Holt Castle

Holt was started by Edward I on a sandstone base beside the River Dee soon after the invasion of North Wales in 1277. In 1282 the king presented the Welsh lands of Bromfield and Yale, in which Holt lay, to the loyal lord John de Warrene, who was also given the task of completing the castle. By 1311 the work was finished, and a planned town had been laid out next to it for the use of English settlers.

The castle was built of local sandstone on top of a promontory some twelve metres high, and was shaped like a pentagon with a tower at each corner. A stepped ramp climbed to the main gateway, and the castle had a barbican, an inner ward, a postern and curtain walls, with a water-filled moat fed from the River Dee. Towers were built against the face of the rock outside the curtain wall, a design shared with the inner wards at Ruthin and Conwy. In the medieval period the five-towered fortress was known as Castrum Leonis, or Castle Lyons, for the lion motif carved into the stonework above its main gate.

Welsh forces burned down the town in 1400 during the uprising of Owain Glyndŵr, although the castle itself was not taken. By the sixteenth century Holt had fallen into disuse and ruin: the English Elizabethan map-maker John Norden surveyed it and noted that it was "nowe in great decay".

For most of the First English Civil War Holt was garrisoned by Royalist troops. The Parliamentarians captured it in 1643, and the Royalists retook it in the spring of 1644. Thirteen of the Parliamentarian garrison were put to the sword after the surrender, and their bodies thrown into the moat.

In January 1647, after a siege lasting nine months, the Royalist governor Sir Richard Lloyd surrendered Holt to Thomas Mytton, commander of the besieging Parliamentarians. After Holt's surrender, Harlech was the only stronghold in Wales still under Royalist control, and it too fell to Mytton in March of that year. Colonel Roger Pope was appointed Parliamentary governor of Holt, and by order of Parliament the castle was slighted later the same year.

Between 1675 and 1683 much of what remained was taken away by Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet of Eaton, who used barges to carry the stonework downstream to rebuild Eaton Hall after the Civil War. By the eighteenth century all that was left of Holt Castle was part of a tower and a rectangular building; of the rest, only the sandstone foundation and a small amount of masonry survives.

The site is a scheduled monument and a National Monument of Wales, and the surviving structure is a Grade II* listed building. Archaeological excavation was carried out between 2012 and 2014, and a series of archaeological surveys of the site has also been undertaken; in 2015 four years of work to clear vegetation, install steps and repair the standing masonry was completed.