Gwrych Castle

The name is older than the building. Gwrych — originally ‘Y Gwrŷch’, meaning “the hedge” — appears in an indenture of 20 April 1536, the twenty-seventh year of Henry VIII, by which Owen ap Gruffith ap Jevaun ap Gruffith let two parcels of land in the town of Abergele, in the comote of Isaled, one of them at a place called ‘y gwrych’, between the highway from Abergele to Conwy and the common pasture. The Lloyds of Plas yn y Gwrych, who traced their ancestry to the medieval period, were the ancestral owners of the ground. Within what became the castle estate stand a pair of Iron Age hillforts, a Roman shrine, lead and silver mines and medieval battle sites, the last recorded on stone tablets at the principal entrance.

Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh (1787–1861) built Gwrych between 1810 and 1825 in memory of his mother, Frances Lloyd, and her ancestors, incorporating an earlier house the Lloyds had owned since the late medieval period. Charles Busby's designs were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1815; Busby was afterwards sacked and Thomas Rickman engaged, and the scheme grew from a Regency country house into an enormous Gothic Revival castle. The foundation stone was laid in 1819.

His heirs kept building. C. E. Elcock and Detmar Blow both worked at Gwrych before it reached its final, immense extent, and through the later Victorian and Edwardian years it was run as a full-scale country house. Queen Victoria is said to have stayed during a visit to North Wales, and Edward, Prince of Wales, was among those received there.

Winifred Bamford-Hesketh, Lloyd's granddaughter and sole heir, inherited Gwrych in 1894. She had married Douglas Cochrane in 1878 and became Countess of Dundonald when he succeeded to the earldom in 1885. The marriage was not a close one. She pursued her interests at Gwrych and in London, and chose not to accompany her husband overseas when he was General Officer Commanding the Militia of Canada between 1902 and 1904; he also served as a courtier to Edward VII and George V. Their fourth child, Lady Jean Cochrane, spent most of her youth at the castle.

Gwrych remained the countess's personal property. On her death in 1924 she bequeathed it to George V, in the hope that it would become the principal Welsh residence of the Prince of Wales, but the gift was refused and the castle passed to the Venerable Order of Saint John. In 1928 her former husband bought it back for £78,000, then sold the contents to meet the cost. The family never returned to live there.

During the Second World War the government used Gwrych, from 1939 to 1941, to house 200 Jewish refugees brought to Britain under the Kindertransport programme. It was run by the Jewish Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva, and Daniel Sperber was born at the castle in this period.

The Dundonalds put the estate up for sale at the war's end, and in 1946 Robert Rennie bought it and opened it as a visitor attraction billed “The Showpiece of Wales”. Under a later owner, Leslie Salts, it was said to have attracted nearly ten million visitors. Randolph Turpin trained there in the early 1950s, the Dragon Rally met on the grounds in the early 1960s, and in the 1970s the castle drew tourists with jousting and banquets. It closed to the public in 1987.

Nick Tavaglione, an American businessman, bought it in 1989 for £750,000; his plans for a centre for opera came to nothing and the building was looted and vandalised. New Age travellers occupying it in the 1990s sold off fittings including fireplaces and stained glass and stripped the slates and lead from the roof, and battlements were later toppled from the towers. Clayton Hotels bought the castle in 2007 for £850,000 and spent about £500,000 towards a £6,000,000 hotel conversion before going into administration; a further scheme, granted planning permission in 2012, never progressed.

Mark Baker began campaigning for the castle's preservation at the age of twelve, and was instrumental in forming the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust, which monitored the building's condition and lobbied Conwy council to buy it compulsorily. In 2018 the castle and some 200 acres were sold to the trust, a registered charity, with a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund; the filming of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! there in 2020 and 2021 brought publicity and funding. The main building remains a ruin, and in 2024 Gwrych was placed in the highest category of risk on Cadw's Buildings at Risk register.