Ewloe Castle

Ewloe stands on a steeply sloped promontory in a forested valley in Tegeingl, a cantref of the Perfeddwlad in north-east Wales, above the junction of two streams and near the Chester road, holding a strategic position close to the Wales–England border. An earlier fortification may already have stood in Ewloe Woods following the victory of Owain Gwynedd, prince of Wales, over the forces of Henry II at the Battle of Ewloe in 1157.

The castle itself was formerly thought to have been raised around 1257 by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd; it is now thought to have been begun much earlier by his grandfather Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, with 1213–18 and 1221–37 both proposed. Built of locally quarried sandstone, the work appears to have gone on piecemeal over many years and may never have been completed. If it commenced in the 1210s, Ewloe may have been a factor in prompting Ranulf de Blondeville, Earl of Chester, to normalise relations with Llywelyn ab Iorwerth; after 1218 the two remained allies until the earl's death in 1237.

An asymmetrical curtain wall encloses two courtyards, with a rock-cut neck ditch cutting off the southern side and a rampart on the higher ground beyond. In the upper, triangular inner ward stands the D-shaped tower known as the Welsh keep, set on a stone outcrop that forms the motte. Its outer walls were 2 m thick at the foot and rose about 11 m, higher than the upper storey to protect the pitched roof from projectiles.

Setting a D-shaped tower on a motte within its own curtain, rather than projecting it from a wall, has precedent in Welsh military architecture: Llywelyn the Great built a similar tower at Castell y Bere in Gwynedd in the 1220s. The lower outer ward, which held several wooden buildings, was enclosed by two separate stretches of wall meeting at a circular tower on a rocky knoll. No gateway connected the inner ward to the outer courtyard, access was entirely by wooden ramps, and as the curtain walls were not joined, ladders would have been needed to reach their parapets.

During protracted legal disputes over the marcher lordship of Mold in the early 1240s, Ewloe was used as a base for failed negotiations between Llywelyn's son Dafydd ap Llywelyn and the officials of Henry III of England, which led to war between 1244 and 1246. After Dafydd's defeat, and with English authority re-established in this part of north-east Wales, the castle appears to have been abandoned by the Welsh. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd recaptured and refurbished it during his forces' reconquest of the Perfeddwlad in 1256–57, and it again provided the backdrop for negotiations between Welsh and English in 1259 and 1260.

In 1276 Edward I began the first Welsh war by marching his forces out of the castle at Chester and up the west coast of the Dee estuary. An advanced base was established at Flint, a day's travel from Chester, and building work on Flint Castle began immediately. Ewloe is not mentioned in the war chronicles of 1276–77, but the presence of what appears to be a siegework outside the castle may suggest it was besieged. It had no military value to Edward I because his strategic castles at Flint and Rhuddlan could be provisioned by sea.

The last contemporary references come in the Chester Plea Rolls, which record a report sent by the Justice of Chester to Edward II in 1311 on the history of the manor at Ewloe from the middle of the 12th century. The rolls note that by 1257 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had regained Ewloe from the English and 'strengthened' a castle in the wood, and that in 1311 much of the castle was still standing.

The castle was ruinous by the late medieval period, and much of the dressed stonework from its curtain walls and keep had been removed for building around Mold and Connah's Quay. Ewloe was listed Grade I in July 1962 and is also a scheduled monument and a National Monument of Wales. It sits within Wepre Park, a country park managed by Flintshire County Council, is under the care of Cadw, the national heritage agency for Wales, and can be reached free of charge by footpaths through Wepre Woods.

In November 2009 the castle was among five lots of farmland and woodland put up for sale by Flintshire County Council, which stressed that the castle and its site were protected from any development; it was sold at auction, with 24 acres of surrounding land, to an anonymous farmer for £122,000. Since 2024 Cadw has used the Welsh name Castell Ewloe in English too, as part of an effort to standardise the names in both languages.