Penrhyn Castle

Penrhyn Castle is a well known and prominent landmark on the outskirts of Bangor in North Wales. It is a massive – and impressive – 19th century castellated mansion incorporating a tall keep which is visible from miles around. Penrhyn is open to the public for a fee as it is a National Trust property. Less well-known is the fact that it was far from the first building to be erected here, on a hilltop site overlooking the River Ogwen as it nears the sea at the eastern end of the Menai Strait.

The first mention of a high-status house here is in 1413, after the Glyndwr rebellion, when it was a possession of Gwilym ap Gruffudd, who had profited from the recent war by briefly supporting Glyndwr, but then returning to Crown loyalty. Gwilym and his wife Morfydd were both members of the prominent landowning family descended from Ednyfed Fychan, the distain of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth. Gwilym was descended from Goronwy ap Ednyfed, Morfydd from Tudor ap Ednyfed. Morfydd was, in fact, cousin to Owen ap Tudor, who would become the grandfather of King Henry VII. The lands of Penrhyn belonged to Morfydd’s family. Their descendants prospered throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. By the mid 17th, the estate had passed to the Williams family, and was held by John Williams, later Archbishop of York, and his brother Sir Griffith, unusually being made a baronet by both Oliver Cromwell and King Charles II. In the mid 18th century, Penrhyn passed by marriage to Richard Pennant, the second son of a Liverpool merchant. Pennant was the owner of several sugar plantations in Jamaica, and an opponent to the abolition of slavery, using the profits from the plantations to fund a slate business which was even more profitable. In 1782, the architect Charles Wyatt drew up plans of the existing buildings at Penrhyn along with designs for improvements.

These plans show that the oldest part of the house took the form of a hall with two flanking wings forming a shallow “U” shaped building, with the courtyard facing north-east. This hall, prior to alterations, was lit by two windows of 14th century type, and accessed through a medieval pointed doorway. A small projecting stair turret in the south-eastern corner of the hall accessed the first floor. A cellar beneath was barrel-vaulted, and a stair led to the base of the stair turret. By the time Wyatt drew up his plans, the old house had been extended to three times its original size, the courtyard had been filled in with a new entrance and circulation area. The southern wing was made up of two rooms – a smoking room to the west (now with a large round bay at the gable end), a library to the east, and a corridor between, which extended into the newer parts of the building to the south. ,The north wing was now made up of two rooms, a dining room to the west, with its round bay at the gable end, and a drawing room to the east, with its bay facing north. Between the drawing room and the library the great hall had been retained along with the stair turret. The extension to the south was roughly L-shaped, with rooms either side of the corridor extending the house along its long axis to the south-west. At the southern end of this was a wing at right angles made up of two rooms and a projecting square third room to the south. This was a separate building in some respects, with an external doorway rather than a link to the main house. A large triangular courtyard was created on the eastern side of this house, with stables and presumably low-status accommodation arrayed around the other two sides.

The house created to Wyatts designs was large, but was dwarfed by the works begun in 1827. Richard Pennant died in 1808 and the estate was inherited by his second cousin George Hay Dawkins, on the condition that he adopted the name Pennant – which he tagged onto his existing name. It was Dawkins-Pennant (another wealthy plantation owner in his own right) who instructed the colossal redevelopment of Penrhyn to a design by Thomas Hopper, creating the mock-castle we see today. Given the scale of the new mansion, it would be difficult to accurately describe the buildings. However, in broad terms, the site of the old U-shaped house now forms the rear part of the central block of the mansion, which extends to the north-east to form a roughly square shaped section. The great tower-keep is attached to the south-eastern part of this block by a tall two storey link. To the north is a large and messy complex of buildings set around two courtyards, beyond which is a substantial stable range, with a courtyard to the east. Penrhyn then passed through the descendants of the Pennant family until 1951, when the castle and a 40,000 acre estate were surrendered to HM Treasury in order to cover the costs of death duties. It was then transferred to the National Trust. The headline image on the National Trust website actually shows the exterior of the old house, with the keep to the right. It truly is a spectacular building – even if the medieval parts are next to impossible to find!

Penrhyn Castle website (NT)