Penrhyn Castle

The land at Penrhyn was originally granted to Ednyfed Fychan, seneschal to Llywelyn the Great, and by the 15th century it had become the centre of a large landholding developed by his descendant Gwilym ap Griffith. Gwilym lost his lands during the Glyndŵr Rising, but regained them by 1406 and began building a fortified manor house and adjoining chapel at Penrhyn, which became his family's main home.

The Pennant fortune began in the late 17th century with Gifford Pennant, a former soldier who settled in Jamaica and built up one of the largest estates on the island, comprising four or five slave plantations growing sugar cane. His son Edward rose to become Chief Justice of Jamaica, and the family accumulated enough wealth to return to England and run their West Indian properties as absentee landlords.

Edward's grandson Richard Pennant (1737–1808) acquired the Penrhyn estate partly through his father, a Liverpool merchant, and partly through his wife, Ann Susannah Warburton. He poured his sugar profits into North Wales — expanding Penrhyn Quarry, building roads and creating Port Penrhyn for the slate trade — until the Bethesda quarries became the world's largest producer of slate by the early 19th century, and in the 1780s commissioned Samuel Wyatt to rebuild the medieval house as a "castellated Gothic" castle. Elevated to the Irish peerage as 1st Baron Penrhyn in 1783, he made over thirty speeches defending the slave trade between 1780 and 1790 and chaired the West India Committee, an informal alliance of some fifty MPs dedicated to opposing abolition.

George Hay Dawkins-Pennant inherited the estate on Richard Pennant's death in 1808 and continued his second cousin's course: developing the quarry, sitting in Parliament, opposing the abolition of slavery — and building. Between 1820 and 1837 the architect Thomas Hopper raised for him one of the largest castles in Britain, a Romanesque Revival pile stretching over 450 feet from a donjon modelled on Hedingham Castle in Essex to the service wing and stables. Cadw estimates the work cost the family around £150,000 — some £50 million in current values — with materials drawn from their own forests and quarries and much of the labour from their industrial workforce. It is generally regarded as Hopper's masterpiece.

When emancipation came with the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, Dawkins-Pennant — who like his cousin had served on the West India Committee — was compensated £14,683 17s 2d for being deprived of 764 enslaved people.

In 1840 the estate passed to Edward Gordon Douglas, husband of Dawkins-Pennant's elder daughter Juliana; he took the name Douglas-Pennant and was created Baron Penrhyn of the second creation in 1866. The castle was not the family's principal residence — it served mainly as a summer holiday home — but Edward filled it with a major collection of paintings, including works by Canaletto and Richard Wilson; guests included Queen Victoria — for whose 1859 visit a one-ton slate bed was made, in which she refused to sleep — the Prince of Wales, and Gladstone.

Edward and his son George were opposed to trade unionism at their quarries, and the refusal of Lord Penrhyn and his agent to recognise the North Wales Quarrymen's Union lay behind the Great Strike of 1900–1903, the longest dispute in British industrial history. The bitterness long outlasted the strike: into the 21st century, some inhabitants of Bethesda still declined to visit the castle.

Edward Douglas-Pennant, 3rd Baron Penrhyn, lost his eldest son and two half-brothers in the First World War; during the Second, a large number of pictures from the National Gallery were stored at the castle to escape the Blitz. When Hugh, the 4th Baron, died in June 1949, the estate passed to his niece Lady Janet Pelham, and in 1951 the castle and 40,000 acres were accepted by the Treasury in lieu of death duties and transferred to the National Trust.

The slave-plantation origins of the Pennant wealth, largely ignored by conservation bodies for much of the 20th century, have since moved to the centre of the castle's story. A 2007 exhibition, Sugar and Slavery – The Penrhyn Connection, marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, and the National Trust's 2020 interim report on colonialism and historic slavery published Dawkins-Pennant's compensation figures, provoking fierce national debate. The castle and its grounds now form part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales.