Castell Dinas Brân

The hilltop above Llangollen was fortified long before any castle stood there. Around 600 BCE the Ordovices, a Celtic tribe of North Wales, built a large hillfort on the summit — an earthen rampart, probably topped with a wooden palisade, enclosing roundhouses, with an extra-deep ditch cut across the gentler southern slopes. An eighth-century structure is believed to have belonged to Elisedd ap Gwylog, the Romano-British ruler named on the Pillar of Eliseg and counted among the founders of the Kingdom of Powys, though no archaeological trace of it has been found.

When Powys was divided in 1191, Dinas Brân fell within Powys Fadog, and Madog ap Gruffydd Maelor — the lord who founded Valle Crucis Abbey at Llantysilio in 1201 — might have ruled from here. Whatever stood on the hill then was a wooden fortification, probably a palisade around a hall and outbuildings, and early records attest that it was destroyed by fire.

Gruffydd II ap Madog, Lord of Dinas Brân, rebuilt the castle in stone in the 1260s. He was an ally of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, with Powys serving as a buffer between Llywelyn's Gwynedd heartland and England, and Dinas Brân was one of several castles raised after the Treaty of Montgomery had secured Wales for Llywelyn. Dolforwyn Castle near Newtown, ordered by Llywelyn at about the same time, shows similarities to Dinas Brân and may be the work of the same master mason.

The castle Gruffydd built had a two-storey keep at the south-eastern corner, a gatehouse with twin towers reached by a wooden bridge over a rock-cut ditch some twenty feet deep, a Great Hall, and an apsidal Welsh Tower of the D-shaped form typical of Welsh castles of the period, from which archers could sweep the southern wall. When Gruffydd died in 1269 or 1270 the castle passed to his four sons, with Madoc, the eldest, senior among them.

In 1277 Edward I launched his conquest of North Wales from Chester. Two of Gruffydd's sons, Llywelyn and Madoc, quickly made peace with the English king — but their surrender documents record the need to recapture Dinas Brân, proof the castle was not in Madoc's hands. Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, was sent from Oswestry to take it, only to find on arrival that the defenders — probably the younger brothers Owain and Gruffudd, still allied to Prince Llywelyn — had abandoned the castle and set it alight, perhaps unwilling to let it fall intact to the English or to their elder brother. The fire did little damage, and de Lacy recommended to Edward that the castle be repaired and garrisoned; an English garrison held it until at least the Treaty of Aberconwy.

The castle's part in the renewed war of 1282 went unrecorded; it may have been retaken by the Welsh in the early months, but ultimately it fell to the English. After the war ended in October 1282 with the death of Llywelyn, most of Powys Fadog, castle included, was granted to John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. Rather than rebuild Dinas Brân, de Warenne chose to build a new castle by the River Dee at Holt, and the fortress of the princes of Powys Fadog was left to fall into ruin.

The name has been argued over since at least the seventeenth century. In Middle Welsh dinas meant a defended enclosure rather than a city, and brân is Welsh for crow — "the crow's fortress" — though Brân may instead be a personal name: legend makes him a Cornish prince, or the King Brân Fendigaid whose exaggerated biography appears in The Mabinogion — or the name may simply come from the Brân brook at the northern foot of the hill. In English it has been "Crow Castle" since at least the eighteenth century. The ruin's first literary appearance came in the thirteenth-century romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn, in which the Norman knight Payn Peveril spends a night in the haunted "Chastiel Bran" and slays the mace-wielding giant Gogmagog, who dies without revealing where the buried treasury of idols, with its huge golden ox, lies. The fourteenth-century love story of Myfanwy Fychan of Dinas Brân and the poet Hywel ab Einion probably inspired the lyrics of Joseph Parry's song "Myfanwy", first published in 1875.

J. M. W. Turner and Richard Wilson both painted the castle and its valley. The first archaeological investigation came only in 2017, with geophysical surveys of the medieval and Iron Age features, followed by an excavation around the gatehouse in 2021. The remains are a scheduled ancient monument, maintained by Denbighshire County Council with the assistance of Cadw.