Gwydir Castle

Fortifications have been associated with this site since AD 600. In the early Middle Ages numerous skirmishes were fought in the area between the post-Roman kingdoms of Wales. In AD 610 Llywarch Hen, a bardic prince of Rheged, fought a bloody battle nearby, and in AD 954 the kingdoms of Gwynedd and Deheubarth met in a major battle near Llanrwst.

By the 14th century the Welsh knight Hywel Coetmor is recorded as the first owner of a manor house on the site. He had fought in the Hundred Years' War as a commander of longbowmen under Edward, the Black Prince, at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and later supported the rising led by Owain Glyndŵr.

Following the Wars of the Roses the castle was rebuilt by Meredith ap Ieuan ap Robert, founder of the Wynn dynasty. The surviving buildings date from around 1500, and though called a castle, Gwydir is a Tudor courtyard house or fortified manor rather than a traditional castle of the kind Llywelyn the Great and Edward I built in North Wales. The rebuilding incorporated re-used medieval material from the dissolved Maenan Abbey: the square turret added at the rear of the Solar Tower around 1540 contains a spiral staircase taken from the abbey. The initials of John Wyn ap Maredudd stand above the main entrance in the courtyard gatehouse with the date 1555. Sir John Wynn's History of the Gwydir Family notes that some take the name to be a compound of gwy and tir — wet land — or of gwaed and tir, blood land, though it may instead derive from gwo-, low, and tir, land.

By the 16th century Gwydir was the seat of the Wynn family, descendants of the Kings of Gwynedd and one of the most significant families of north Wales in the Tudor and Stuart periods. The house was home to Katheryn of Berain, and Charles I is said to have visited in 1645 as the guest of Sir Richard Wynn, 2nd Baronet, Treasurer to Queen Henrietta Maria and Groom of the Royal Bed Chamber.

During the 16th and 17th centuries the Gwydir estate dominated north Wales, and at its centre the house stood in a deer park of some 36,000 acres. In 1678 Gwydir passed by marriage to the Barons Willoughby de Eresby, when Mary Wynn married Robert Bertie, then Lord Willoughby de Eresby and later 1st Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven. With its owners based in Lincolnshire, the 18th century saw a period of some neglect, though in 1796 the title of Baron Gwydyr was created for Peter Burrell, husband of Priscilla Bertie, 21st Baroness Willoughby de Eresby. Lord Willoughby undertook some demolition work at the house around 1819, followed by alterations around 1828.

By the early 19th century the estate ran to some 55 square miles, largely the parishes of Dolwyddelan, Llanrhychwyn, Trefriw and Gwydir — mostly mountainous land of poor quality, its thirty-odd slate quarries producing, over 150 years, only as much as two years' output from Blaenau Ffestiniog. Much of the estate lay under continuous mortgage, and in 1894 Dolwyddelan was sold off, followed over the next two years by most of Llanrhychwyn and Trefriw. King George V and Queen Mary, then Duke and Duchess of York, stayed at Gwydir in April 1899. The sale of the house itself in 1921 by the Earl Carrington took it out of inherited ownership for the first time in over 400 years, and today the estate comprises just the ten acres in which the castle sits.

In 1921 the panelled main dining room of the 1640s was stripped, its carved and gilded panelling bought at auction by the American press baron William Randolph Hearst and, on his death, inherited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1922 a fire gutted the Solar Tower, leaving it roofless; a subsequent fire in the West Wing made the place untenable, and it stood unoccupied until 1944, when Arthur Clegg, a retired bank manager, bought it and began a twenty-year programme of renovation with his wife and son.

Peter Welford and Judy Corbett purchased the castle in 1994 and began a restoration of their own, told in Corbett's book Castles in the Air. They traced the Hearst panelling to the Metropolitan Museum and negotiated its sale back; the panels were returned to their original setting, and the restored dining room re-opened in July 1998 at a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales. Gwydir remains privately owned by Welford and Corbett, a Grade I listed building and National Monument of Wales, while Gwydir Uchaf Chapel in the woods above — built in 1673 by Sir Richard Wynn as a memorial chapel for the Wynns of Gwydir — is managed by Cadw.