Hay Castle

The Norman advance into south Wales reached Hay after Bernard de Neufmarché conquered Brecknock in 1091 and assigned the manor to one of his followers, Philip Walwyn. The first castle at Hay was built by St Mary's church outside the main settlement, and its motte survives as the Hay Tump; the lordship, known as Hay Anglicana, grew into a wealthy walled town, and its lands passed by marriage to Miles of Gloucester and then into the de Braose family. In the late 11th or early 12th century a new fortification went up inside Hay itself, around 200 metres from the old motte: an earth ringwork with a stone gate tower.

The de Braose family rebuilt Hay Castle in stone around 1200, adding a curtain wall reinforced with intramural timbers and turning the gate tower into a keep. During the First Barons' War, Reginald de Braose joined the baronial alliance against King John, who attacked the castle in 1215. The Welsh prince Llywelyn ab Iorwerth attacked and burnt the town and castle in 1231, and Henry III had it rebuilt in 1233. During the Second Barons' War, Prince Edward captured the castle in 1263, only for Simon de Montfort and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to recapture and burn it the following year.

The castle was damaged again during Owain Glyndŵr's rebellion around 1401 and during the Wars of the Roses in 1460. When the antiquarian John Leland visited in the 16th century he found the town of Hay "wonderfully decaied", though the castle itself was described as having once "bene right stately".

A Jacobean mansion was raised beside the medieval keep in the 17th century, though historians disagree on the sequence: one account has Howell Gwynne building a manor house in the first half of the century, later replaced in 1660 by a new mansion built by James Boyle of Hereford; another has Boyle leaving the castle to Gwynne in 1603, with the mansion built at the century's start. The building was two storeys tall, three counting its facade, with seven Dutch-style dormer gables and a large staircase, and it incorporated the upper floors of the old keep. In 1702 the house was divided among tenants and passed to the local Wellington family; the keep's basement supplemented the town gaol until 1812. The industrialist Sir Joseph Bailey leased the castle from 1809 and bought it outright in 1844, laying out a walled kitchen garden; the building served as a vicarage from 1825, including under Archdeacon William Bevan, and its terraced gardens were maintained through the 19th century, with trees planted behind the castle in the 1860s and 1870s.

The architect W. D. Caröe restored the house in 1910, and it was sold to the banker Benjamin Guinness in 1937. Fire destroyed the interior of the eastern side in 1939. Richard Booth acquired the castle around 1961 and ran it as a bookstore, selling much of the walled garden for development in 1975; a second fire in 1977 gutted the western half, and repairs followed from the 1980s. In 2011 Hay Castle Trust bought the castle for around £2 million and, with Rick Mather Architects and more than £5 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund alongside other trusts, foundations and the Welsh Government, restored it as a centre for arts, literature and learning, including a gallery and a viewing point atop the keep. It opened to the public for the first time in its history on 26 May 2022. Little of the original earthworks or curtain wall survives beyond a fragment by the gateway, 1.8 metres thick, whose bank once stood as much as 7.6 metres high; the gateway's left-hand door probably dates from around 1300, the right-hand one from the early 17th century. The castle is a Grade I listed building, and its gardens are listed Grade II on the Cadw/ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales.