Harlech Castle

Harlech Castle, Castell Harlech in Welsh, stands on a rocky knoll in Harlech, Gwynedd, close to the Irish Sea. It is a concentric fortress of local sandstone, now a ruin in public care and open to visitors. Since 2024 the service that manages it has used only the Welsh name when writing in English. The rock is a spur of the Harlech Dome, almost 200 feet, or 61 metres, high, and the ground falls sharply away to the north and west.

Local mythology links the site with Branwen, a princess in the medieval Welsh tales, and the earliest literary mention of Harlech belongs to that tradition. No evidence has been found of a native Welsh fortification, an early court, or a llys on the rock. Kings of England and princes of Gwynedd had contended for north Wales since the 1070s, and the contest was renewed through the thirteenth century.

The Conquest of Wales by Edward I ran from 1277 to 1283, in two campaigns. Edward I, also called Longshanks, was king of England from 1272 until his death on 7 July 1307. He was born at the Palace of Westminster on the night of 17 to 18 June 1239, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, and he stood about 6 feet 2 inches, or 188 centimetres. In 1277 he reduced Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Llywelyn the Last, to the western part of Gwynedd by the Treaty of Aberconwy, while leaving him the title Prince of Wales.

War returned in 1282 when Llywelyn's brother Dafydd ap Gruffudd rebelled, and the fighting became a wider Welsh struggle. Llywelyn was killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge on 11 December 1282. Edward marched into Snowdonia in January 1283 and took Dolwyddelan. Dafydd, who had succeeded his brother, was captured in June 1283, taken to Shrewsbury, and executed the following autumn.

The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 organised the retained royal lands as a personal fief, divided into six shires on the English model, and declared them annexed and united to the crown without making them part of the kingdom of England. English common law was imposed, with some Welsh civil custom left in place, including parts of the law of inheritance, though illegitimate sons lost the share Welsh law had allowed them. In 1301 the lands and the title Prince of Wales were bestowed on Edward's son, Edward of Caernarfon, the future Edward II, and thereafter they were the customary endowment of the heir. Full incorporation into the kingdom waited until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542.

Edward ordered a castle at Harlech among the fortresses raised across north Wales after the campaign of 1282. One account counts seven such castles. Another counts eight new royal castles begun by the king over about twenty years, and names Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech as the finest. English forces advanced down the Conwy valley and through Dolwyddelan and Castell y Bere.

Sir Otton de Grandson took Harlech with 560 infantry in May. Money for the first works arrived in mid-May, and carpenters and 35 stonemasons were sent in June and July.

By the winter of 1283 the first 15 feet, or 4.6 metres, of the inner walls were up, enough for the place to be defended, and a small planned town had been founded beside the castle. The town received a royal charter in 1284, and its customs and privileges were modelled on those of Conwy. It was one of two new towns Edward founded in Merioneth, the other being the lost town of Bere. Harlech's town was never given stone walls.

It has a single main street and no obvious market place, and it was laid out with less care than Beaumaris, Caernarfon or Conwy.

The works continued under James of Saint George, a master mason and military architect from Savoy, born about 1230 and dead in 1309. The name he carried in England refers to Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche in the Viennois, and to a sainted archbishop of Vienne, not to the soldier-saint of England. Edward is thought to have met him on 25 June 1273, when the king, returning from crusade, visited that castle so that his great-uncle Philip I, Count of Savoy, could do homage under a treaty of 1246. James was largely responsible for Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon, all begun in 1283, and for Beaumaris, begun in April 1295.

Around 1285 he was Master of the Royal Works in Wales, paid 3 shillings a day, with control of construction at Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech.

The fabric is the product of three campaigns. The first began in 1283, after the defeat of Llywelyn, and enclosed the site. The second, completed in 1289, strengthened the inner curtain and finished the towers and the gatehouse. The outer defences were added in a third phase in 1295, after the rising of Madog ap Llywelyn.

A labelled plan marks first work begun in 1283, second work finished in 1289, work of about 1295, and work of 1323 to 1324. Another account places the building in the invasion years 1282 to 1289 and calls the castle essentially complete at the end of 1289. A visit account says it was finished from the ground to the battlements in seven years. Read together, the walls could be held by the winter of 1283, the main castle was complete in 1289, and the outer line came later.

