Pennard Castle

The Normans began making incursions into south Wales from the late 1060s, pushing west from their bases in recently occupied England, and marked their advance with castles and new regional lordships. Pennard Castle belongs to that advance. It was built at the start of the 12th century after Henry de Beaumont, Earl of Warwick, conquered the Gower Peninsula and made Pennard one of his demesne manors.

The builders chose a limestone spur over the mouth of the Pennard Pill stream and Three Cliffs Bay, with cliffs shielding the north and west. The first fortification was an oval ringwork of 34 by 28 metres, ringed by a ditch and ramparts, with a timber hall at its centre. A church, St Mary's, went up just to the east, a settlement gathered around the site, and a rabbit warren was established in the sand dunes nearby. In the early 13th century a plain stone hall of about 18.6 by 7.6 metres replaced the timber building on the same spot, in red-purple sandstone with white limestone detailing.

Around the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, with the castle in the hands of William de Braose and his son, also William, the timber defences came down. A thin stone curtain wall roughly 8 metres tall, with battlements, took the place of the palisades; the mural defences included a square tower on a rocky spur to the west and a circular tower at the north-west corner. A new gatehouse carried two half-circular towers that possibly imitated those of regional castles such as Caerphilly, though it was weakly defended, with only a portcullis and a handful of arrow loops. The masonry was red sandstone rubble, probably quarried locally, mixed with limestone dug out of the castle site itself.

The Braoses may have built the new Pennard as a replacement for their castle at nearby Penmaen, which was abandoned at about the same time because of encroaching sand dunes.

Pennard began to suffer the same dune encroachment, and castle and settlement alike were gradually abandoned. A survey of 1650 called the fortification "desolate and ruinous" and surrounded by sand. By 1741 the south wall had largely fallen, though the rest of the castle was apparently still generally intact; further losses had followed by 1795.

From the 18th century onwards the ruins were a popular subject for engravings, sketches and paintings, the view from the east proving the favourite. By 1879 large cracks had opened in the southern tower of the gatehouse, and that tower partially collapsed.

By 1922 concern about the castle's condition had brought the Pennard Golf Club, which owned the site, into discussion with the Royal Institution and the Cambrian Archaeological Association. A joint committee set out to raise funds for repairs to the stonework, but the costs appear to have been excessive; instead the gatehouse was patched with concrete between 1923 and 1924.

Much of what remained of the southern wall came down at the beginning of 1960. An archaeological survey followed in 1960 and 1961, and urgent masonry repairs were carried out in 1963, paid for by the Ministry of Public Building and Works, the Gower Society, the golf club and a public appeal launched by local newspapers.

The gatehouse ruins survive up to the battlements on the east side, partly because they were built with very strong mortar; parts of the curtain wall stand on the north and east sides, along with the remains of the square mural tower. The ruins are protected under UK law as a Grade II* listed building and a scheduled ancient monument.