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To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Ruthin Castle is a Medieval castle built as part of the campaign by Edward I, the English King, to conquer the Welsh in the late 1270s early 1280s. Rather than being built directly by the King, Ruthin was built by one of his Barons, Reginald de Grey, although work had started at the site under the Welsh Prince Dafydd who had initially allied himself with Edward.
The castle is a pentagon shape, with corner turrets, constructed of limestone and red sandstone. The main gateway and postern gate survive although little of the interior features remain. Ruthin Castle played a key role in the initial stages of Owain Glyndŵr’s revolt in the early 1400s. Glyndŵr’s initial act was to attack the de Grey’s at Ruthin Castle, sacking and burning the town.
The castle was in the ownership of the de Grey family until 1508 when it became the property of the Crown. By the time of the Civil war in the mid seventeenth century the site was in a state of disrepair. It was hastily repaired and the Royalists held the site until it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1646 following an eleven week siege. Further deliberate slighting of the castle took place to render it useless as a defensive site.
The site came into the hands of the Middleton family and in the early nineteenth century Harriet Middleton built a mansion within the curtain walls of the Medieval Castle, the house was altered and extended in the 1850s and extensive picturesque gardens set out. These gardens had the perfect backdrop of a decaying Medieval castle. Through the twentieth century the mansion house became first a hospital and then in the 1960s a hotel, which it remains today.
Throughout the ‘picturesque’ ruins have become more and more overgrown and more and more ruinous. There has been virtually no repair work carried out on the Medieval Castle since the end of the Civil War. The Medieval site is in a parlous state. A Conservation Trust was set up in 2016 to try to address the issues of the decay of the important Medieval masonry. I am now Chair of that group and the Trust is on the cusp of developing a major programme of repair, consolidation and interpretation of the remains whilst bringing them to the attention of a much wider public.
This talk will aim to further outline some of the history of the site, look at its significance, current condition and plans for the future.
This event will be both in person in Cardiff and online. Please select online tickets below. For in person tickets please visit Eventbrite here.
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