Deganwy Castle

Deganwy Castle occupies a volcanic plug called the Vardre, 110 metres above the mouth of the River Conwy in what is now Conwy county borough. Little survives of the early fortress but ditches and mounds; the site was probably first occupied during the Roman period and stayed in use afterwards because it was safe from Irish raids, with the ground beneath the rock possibly holding a settlement of serfs. Tradition places Maelgwn Gwynedd, king of Gwynedd in the earlier 6th century, at Deganwy, and nearby places carry his name, including the hill of Bryn Maelgwyn. In 812 the stronghold was struck by lightning and burned.

After the Norman invasion of England in 1066, William the Conqueror placed followers as earls along the Welsh border. Hugh d'Avranches, made Earl of Chester, sent his nephew Robert into north Wales; the campaign produced a castle at Rhuddlan and, according to Orderic Vitalis, another at Deganwy, work that cannot have begun before 1073. The precise site and layout of this castle on the hilltop are unknown. Robert was killed in 1093, and within a year the Welsh had driven the Normans out of Gwynedd; nothing more is recorded of the castle for a century.

By the early 13th century Deganwy had been fortified by Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd. The Earl of Chester captured it in 1210, but Llywelyn retook it soon after and rebuilt it in stone. The Brut y Tywysogion gives a different sequence, recording that "the earl of Chester again built the castle of Degannwy, which Llywelyn ap Iorwerth had destroyed for fear of the king" — the chronicle has the prince pulling the castle down and the earl raising it again. The castle passed to Llywelyn's son Dafydd ap Llywelyn, who in 1241 had it destroyed ahead of an advancing English army, a demolition recorded in the Annales Cambriae. Henry III of England then took control of the site and undertook a building programme costing more than £2,200.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, destroyed the castle again in 1263. Twenty years later, in 1283, Edward I of England had Conwy Castle built just across the estuary and left Deganwy in ruins.

Between 1961 and 1966 Leslie Alcock led excavations at Deganwy, a programme planned by the University of Wales and funded by the Board of Celtic Studies and the Caernarvonshire Historical Society. The dig recovered a dozen sherds of early medieval pottery imported from the Mediterranean, evidence of the far-reaching contacts of Gwynedd's royal dynasty. The Gwynedd Archaeological Trust carried out a geophysical survey of the bailey between the two hills in 2009. The site has been a Grade II* listed building since September 1950, is a scheduled monument, and is designated a National Monument of Wales; the twin summits today show only earthworks and mounds.