Parc Y Castell

Parc-y-Castell is a largely eroded quadrangular earthwork sat in low lying fields. These are the base of a steep-sided valley, through which the Nant Gwrog runs, a minor watercourse which empties into the Teifi about three-quarters of a mile to the south.  The location is visible through trees at the edge of the public road, but the nature of the3 earthwork means it cannot really be made out.

The remains are a roughly square shaped ditch enclosing a platform the sides of which face ENE/WSW and NNW/SSE. Three sides of the ditch survive as an intelligible feature showing clearly in LIDAR, but the northern corner has been eroded, perhaps by landslip into the stream, taking perhaps half of the NW ditch with it. The platform rises about 1.5 metres above the base of the ditch, and measures perhaps 20 metres square; the ditch is perhaps 10 metres wide in places, but mostly silted up. The location is not obviously strategically important, and perhaps represents a late 13th/14th century moated manorial centre from which the area was farmed.

The valley lies on the north side of the Teifi, and is within the commote of Iscoed in the Ceredigion cantref of Is Aeron. This area was settled by the Normans, whose castles line the river valleys along the Teifi and its tributaries from their base at Cardigan, but in the first half of the 12th century had been reclaimed by the Welsh lords of Deheubarth. The typology of the earthwork is not consistent with one of the Norman conquest castles, but is also not what is to be expected from a native site, which leads to the likely date being post 1288, when the rebellion of Rhys ap Maredudd of Ystrad Tywi was decisively crushed, and the lands round about were absorbed into the County of Cardigan.

RCAHMW Coflein database entry