2,150 marched north from Bristol. Llywelyn surrendered.

Mortimer may have been at the siege of Bristol on 26 July 1316, just after his nephew Edmund’s wedding at Ernwood, near Kinlet, to Elizabeth Badlesmere. Lancastrian pressure removed him from office in January 1315. When the principality was quiet again he was reappointed Justiciar of North Wales in October 1316. A history of the castle says that in 1308 Edward II had already elevated him to Justiciar of Wales, with quasi-royal authority.

By the 1320s he was the leading Mortimer and in fierce competition with Hugh Despenser the Elder and the Younger, who seized Gower and other lordships. The Mortimers surrendered in January 1322 after the king and the recalled Despensers came up the Severn and crossed at Shrewsbury. Mortimer of Chirk and his nephew, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, were sent to the Tower rather than being killed at once. Their men went to Wallingford.

One account says he was mortally wounded in the war. Another says he lived on for about three years. He died in the Tower on 3 August 1326, apparently of injuries from the war, and was buried at St Augustine’s Priory in Bristol. The history of the house places his imprisonment and his death in the Tower in 1326, and says the rebellion against the crown brought that end.

His nephew, Roger Mortimer, third Baron Mortimer of Wigmore and first Earl of March, was born on 25 April 1287 and died on 29 November 1330. He may have been fostered as a boy in his uncle’s household. He married the heiress Joan de Geneville, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from November 1316, and led the marchers against the Despensers. His men wore green with a yellow sleeve.

After the surrender of 1322 he escaped the Tower and reached France. Queen Isabella joined him there. Historians differ on when they became lovers. One modern view is that the affair began in England and that she at first left him to the Tower, meeting him again in Paris at Christmas 1325.

They landed in the Orwell on 24 September 1326 with Prince Edward and Henry, Earl of Lancaster. Edward II was captured on 16 November and abdicated. Edward III was crowned on 1 February 1327. Edward II died in captivity on 21 September 1327.

Mortimer is alleged to have arranged the killing at Berkeley. None of the theories is proved. For three years he was the de facto ruler. In March 1330 he had Edmund, Earl of Kent, executed.

In October 1330, at Nottingham, Edward III and his companions seized Mortimer and Isabella through an underground passage. Isabella is said to have begged, Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer. He was condemned without trial and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330. His body hung for two days.

Isabella buried him at the Greyfriars in Coventry. Edward III later allowed the body to go to Wigmore Abbey, where Joan was buried beside him. He is said to have finished Chirk Castle before that death. The history of the house says that after the uncle’s fall the castle passed briefly to the Earl of Arundel, who was then beheaded by this nephew, Roger of Wigmore, after he and Isabella had deposed Edward II, and that in 1330 Edward III had Roger executed.

The FitzAlan earls of Arundel held Chirk from 1335 to 1415, were largely absent, and made only modest improvements. The building account says the castle then passed through the earls of Arundel and the Beauforts, and to Sir William Stanley about 1475.

Throughout the later Middle Ages, ownership is described as perilous. One history says five holders were executed for treason, their lands confiscated, and their tenants left in the uncertainty of marcher politics. In 1495, after Sir William Stanley, then the owner, had been executed for treason, the crown held the estate again. It was administered by the Tudors, with large repairs before 1529, until 1563, when the queen granted it to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Elizabeth I is named as the giver, and Dudley as her favourite. By the late sixteenth century the castle was a neglected and unfashionable military relic. One account says it was run as a March castle by the Layards Edwardes of Chirk until the Star Chamber removed them, that the Edwardes coat of arms is preserved in the castle, and that the Edwardes became the Barony of Kensington. The purchase that follows is documented from another side.

The building account says that in 1595 the merchant adventurer Thomas Myddleton bought it. The family record and the history of the house say Sir Thomas Myddelton bought Chirk in 1595 for £5,000. The castle summary says Sir Thomas Myddelton bought it in 1593 for £5,000, reckoned at about £18 million as of 2024. The preface to the castle accounts for 1605 to 1666 says he purchased the lordship by a deed of 14 August 1595 from Lord St John of Bletsoe, and that possession was given on 16 August by livery of seisin.

