Penrhyn CastleCastell Penrhyn
Local highlightNot an old castle at all but a colossal Victorian one, raised on slate and sugar money above the Menai Strait
Open to visitorsa National Trust place — check opening times and admission before you go
For all the battlements and round towers, this is a country house barely two centuries old, dressed up to look like a Norman fortress. The architect Thomas Hopper built it between 1819 and 1835 for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, and no expense was spared: a keep over a hundred feet high, cavernous halls carved with mock-medieval detail, a grand staircase that took ten years to finish, even a bed made of slate. The family money came from the Penrhyn slate quarries a few miles inland and, before that, from sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by enslaved people, and the house is a monument to that wealth as much as to anyone’s taste.
Inside there’s a serious art collection, with paintings by Canaletto and Gainsborough among them, and the estate rolls down towards the coast with a walled garden and parkland to walk. The setting does a lot of the work: the castle stands on rising ground above the Wales Coast Path, looking across to Anglesey one way and up into Eryri the other.
It’s a paid National Trust property with set opening hours, and the house tends to open for a shorter season than the grounds, so check the day’s times if the interiors are what you’re after. Medieval castle hunters have the real thing close by at Beaumaris, across the water.
