NAR SJ03NW12

A mound thought to represent a castle mentioned in 1202. It is associated with a late medieval house (NPRN 28312) and is set within a seventeenth century park (NPRN 265134). The mount and house occupy the tip of a promontory jutting out across the floodplain of the Dee. It came to be landscaped and is depicted as part of the shrubberies around the house on the OS County series 1st edition (Merioneth. XV.14 1887).
This is a steep-sided oval mound, about 35m by 46m and 7.0m high, with a roughly level summit 9.0m across. There is no trace of a ditch. The summit is strewn with stone, thought to be the debris of a fallen building. This could represent a castle tower, although it could have been a garden feature, a prospect tower, or a banqueting or summer house.
The houses lies on the east side of the mound. Its south-eastern part is believed to be a medieval solar or parlour crosswing to a vanished hall and is dated to the later fourteenth-early fifteenth century. The house was remodelled in the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century and again in the early nineteenth century.
It is possible that the castle was established in 1202, when the commote of Penllyn was divided. It is one of several castle mounds in Merioneth that are associated with apparently unfortified houses, for example Castell Prysor (NPRN 308964) and Rug (NPRN 306598).
It is tempting to speculate that the park had medieval origins.

Sources: NMR Site File
History of Merioneth II (2001), 410-11

John Wiles 10.07.07