Lord St John named as his attorneys Sir Robert Salusbury of Rug, John Salusbury of Llewenny, Roger Puleston of Emral, and John Lloyd of Yale. The witnesses included William Myddelton of Gwaenynog, John Conway of Bodrhyddan, William Penryn, who had been steward to Lord St John and remained steward to Sir Thomas, and Hugh, Robert and Foulk Myddelton, brothers of the purchaser. The lordship ran into Denbighshire, Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. The price covered the deer in Yollyn Park, also called Park Yollyn, and in Brinkinallt Park, also called Black Park, the chapel of Chirk and its tithes, and the right to hold courts leet and courts baron, with royalties, view of frankpledge, felons’ goods, fugitives’ goods, traitors’ goods and deodands, and the power to appoint officers.

Sir Thomas lived chiefly in London, at the time of the purchase in Mincing Lane, in the parish of St Dunstan in the East.

Sir Thomas Myddelton was born in 1550 and died on 12 August 1631. He is called the fourth son of Richard Myddelton, governor of Denbigh Castle, and Jane Dryhurst, and the accounts preface calls him the third son of that Richard. As a youth he was apprenticed to a London grocer. He was a freeman of the Grocers’ Company in 1582, a founding member of the East India Company, and a benefactor of expeditions associated with Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins.

The history of the house says that he and his father Richard were founders of the East India Company, and that Thomas invested in the Virginia Company and later lent money. He was knighted in July 1603, sheriff of London in 1604, and lord mayor in 1613. He was a member of Parliament for the City of London, and also, on the family archive, member for Merioneth in 1597, lord lieutenant in 1599, and member for London again from 1624 to 1626. With Rowland Heylyn he paid for a Welsh Bible in a form meant for everyday use, described as the first popular-format Welsh Bible.

His brother Hugh was the projector of the New River, which brought fresh water to London from 1613. Thomas married four times. The first, on 18 February 1584, was to Hester Saltonstall, daughter of Sir Richard Saltonstall, and she died in July 1587, leaving Thomas of Chirk and a son Richard. Later wives were Elizabeth Olmstead, Elizabeth Brooke, and Anna Vanaker.

He gave Chirk to his eldest son as a wedding present. He cleared redundant military works, built domestic ranges and service and farm buildings, and added a clock tower. The courtyard has a bellcote of 1609, later refurbished, with a clock face of 1960 over a two-light window. On the north side an inscription over a kitchen arch reads that this new building and the tower were built all in one year by Thom Myddleton, knight, in 1636, which is after the father’s death and belongs to the son.

He became Denbighshire’s greatest landowner, opened copper mines, and fixed the family’s local authority. The motto In veritate triumpho stands over the entrance. In 1615 he bought an Essex manor nearer his business in Tower Street. In 1628 and 1629 he bought the crown lordship of Arwystli and Cyfeiliog and later sold it again.

His younger son Timothy inherited the Essex estates.

Sir Thomas Myddelton the son was born in 1586, in Mincing Lane, and died in 1666. He was an English-born Welsh landowner, politician and soldier, and he seems to have thought of himself as Welsh though he probably could not speak the language. He matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, on 22 February 1605, entered Gray’s Inn in 1607, and then handled his father’s business in Wales. A lawsuit with a neighbour at Chirk may have pushed him to seek election in 1624, first for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, then, in 1625, to sit for Denbighshire.

He married Margaret Savile of Wakefield, and then Mary Napier of Luton Hoo, by whom he had seven sons and six daughters. He was in the Long Parliament, of the large Presbyterian group, more concerned to unite Puritan members against Catholic influence than to lead. The English Civil War, from 1642 to 1651, was part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, from 1639 to 1653. The first war was about the balance between Parliament and Charles I.

It ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. Wales, annexed to the kingdom of England, was under the same strains. Supporters of the king were called Cavaliers and supporters of Parliament Roundheads, both names beginning as insults. In August 1642 Denbighshire petitioned the king for protection against the ordinances of Parliament, and offered a regiment and £1,000.

In the following January, while Myddelton was away, the local Royalist commander Robert Ellice attacked Chirk, put in a garrison, and took Myddelton’s money and plate to fund a foot regiment. The loss is supposed to have turned a moderate politician into a fighting man. In June 1643 he was made sergeant-major-general for north Wales, with no earlier military experience. Parliament let him raise troops and charge the cost to Royalist estates, and later he claimed to be £35,000 out of pocket.

From August 1643 he campaigned with his brother-in-law Thomas Mytton and Sir William Brereton against Royalist garrisons. William Salesbury held Denbigh, and a Royalist force landed from Ireland in November, so they did not retake the north. A fresh commission in 1644 confirmed him. His men took Newtown on 4 September and Montgomery Castle the next day.

