Denbigh Castle

Before the castle existed, the site held a llys, a royal residence of the Welsh princes controlling the pastoral lands of the Denbigh Moors, part of the disputed Perfeddwlad territory. In 1277 Edward I, then allied with Dafydd ap Gruffudd against his brother Llywelyn, granted it to Dafydd, who rebuilt the residence into a substantial castle, his main stronghold, with a bakehouse, buttery, chapel and hall.

Dafydd and Llywelyn rebelled against Edward in 1282; after a month-long siege the settlement fell to the King's forces that October. Edward created the new lordship of Denbigh and granted it to Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who, working with the King's master mason James of St George, began a walled town colonised by English immigrants and protected by a substantial new castle, built symbolically on top of the former llys. The work was still unfinished in September 1294 when Welsh forces under Madog ap Llywelyn seized the castle; despite Henry's efforts to relieve it, the fortification was not recaptured until December.

Henry de Lacy died in 1311 with the castle still not fully finished; it passed through a series of short-lived owners before the Mortimer family reacquired the lordship in 1355 and repaired its stonework and timber. In 1400 Owain Glyndŵr's rising reached Denbigh and the walled town was raided, though the castle itself held throughout. Edmund Mortimer kept it until his death, childless, in 1425, when it passed to Richard, Duke of York.

During the Wars of the Roses, Henry VI named the Lancastrian Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, constable of Denbigh in 1457, but the castle stayed in Yorkist hands until Jasper forced its garrison to surrender after the Lancastrian victory at Ludford Bridge in 1460. The new garrison held out for months under Roger Puleston before Sir Richard Herbert recaptured the castle in late 1461. Jasper returned in 1468 and, unable to take the castle itself, burnt the interior of the walled town; its remaining inhabitants drifted out to the newer suburbs over the following decades, and by the end of the 16th century the old walled town was largely deserted.

Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester, took a lease on the decaying castle in 1563, and under his tenure it held prisoners regarded as traitors, including dissidents against the Elizabethan religious settlement — among them the Welsh poet and underground Catholic schoolmaster Richard Gwyn, held from September 1581 to the spring of 1582. After his execution on 15 October 1584, his head and one quarter of his body were spiked on the castle; the other three quarters were displayed at Wrexham, Ruthin and Holt.

North Wales stood solidly Royalist when civil war broke out in 1642, and Denbigh was held by a garrison of 500 under Colonel William Salesbury. By late 1645 the war had turned; Charles I spent three days at the castle after his defeat at Rowton Heath that September. Sir Thomas Mytton defeated a Royalist relief force at Denbigh Green in October, then returned in April 1646 to place the castle and town under close siege, bombarding the Goblin Tower, which held the garrison's main well. Salesbury refused to surrender, citing assurances he had given the King, until Charles himself sent orders to give up the castle; he surrendered on terms on 26 October 1646.

In 1659 Royalist soldiers seized the castle during Sir George Booth's uprising against the Commonwealth; after Booth's defeat at Winnington Bridge, the rebels surrendered and General George Monck ordered the castle slighted. The republican John Carter spent six weeks demolishing sections of the curtain wall and two towers, and its stone was later carried off to build houses in the town.

The Crown briefly granted the ruin to William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, in 1696, but reclaimed it after complaints in Parliament, and the walled town remained largely deserted into the 19th century. A town-formed Castle Committee took over the ruins' upkeep, with a £300 Crown loan for repairs in 1879; the Office of Works assumed responsibility in 1914.

Denbigh's Great Gatehouse — a triangle of three octagonal towers the historian John Goodall calls "the most architecturally sophisticated gatehouse of the thirteenth century" — still dominates the entrance, and the town walls survive largely intact for around 1,100 metres. The site is now cared for by Cadw as a scheduled monument and Grade I listed building, open to visitors; a £600,000 investment in the mid-2010s funded a new visitor centre.