In 1286, at the busiest point, the workforce was 546 general labourers, 115 quarriers, 30 blacksmiths, 22 carpenters and 227 stonemasons, and the work was costing nearly £240 a month. The estimated bill at completion was £8,190. That was about a tenth of the £80,000 Edward spent on castles in Wales between 1277 and 1304, and about twelve times the yearly income of a typical baron of the time. At that price Harlech was one of the cheaper of his Welsh castles.

John de Bonvillars was appointed constable in 1285. He died in 1287, and the mason's own life places the death in August 1287. His wife Agnes held the office until 1290. James of Saint George was appointed constable on 3 July 1290 and kept it until 14 December 1293.

Another account gives the same term simply as 1290 to 1293, and says he lived in the castle, probably in the gatehouse. The peacetime garrison was set at 36: a constable, 30 men of whom 10 were crossbowmen, a chaplain, a smith, a carpenter and a stonemason.

Madog ap Llywelyn, who died after 1305, led the Welsh revolt of 1294 and 1295. He belonged to a junior branch of the house of Aberffraw and was a distant kinsman of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. His father, Llywelyn ap Maredudd, last vassal lord of Meirionnydd, had lost that land in 1256 for opposing Llywelyn at the Battle of Bryn Derwin, and died in a skirmish in April 1263. Madog received gifts from Edward in 1277, sued in 1278 for his father's cantref, and after 1282 held lands in Anglesey.

On Michaelmas, 29 September 1294, he put himself at the head of a revolt planned for months, answering new royal administrators and a tax of a fifteenth on movables. He used the title Prince of Wales in a land grant issued during the rising, though there is no evidence that the aim was to restore the old principality in full. Cynan ap Maredudd, Maelgwn ap Rhys and Morgan ap Maredudd led the attacks in mid and south Wales. The leaders had hoped that Edward and his army would already be in France.

Bad weather had kept the ships in port, and he cancelled the French campaign.

Caernarfon was overrun and its castle occupied. Castell y Bere was taken and afterwards burnt. Hawarden, Ruthin and Denbigh fell. Criccieth was besieged for several months, and so was Harlech.

At one moment Harlech was held by just 37 men, a figure set beside the establishment of 36. Fresh supplies were sent from Ireland and landed through the water gate, and the castle did not fall. In December 1294 Edward led an army through Wrexham, Denbigh and Abergele and reached Conwy shortly before Christmas. He was ambushed, lost his baggage, and was shut in Conwy until his fleet relieved him in 1295.

The decisive battle was at Maes Moydog in Powys on 5 March 1295. The Earl of Warwick surprised Madog's men. They held off a cavalry charge in a pike formation of the kind later familiar in Scotland, but English arrows broke them, and many drowned in a swollen river during the pursuit. Madog escaped, then was captured by Ynyr Fychan of Nannau and handed to John de Havering in Snowdonia in late July or early August 1295.

He was taken to London and seems to have remained a captive. He was still alive in 1305, and two sons, Maredudd and Hywel, survived him.

After the revolt, further defences were built around the path down to the sea, and the outer works of 1295 belong to that answer. More building followed the Despenser War. Between 1323 and 1324 Edward II, threatened here by the Mortimer lords of the March, ordered his sheriff, Sir Gruffudd Llwyd, to extend the approaches to the gatehouse with additional towers. The bridge over the ditch was reworked in the early fourteenth century under the same king.

A reconstruction of the castle as it may have stood about 1325 shows inner and outer defences, a wall at the foot of the rock, and the bridge, all complete.

The plan is concentric, one circuit inside another, making an inner ward and an outer ward. The outer wall was once somewhat higher than the stump that remains. A rock-cut ditch covers the landward sides. The stone is local grey-green sandstone.

Large regular blocks form the towers, and more irregular material, possibly quarried from the ditch, forms the curtains. A softer yellow sandstone, perhaps from near Egryn Abbey by Barmouth, is used for the carved work. The formal entrance crossed a stone bridge from two towers in the eastern ditch to the gatehouse. Little of those towers survives, and a timber way now stands in place of the medieval bridge.