On 17 September, with Mytton and Brereton, he defeated a Royalist attempt to recover Montgomery, destroying much of the Royalist field army in north Wales. He still could not hold Denbighshire or retake Ruthin or Chirk, which he besieged late in December. The self-denying ordinance of May 1645 recalled him to Westminster and gave the command to Mytton. He recovered his estates at the end of the war in 1646.

His son Thomas was made governor of Chirk Castle on 7 March 1646 and deputy lieutenant of Denbighshire on 2 July 1646.

In the second civil war of 1648 he again had responsibility for north Wales, where Sir John Owen’s short rebellion was broken at Y Dalar Hir in June, but he left the field to Mytton. He opposed the trial and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. He was excluded in Pride’s Purge. In 1651 a garrison was put into Chirk because he was suspected of contact with Charles II, and it stayed until he entered a bond of £20,000 for good behaviour.

He was approached for a plot in 1655 and did not join. He spent much of the 1650s at Chirk, in coal, and at the occasional race or cockfight. The castle summary says he was a Parliamentarian in the English Civil War and became a Royalist in the Cheshire rising of 1659 led by George Booth. The history of the house says Chirk was attacked by both Royalist and Parliamentarian forces, that his loyalties shifted, and that the castle was heavily damaged but survived.

George Booth, born on 18 December 1622, was a Cheshire Presbyterian who had fought for Parliament and sat for the county. In May 1659 he was described to Charles II as considerable in his county, a Presbyterian, and a man whose promises the king might trust. An uprising was arranged for 5 August 1659 in several districts. Booth had a commission to command in Lancashire, Cheshire and north Wales.

Only the Cheshire rising had early success. Myddelton joined with an energy he had not shown in 1651 or 1655, beside old opponents such as Sir John Owen and Edward Broughton. He welcomed rebel cavalry to Chirk and sent a trumpeter to the Oswestry militia, who refused. On 7 August he drew his sword in the marketplace at Wrexham and proclaimed Charles II.

Booth, who had avoided naming Charles in his own proclamations in the hope of winning moderates, did not welcome the gesture. Booth gained Chester on 19 August and issued a proclamation that arms had been taken for the freedom of Parliament, the known laws, liberty and property, then marched toward York. John Lambert’s troops defeated the rising at Winnington Bridge near Northwich. One account puts that defeat on 19 August, and says Myddelton was probably there.

Lambert then besieged Chirk, where the eldest son Thomas and other Welsh rebels held out, until 24 August. Myddelton himself went into hiding and was thought to have left the country. Booth escaped dressed as a woman, was found at Newport Pagnell on 23 August while being shaved, and was sent to the Tower. Myddelton was ordered to forfeit his estates, but the order was overtaken when the excluded members were recalled in February 1660.

The son who held the castle was given two months to leave the country unless Parliament pardoned him. The building account says the upper parts of the towers were probably demolished in 1659, after damage in the civil war and a limited demolition. The castle summary says the castle was partly demolished in the English Civil War and then rebuilt, and that mullioned and transomed windows were put in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the siege the dismantling had gone far enough that the house was uninhabitable until the 1670s.

The English Restoration was the return of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660 to England, Scotland and Ireland, ending the Commonwealth that had followed the execution of Charles I. Richard Cromwell had given up the Protectorate. George Monck marched south from Scotland. Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, landed at Dover on 25 May 1660, entered London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.

The Indemnity and Oblivion Act pardoned most former opponents and excluded the regicides. Myddelton was recalled with the other expelled members and was pardoned. Booth was freed, sat in the Convention Parliament, carried the Commons’ message to Charles at The Hague, accepted £10,000 after refusing £20,000, and on 20 April 1661, at the coronation, was created Baron Delamer. The history of the house says the castle was returned to the family by Charles II.

There followed a restoration over several generations. A library of national importance and examples of musketry survive from that period.

The son who had held the castle in 1659 is a point of disagreement inside the family record. The life of the father calls Sir Thomas Myddelton, first baronet, the eldest son and heir, born in 1624. The baronet’s own notice calls him the second son of the Parliamentary general, and the grandson of the lord mayor. He was born on 2 November 1624, matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, on 20 March 1640, sat for Flint in 1646, was excluded in Pride’s Purge in December 1648, and took part in Booth’s rising.

