The castle at Aberystwyth

The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth is somewhere I’ve had cause to visit a few times recently. As well as a university and a funicular railway (which goes up the cliffs to the north of the town; there’s a park and a camera obscura at the top), Aber (as it’s known locally) has its own castle which dates back to the late thirteenth century.

It’s a ruin now, but unlike a lot of castles it has the advantage of being free to access at any time of day. It dates back to reign of Edward I as part of his campaign to conquer Wales; like the better-known castles to the north at Caernarvon and Harlech, it was the work of one James of Saint George, one of the greatest castle-builders ever to have lived (he’s also known as Jacques de Saint-Georges d’Esperanche; until the mid-twentieth century, historians had assumed that James et Jacques were different men from the same place – a village in south-eastern France – who both happened to be castle-builders, but it’s now accepted that they were the same person).

In the early 1400s, the famous Welsh rebel leader Owain Glyndwr (whose name is sometimes anglicised as Owen Glendower) captured Aberystwyth Castle and made it his headquarters, which probably explains why this castle was the first to have cannons fired against it when Henry IV attacked it in 1408. Over two centuries later, the castle was briefly a Royal Mint during the reign of Charles I but, like many a British castle, it was slighted (rendered unusable as a military installation) on the orders of Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, going to the seaside was becoming popular with those who could afford to do so; the previous fashion had been for spa towns like Bath, Cheltenham and Royal Tunbridge Wells, but after it became known that George III preferred sea-bathing the trend shifted towards seaside towns. This was also a time when, thanks to various wars with France, rich Britons who would previously have travelled to Europe for the Grand Tour looked to domestic destinations instead. Aberystwyth proclaimed itself to be the ‘Brighton of Wales’, and the castle became a popular picturesque ruin with those who visited the town. The late eighteenth century was very much the age of the picturesque, thanks mainly to the Rev. William Gilpin and his 1770 trip along the Wye; he defined ‘picturesque’ as ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, and this had a great impact not just on late eighteenth century tourism but on the Romantic movement that was to follow.

A picturesque ruin is very much what Aberystwyth Castle is today. I rather like walking over the wooden bridge from the war memorial to the old D-shaped tower with the gateway in it, and then either passing through or around it (there being not much left by way of walls) and then wandering among the ruins. I clamber up onto some parts as, quite a few other people do. You can, if you’re confident, make it up to the circular tower on the northern side; the views from there are pretty good. I’ve even spotted students having an evening barbecue up there! To the east, the ruins of another tower with plenty of jutting-out bricks could present more of a challenge; perhaps the casual would-be climber-of-ruins should give this one a miss.

Amid the ruins, there’s something you don’t see in many, or even in any other, castles – a stone circle. A puzzle, but not for long (there are plenty of information boards around, even a series of mosaics about the castle’s history down by the road that skirts around it down on the seaward side). It isn’t anywhere near as old as the castle, and it wasn’t added to make the place more picturesque back in the eighteenth century. The stones were in fact put there in 1916, to celebrate the Eisteddfod (Welsh literature and music festival) that took place in Aber in that year – the symbolism is that there are 13 stones, one for each of the 13 historic counties of Wales.