A later footbridge is said to let a visitor enter as the master mason intended, for the first time in 600 years.

A water gate overlooks a protected stair, called the Way from the Sea, running down the cliff toward the old shore. One account counts 127 steps. The visit account counts 108 steps on the same path. In the thirteenth century the sea reached close enough for ships to feed a besieged garrison.

The water has since drawn back across the dunes of Morfa Harlech, and the stair ends above ground that was once the beach.

The gatehouse follows a form sometimes called the Tonbridge type. Two great D-shaped towers flank the passage. Three portcullises and at least two heavy doors closed the way. Two upper floors are broken into rooms.

Each floor has three large windows looking into the inner ward, and the second floor has two further grand windows on the sides. Fireplaces were provided, and the roof once carried prominent chimneys. Arnold Taylor argued that the constable lived on the first floor and that senior guests used the second. Jeremy Ashbee has challenged that reading, and has suggested that the finest rooms may have stood in the inner ward, with the gatehouse put to other uses.

The account of the building campaigns still places the constable, probably, in the gatehouse itself.

Four round towers cover the inner ward. In 1343, taken clockwise from the north-east, they were called Le Prisontour, Turris Ultra Gardinium, Le Wedercoktour and Le Chapeltour. By 1564 the same towers were the Debtors', the Mortimer, the Bronwen and the Armourer's. Le Prisontour held a dungeon.

Le Chapeltour may have contained an artillery workshop in the sixteenth century. Against the curtain stood a chapel, a kitchen, service rooms, a granary and a great hall. A range known as Ystumgwern Hall is thought to have been brought from the nearby place of that name and rebuilt inside the ward. The battlements may once have carried triple finials, as at Conwy, though almost nothing of that cresting remains.

Details of the masonry have close cousins in Savoy of the same years: semicircular door arches, window patterns, corbelled turrets, and the spacing of putlog holes. They are usually traced to Master James. The comparison is not straightforward, because some of the Savoy buildings that share those details were raised after he had left the region. The likeness may therefore belong to the wider company of Savoy craftsmen on the Harlech works, and not to his hand alone.

Before England he had worked for Peter II of Savoy at Yverdon-les-Bains, at first with his father John and alone by 1265, and then for Philip I at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche, La Côte-Saint-André, Voiron and Saint-Laurent-du-Pont between 1270 and 1275. His last Savoy work may have been at Châtel-Argent in the Aosta valley in the summer of 1275. His father is identified as Jean Cotereel, builder at Saint-Prex and at Lausanne Cathedral. A gap in the records runs from 1275 to 1278.

In April 1278 he was sent into Wales to put the castle works in order, and he is recorded visiting Flint and Rhuddlan while Flint, Rhuddlan, Builth and Aberystwyth were under construction.

In 1400 revolt broke out again under Owain Glyndŵr, born Owain ap Gruffudd Fychan in or before 1359, a descendant of the old dynasties of Powys, Deheubarth and Gwynedd. His supporters acclaimed him Prince of Wales on 16 September 1400. The spark was a quarrel with his English neighbour Reginald Grey, Lord of Ruthin, but the grievance was wider, and penal laws passed against the Welsh in answer to the rising brought him more support. By 1403 only a few castles, Harlech among them, still held for the crown.

The garrison was poorly armed: three shields, eight helmets, six lances, ten pairs of gloves, and four guns. At the end of 1404 the castle fell. Another account says the ill-equipped garrison gave it up in 1404 after a long siege.

Owain Glyndŵr made Harlech his residence, his family's home and his military headquarters for four years. A court was held here, and Gruffydd Young was appointed Welsh chancellor. One account calls the Harlech meeting his second parliament and dates it to August 1405. His life also places parliaments at Machynlleth and at Harlech in 1404, with envoys from France, Scotland and the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and León, and says that in the summer of 1405 four representatives from every commote were sent to Harlech.

A further account says he summoned followers from across the country to a great parliament here, and that it may have been in this castle that he was formally crowned Prince of Wales before envoys from Scotland, France and Spain. The acclamation of September 1400 is a separate and earlier event. The crowning at Harlech is given as a tradition and as a possibility, not as a dated ceremony.