He was pardoned in 1660, sat for Montgomery in the Convention Parliament, and was created a baronet of Chirke in the county of Denbigh on 4 July 1660. In 1661 he was elected for Denbighshire to the Cavalier Parliament and sat until he died. He died in London on 13 July 1663, aged 38, in his father’s lifetime, and was buried at Chirk. He married Mary Cholmondley of Vale Royal and then Jane Trevor.

His eldest son Thomas succeeded to the baronetcy. The father, still alive, said his health was much impaired by age and the winter. He sat in the Convention Parliament of 1660 and stood down for that eldest son in 1661. When the son died in 1663 he backed John Wynne of Melai as the next member for Denbighshire.

He died in 1666. He was said to have lost as much as £80,000 in the wars, yet land and coal probably made him one of the richest men in the kingdom. His will called him a Protestant, maintaining the three creeds of the Church of England as in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and it stayed politically evasive.

The fabric records the rebuilding. The inner doors carry the inscribed date 1669 and the initials T M. The east range is of 1664 to 1678, a two-storey range of seven mullioned and transomed windows of three lights. Sir Thomas Myddelton, the second baronet, worked on that range in 1673 to 1678 under the guidance of Lady Wilbrahim of Weston in Staffordshire, in the style of William Wynde.

The long gallery in the east wing, 30 metres long, was begun in 1670 for the second baronet and finished in 1678, probably by the same team she used at Weston Park, where she is also called Lady Myddleton. It has bolection panelling, an acanthus cornice, broken pediments, and a heraldic ceiling. Tiles by Minton and Hardman were commissioned in 1847 and 1848. The north side is of about 1630 to 1640, with later changes.

The south range, which contains the great chamber and the chapel, is described as rebuilt about 1400 after the castle was reduced in size, and the south side is also dated to 1529, of three storeys, with the imprint of nine gables from seventeenth-century roofs, later taken up to a level parapet. The chapel, in the south-east corner, was fitted out in the 1670s. It rises through ground and first floors. A five-light east window was made in 1894 by Sir Arthur Blomfield, replacing one by Edward Pugin.

In 1912 Lord Howard de Walden converted the chapel to a music room. Further work on the castle is dated 1912 to 1913.

A north view of the castle is given to Peter Tillemans and dated 1725. Peter Tillemans was a Flemish painter, born in Antwerp about 1684 and dead on 5 December 1734, best known for sporting and topographical pictures. With John Wootton and James Seymour he was one of the founders of the English school of sporting painting. He came to England in 1708, brought by a picture dealer named Turner, and stayed.

He copied battle scenes, especially those of Jacques Courtois, and small genre pictures in the manner of David Teniers. By 1711 he was in Godfrey Kneller’s academy, giving his speciality as landscape. He died at the house of Cox Macro at Little Haugh Hall in Suffolk, and was buried on 7 December at Stowlangtoft. The 1725 view belongs to the years when the gardens were being made formal.

From the early seventeenth century there were formal gardens and kitchen gardens beside the castle, probably on the east. After the civil war an outer courtyard was built to the north, walled, with an iron gateway. By 1719 the courtyard had been turfed and the gates replaced by a screen made by Robert and John Davies of Bersham. Thomas Badeslade’s panorama, published in 1742, shows the baroque result: formal gardens east of the castle, a walled outer court, and kitchen gardens to the north.

Most of that layout was swept away in the 1760s and 1770s by William Emes for Richard Myddelton, including a ha-ha and the moving of the Davies gates to the New Hall entrance. Those works largely made the park as it is. The earthwork of the dyke was partly drowned by the new lake. William Emes, born in 1729 or 1730 and dead on 13 March 1803, had been head gardener to Sir Nathaniel Curzon at Kedleston from 1756 until 1760, when Robert Adam took the grounds.

His manner was close to that of Lancelot Brown. He worked for many years at Chirk and at Erddig, where his involvement lasted about twenty-five years. Trees and water were his materials: serpentine lakes, clumps, and belts. At Erddig he used parts of Wat’s Dyke and also removed parts of it near the house.

The eighteenth-century owner Richard Myddelton employed Joseph Turner, surveyor of Hawarden, to remodel the state rooms in 1766 to 1778, supervised by John Cooper of Beaumaris. The history of the house says that in the 1760s Sir Richard Myddelton married the heiress Elizabeth Rushout, and that Turner made a suite of drawing rooms, a dining chamber and a saloon, with plasterwork in the Adam taste, Ionic columns and a cantilevered stair. The open-well stair, with an iron balustrade and marbled Ionic columns, is dated 1777 to 1778 and was restored to that design in the 1950s. The state dining room, formerly the chamber over the buttery, was restored in 1963.

