Criccieth Castle

Before the 1230s the only structures at Criccieth were the parish church of St Catherine and its buildings; the commote of Eifionydd had instead been administered from a motte about four miles north at Dolbenmaen, probably a Norman work soon taken over by the Welsh. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, transferred that administrative centre to Criccieth in the 1230s and probably built the castle's inner ward and twin-towered gatehouse on the headland above Tremadog Bay; his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd probably added the outer ward between 1255 and 1282.

The castle served the princes as a prison from early on. In 1239 Dafydd ap Llywelyn imprisoned his half-brother Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and half-nephew Owain Goch ap Gruffydd at Criccieth, probably within the new castle; Gruffudd was styled "Pendefic crukyeith," Lord of Criccieth, in a contemporary praise poem by Einion ap Madog ap Rhahawd. In 1259 the castle held Maredudd ap Rhys Gryg, a prince of Deheubarth who had rebelled against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. One of the last records of the castle in Welsh hands is a letter Llywelyn ap Gruffudd sent Edward I from Criccieth in 1273 or 1274.

The English had taken the castle by March 1283, during Edward I's conquest of Wales; the king visited that year and again in 1284. The Pipe rolls record £332 spent there between 1283 and 1292, mostly on heightening the towers, cutting new ground-floor doors into them, and building external stairs to their upper floors — changes that turned each floor into a self-contained defensive unit. A borough of 23 burgage plots, the same number as Caernarfon, was founded beside the castle in November 1284, though it does not appear to have been walled. By 1283–84, when the Welsh castles were particularly heavily garrisoned, constable Sir William Leyburn commanded 30 garrison men, 10 crossbowmen and about twenty other staff, paid £100 a year.

In 1294 Madog ap Llywelyn's revolt against English rule took Caernarfon Castle and sacked its town, and besieged Criccieth along with Harlech and Aberystwyth. Leyburn, still constable, held the castle with 29 men and 41 townsfolk who had taken refuge inside until the siege was lifted in April 1295 and the garrison resupplied by sea from Ireland.

Further repairs under Edward II between 1307 and 1327 raised the gatehouse a second time, but a 1343 survey for Edward the Black Prince found it dilapidated again, needing £96 in repairs; the survey names its towers as the great tower, the "sister" or cistern tower, the Leyburn tower and the "le gynnetour." From about 1359 to 1381 its constable was Syr Hywel y Fwyall, "of the Battleaxe," who may have commanded a corps of Welshmen at Crécy and certainly fought for Edward III at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.

The castle's end came in the first half of the fifteenth century. Its inner gatehouse and two of its towers are burnt red, with a layer of burnt material found in each during excavation; the fire probably followed the castle's capture during Owain Glyndŵr's rising in 1404, and a document of 1450 calls it "totally destroyed." That document also enlarged the garrison and says nothing of repairs to the fabric, though, so the ruin may date not from 1404 but from a further fire after 1450 — no constable is recorded, nor any further use of the castle as a fortress, after Glyndŵr's men took it. The adjoining borough decayed too: John Leland, travelling through Wales in the 1530s and 1540s, found it "clene decayed," and Thomas Pennant called it a "poor borough town" around 1784.

By the time J. M. W. Turner sketched the castle on his 1798 tour of the north Wales coast, Criccieth was considered a romantic ruin; he returned to the subject in an 1835 watercolour of salvage on Criccieth beach, taking some licence with the cliffs and the tide. The Crown sold the castle in 1858 to William Ormsby-Gore, 2nd Baron Harlech, who carried out restoration work in 1879.

More work followed in 1933, when the 3rd Baron Harlech placed the castle under the guardianship of the Office of Works. State consolidation of the fabric was followed by excavations directed by Bryan O'Neil, which recovered a gilt bronze and Limoges enamel crucifix from the inner gatehouse and uncovered buried parts of the outer ward and south-east tower — the north tower, local tradition holds, deliberately infilled in the nineteenth century to keep children out. The castle is now maintained by Cadw and is a Grade I listed building.