In 1408 an English army under the future Henry V besieged the castle and its commander, Edmund Mortimer. Cannon were brought up. One very large piece, nicknamed the king's daughter, burst during the bombardment. The fire probably destroyed the southern and eastern parts of the outer walls.

A caption on the same damaged curtain says that most of the outer wall on the east and south was lost as a result of Owain Glyndŵr's own siege. When the guns did not take the place, Henry left John Talbot to keep the siege and went on to Aberystwyth. Another account reverses that sequence: the English recovered Aberystwyth and then marched north, and Harlech surrendered in the cold winter running into 1409. Supplies failed.

Mortimer and many of his men died of exhaustion, and the castle fell in February 1409. His life says simply that he died during the siege.

Owain Glyndŵr himself escaped. One account says he left disguised as an old man and passed the English line in the dark. His wife, Margaret Hanmer, two of his daughters, including Catrin, and three granddaughters of Mortimer were taken and imprisoned in the Tower of London. They died there in 1413 and were buried at St Swithin by London Stone.

He was never captured. He refused royal pardons, kept up raids from the hills, and was last seen by his enemies in 1412, when he ambushed and ransomed Dafydd Gam in Brecon. He is thought to have died in hiding around 1416. A harness mount bearing his arms was found at the castle in 1923.

Later in the fifteenth century the castle was drawn into the Wars of the Roses, the fight for the English crown between Lancaster and York that ran from 1455 to 1487. In 1460, after the Battle of Northampton, Queen Margaret of Anjou fled to Harlech. From 1461 until 1468 it was held for Lancaster against the Yorkist Edward IV, under Dafydd ap Ieuan. The same constable is also named Dafydd ab Ieuan ab Einion.

Because of the rock and the sea route, Harlech outlasted the other Lancastrian strongholds and became the last major fortress still in their hands. It was a base for war in the district. Operations were planned in 1464. Sir Richard Tunstall rode out from the castle to attack in 1466.

In 1468 Jasper Tudor landed with French reinforcements and then raided Denbigh. Edward IV ordered William Herbert of Raglan to gather an army, possibly as large as 10,000 men. The poet Hywel Dafi wrote of men shattered by the sound of guns, and of seven thousand men shooting into every opening, their bows cut from every yew. After a siege of a month, and in another telling of less than a month, the small garrison surrendered on 14 August 1468.

Fifty prisoners were taken, the Welsh constable among them. This siege is credited with the song Men of Harlech. Another telling asks whether the hungry Welsh defenders of 1409, rather than the Lancastrians of 1468, were the men of that song.

The castle seems not to have been repaired after 1468, and by the seventeenth century it was ruinous except for the gatehouse, which was used for the local assizes. Through the sixteenth century it housed the assizes of Merioneth, and that continued use is offered as a reason the shell was maintained well enough to be defended again. The English Civil War began in 1642 between supporters of Charles I of England and supporters of Parliament. Charles I of England was born at Dunfermline Palace on 19 November 1600, the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark.

He became king of England, Scotland and Ireland on 27 March 1625, and he was tried and executed for high treason on 30 January 1649. In 1644 Prince Rupert appointed a local royalist, Colonel William Owen, as constable, and trusted him to repair the walls. One account dates the defence for the king from the spring of that year.

A long siege lasted from June 1646 until 15 March 1647, when a garrison of 44 men surrendered to Major-General Thomas Mytton. Another account says that the survivors were 16 officers, gentlemen and invalids, and that they gave up the castle in 1647. Harlech is called the last mainland royal fortress to surrender, and the last royalist stronghold to fall. One account says that 15 March 1647 marked the end of the first phase of the war.

Another says that the surrender marked the end of the English Civil War. The same wars are also described as a series from 1642 to 1651. On that telling the first war ended in June 1646, with the king already a prisoner, a second war followed in 1648, and the execution came in January 1649. The surrender of Harlech therefore falls after the general close of the first war and before the second war and the king's death.

Parliament ordered the castle slighted so that it could not be used again. The order was only partly obeyed. The staircases in the gatehouse were destroyed and the place was made broadly unusable, but it was not pulled down entirely. Another account says that, despite the order to demolish, the demolition was not carried through, and the castle stayed Crown property.