The saloon, the great dining room of the seventeenth century, has a ceiling of fifteen panels with cameos by G. Mullins, an Irish landscape painter, and a marble Corinthian chimneypiece with jasper by Bromfield of Liverpool, of 1773. The corner drawing room was completed in 1796. The kitchen and the room later called the Cromwell Hall, the dining room of the seventeenth century, were classicised about 1778.

Charlotte Myddelton inherited on the death of her father in 1796. She had married Robert Biddulph, who took the name Robert Myddelton-Biddulph. The castle passed to their son Robert. Colonel Robert Myddelton Biddulph, of 1805 to 1872, brought in Augustus Pugin in the mid-1840s.

Pugin designed a facade for the east range and, with J. G. Crace, reworked the interiors. He re-medievalised the Cromwell Hall in 1845 and 1846, with a stone fireplace by Myers and painted arms in cusped recesses.

A single-storey range against the east front, buttressed, with a crenellated porch, is his son’s work of about 1846, and a door by Pugin is dated 1846. The arms over the main door are his. In 1846 he wrote that such a job as Chirk was enough to drive any man mad. He died in 1852, and his son Edward continued the work.

The family later removed many of those Victorian changes and brought back some of the neoclassical rooms. The crenellated parapets of the towers are of the nineteenth century, replacing the upper stages demolished in 1659 and an eighteenth-century balustrade. Richard Myddelton, the eighteenth-century owner, is distinct in the family list from Richard Myddelton of 1764 to 1796 and from Richard Myddelton of 1837 to 1913.

By 1900 agricultural rents had fallen and death duties pressed. Richard Myddelton, who lived from 1837 to 1913, opened the castle to the public and gave the proceeds to charity. By 1911 he had auctioned land and buildings and leased Chirk to Thomas Scott-Ellis, eighth Baron Howard de Walden. The lease is also described as running from before the First World War until after the Second.

Scott-Ellis was born in London on 9 May 1880, the only son of the seventh baron, and died in London on 5 November 1946. He was known as Tommy. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, commissioned into the 10th Hussars on 19 April 1899, served in the South African war, and returned to service in the Royal Tank Corps in the First World War. He succeeded in 1899 and took his estates in 1901, including the Marylebone property that made him known as Britain’s wealthiest bachelor.

He leased Chirk from 1911 in preparation for his marriage in 1912 to Margherita Dorothy van Raalte, and it was his main residence after the First World War until 1946. He learned Welsh, wrote operas on the Mabinogion under the name T. E. Ellis with the composer Joseph Holbrooke, supported the National Eisteddfod, and is credited with creating the National Theatre of Wales.

He was president of the National Museum of Wales and a governor of the National Library of Wales. Augustus John visited and found him one morning in a full suit of ancient armour, reading a newspaper. The history of the house says he hosted Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. In 1918 the castle was a film location for Victory and Peace, directed by Herbert Brenon.

Herbert Brenon, born Alexander Herbert Reginald St. John Brenon on 13 January 1880 at 25 Crosthwaite Park in Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire, and dead on 21 June 1958, was an Irish-born director, actor and screenwriter of silent films, working in the United States from the age of sixteen. He directed until 1940. The castle notice of the 1918 filming is the link between that career and Chirk.

It does not describe the plot.

Scott-Ellis commissioned the Chirk War Memorial as a memorial of the First World War. The English sculptor Eric Gill designed and made it. Lady Howard de Walden unveiled it in October 1920. It stands on a traffic island at the east end of Station Avenue, at the junction with Church Street, in the town, not in the castle court.

It became a listed building of the second-highest grade in 1998. It is a tapered square obelisk of Portland stone. Each face ends in a pointed gable, and the ridges meet in a cross. The south face has a soldier in profile, in greatcoat and helmet, hunched over rifle and bayonet, above an inscription to the inhabitants and indwellers of the parish of Chirk who gave their lives in the Great War of 1914 to 1919.

The west and east faces name 66 men, 33 on each side. The north face carries a Welsh inscription of the same dedication. After the Second World War the dates 1939 to 1945 and a further 19 names were added. Around the base is a verse from the Book of Revelation, chapter 19.

