Swansea Castle

Henry de Beaumont was granted the Lordship of Gower in 1106 and used Swansea as the caput from which the Normans consolidated their hold on the area; a timber castle stood there by 1116, when Welsh forces attacked and destroyed its outer defences. The original stronghold was a sub-rectangular or oval enclosure above the River Tawe, ringed on three sides by a larger outer bailey; its inner mound — probably a motte, though it has also been read as a ringwork — measured 52 metres across, second in size only to Cardiff's.

Rhys ap Gruffydd, Prince of Deheubarth, besieged the castle in 1192, and its defenders endured ten weeks of starvation; accounts differ on whether it was captured or held. Further attacks failed, and the castle finally fell in 1217, before being restored to the English in 1220 under the settlement between Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Henry III.

The castle was rebuilt in stone, probably between 1221 and 1284, beginning with the inner castle and at least one tower before the large outer bailey was added; the two surviving sections of that outer bailey's south-east corner were built in the late 13th or early 14th century; the south face ends in a tall garderobe tower, its wall-head capped with an arcade similar to the Bishop of St David's palaces at Lamphey and St David's. By the 14th century the castle was losing its military importance. Alina de Mowbray ruled Gower until 1331, when her son John de Mowbray succeeded as Lord of Gower and probably added the arcaded parapet walk.

During the Welsh rebellion led by Owain Glyndŵr in the early 1400s, which saw a number of English-held castles attacked, it is not recorded whether Swansea itself fell; the castle's account books note only that two men were sent north to gather intelligence on Glyndŵr's movements. Its owners became absentee landlords, and by 1650 the castle was described as "a decayed Buildinge."

The square tower was in use as a bottle factory by the 1670s, and a town hall was built in the castle courtyard in 1700; by the mid-18th century the Great Hall had become Swansea's workhouse. The River Tawe, which had once flowed close by, was straightened and diverted in the 1840s; the town hall gave way to a post office in the 1800s, and by 1850 a military Drill Room had replaced the workhouse.

The castle's large motte — the mound that had survived since the 12th century — was demolished between 1909 and 1913 to build a newspaper office; in the early 1930s the poet Dylan Thomas worked for the South Wales Daily Post on the site. The newspaper offices were removed in 1976, after which the remains were consolidated and opened to view from the street. The castle is a scheduled monument, and was given a Grade I listing in 1952.

Fenced off for decades and opened to the public only rarely — most recently for tours timed to St David's Day in 2012 — the site was made a permanent public space in the early 2010s through a project funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Welsh Government, adding a stone-paved courtyard and information panels for public tours, markets and a Swansea castle trail. It is now a National Monument of Wales, held and operated by Cadw.