Stone from the walls was taken to build houses in the town.

In the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, the picturesque ruin drew artists, among them John Cotman, Henry Gastineau, Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner and John Varley.

Turner's view from Tygwyn Ferry, a summer evening, was painted around 1798 or 1799. Varley, who lived from 1778 to 1842, also painted the castle from far off, and the standpoints of both pictures may have disappeared as the landscape changed. In 1914 the castle passed from the Merioneth Crown Estate to the Office of Works, which began a major restoration after the First World War. In 1969 it passed to the Welsh Office and then to the historic-environment service that still manages it as a place for visitors.

In 1986 the castle was included in the inscription of the castles and town walls of King Edward in Gwynedd, with Beaumaris, Caernarfon and Conwy and the walled towns at Caernarfon and Conwy. The group was among the first seven places in the United Kingdom to be recognised at that level. The Harlech component is given as 1.7 hectares, with no buffer zone. A geographic table of the four components totals 6 hectares, again without a buffer.

Planned towns and waterfronts lie outside the boundary. Essential settings and significant views have been defined instead. From the castle the important views run over the Morfa to the sea and back toward Eryri, also called Snowdonia, and east across the rural Harlech Dome. The castle was listed at the highest grade on 21 June 2001.

A five-yearly inspection of the four castles, completed in March 2016, used the eye and aerial drones and found the overall condition good. In the years of the previous plan, conservation was done on interiors inside the Harlech towers, and a new entrance bridge was installed. The former Castle Hotel was turned into a visitor centre with holiday apartments, a project already in hand by 2012.

During the Second World War the walls were used for training. The headquarters of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando sat for a time in London House in the town, not inside the castle, under Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Lister. The unit marched in the district and climbed the walls after dark.

Several digs have added finds. Besides the harness mount of 1923, work in 2013 for a new visitor centre on the old ground of the Queen's Hotel recorded seven phases. The first was a sub-circular stone setting. The second was a small group of features that either just predated the castle or belonged to its building.

The third was a possible medieval chapel and walls associated with it. The fourth held burials of up to ten people to the south of the chapel, some graves cut into earlier ones, the bodies laid east to west, with domestic traces further to the south-east. The fifth held later burials of up to nine people. The sixth was building of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the seventh was modern.

Three years after the bones were found they were still described as under study, because samples for dating had yet to be selected.

In 2014, while the footbridge was built, a limited excavation and a watching brief examined three foundation pits. The eastern pier was dug to bedrock. The earliest traces, cut stone, were read either as the first cutting of the ditch in 1285 or as levelling for pier bases in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Later levelling was read as belonging to those bases, or to a rebuilding after the occupation of the early fifteenth century.

The drawbridge pit, also taken to the rock, showed cutting and drainage. A medieval silver coin and a probable medieval copper-alloy pin lay in the deposits above the rock. A third pit produced nothing of note, and new sockets cut into the upper walls of the pit removed only a little of the standing masonry.

Between 27 March and 25 May 2023 a watching brief followed the removal of a flight of stone steps just inside the gatehouse. Under the steps was a possible wall, set at about 110 degrees to the wall that crosses the inner ward from the junction of Ystumgwern Hall and the granary toward the front of the gatehouse. The angle suggests a division inside the ward rather than a load-bearing line, and the meeting of the two walls had already been destroyed by the steps and by a later rebuilding. A narrow trench between the gatehouse and that cross wall found deposits still in place, in five phases.

The first was a possible gully cut into the natural clay. A dump of gravel, with some household waste, sealed it and levelled the ground. Above that was a possible hearth and a trodden surface scorched by the heat, only about half a metre from the later cross wall, so the fire is thought to be earlier than the wall. Another levelling followed.

The last phase was a drain of the late twentieth century, with a concrete base and slate sides, and a pad of lime mortar holding an iron pin that probably carried a sign. The trench was small, and the reading is cautious, but it shows that conservation early in the twentieth century did not strip the inner ward of all its buried layers.

What remains is a castle built to hold a conquered coast, fed from the sea when the country around it was hostile, and still fighting when other fortresses had already fallen. Its building accounts, the symmetry of its two walls, and a stair that now descends toward a shore which has gone are the things later centuries have kept.