The parish church of St Mary nearby holds a roll of honour. In the later part of the Second World War the baron opened parts of the castle to evacuees. He retired to his Scottish estates in 1946 and died soon after. The Myddeltons returned in 1949.

Lieutenant-Colonel Ririd Myddelton and Lady Margaret found the garden neglected. They set out to improve it, took away many of Pugin’s changes, and restored a calmer neoclassical interior. Running costs outran their means.

Ririd Myddelton was born on 25 February 1902 and died on 7 February 1988. He was named for an older Myddelton ancestor. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and served in the Coldstream Guards from 1923 to 1946. He was adjutant of the 3rd Battalion from 1928 to 1931, a staff captain in London District from 1934 to 1937, and Deputy Master of the Household until 1939, returning to that office by 1944.

He commanded the 1st Armoured Battalion of the Coldstream Guards from 1942 to 1944, including the Normandy landings and the advance across north-west Europe. From 1952 until his death in 1988 he was an extra equerry to the queen. The castle account names that queen as Elizabeth II and dates the service from 1952 until 1988. Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, was born on 21 April 1926 and died on 8 September 2022.

She was queen from 6 February 1952 until her death, a reign of 70 years and 214 days, the longest of any British monarch. Ririd was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1945, a justice of the peace in 1948, a deputy lieutenant in 1949, High Sheriff of Denbighshire in 1951 to 1952, a Knight of the Order of St John in 1961, and Vice Lieutenant of Denbigh from 1968 to 1974. His seat was the castle, and the family occupied it until 2004. He and Lady Margaret passed Chirk to the state in 1978.

Urgent repairs were then paid for by the National Land Fund, and in 1981 stewardship passed to the National Trust. The listed-building history places the purchase for the nation in 1978, together with the start of that care. Another summary keeps the family in possession until the transfer of 1981, and has them living in the house until 2004. Both the transfer of care and the continued residence are part of the record.

The collection, built over four centuries of Myddelton occupation, includes two giltwood pier glasses of 1782, made from the largest plate glass then available, Elizabeth Rushout’s harpsichord of 1742 by Burkat Shudi in oak and walnut, a Japanese chest of about 1600 covered in shagreen and counted among the earliest Japanese imports in Wales, and a full-length portrait of the servant John Wilton, who died in 1751, shown in the servants’ hall.

A third season of excavation, in September 2021, lasted eleven days and looked at buildings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century estate rather than at the dyke. An evaluation in 2019 had found remains that matched eighteenth-century maps and paintings. In 2020 the same area showed a sequence of workshops and industrial features. On limited dating evidence those workshops were at first thought to belong to the rebuilding after the civil war.

In 2020 visitors were told that the outer walls of a large two-storey building on the west side had been found, that its purpose was unknown, and that some of the objects suggested a smithy. The finds then included Victorian and Georgian pottery, historic lead-working, stained glass and clay pipes. The 2021 trenches went further. Rooms in the north wing showed floors, drains, pits and culverts, altered partitions and backfilled drains, and several phases.

Datable objects in place were few: lead weights, clay-pipe fragments and contemporary ceramic. The earliest phase ran from the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth. Two trenches downslope found part of an exterior wall 0.6 metres wide, with internal clay floors, running east to west, read as the south wing shown on the eighteenth-century map. The trenches had fallen on that outer wall, so the rooms of the wing were only partly seen.

Twenty-three volunteers gave 624 hours over the eleven days, including open days. The walls were covered with protective matting and the trenches put back with a shallow cover, so that the remains could be shown later if the site was opened again. The 2019 season had also tested the lawns north of the castle for lost formal gardens, using an eighteenth-century drawing and parch marks from the dry summer of 2018, and had opened a trench on a building of unknown date that appears on estate maps of the 1700s.

The castle was a special stage of the Wales Rally in 2013. That is a modern use of the ground, not a change to the building. What the place changed, over seven centuries, was the command of a valley. It was a marcher seat on land taken from Powys Fadog after the conquest, then a neglected fortress, then the house of a London merchant’s heirs, damaged by both sides in the English Civil War and in Booth’s rising, rebuilt after the English Restoration, landscaped over a dyke that is older than the towers, and at last kept as a public building while the family remained until 2004.

The disagreements of date, of the 1593 and 1595 purchases, of how far the towers were demolished, and of whether the Ceiriog fight of 1165 was a battle, are left as the accounts give them.