Natural Stone and World Heritage

The Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd

Ruth Siddall

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000481228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

This book is about the stone used to build the castles of Edward I in North West Wales. It provides a description of the available geological resources and the building materials used in the construction of Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris Castles. It takes a broad view of this subject, placing the stone used in the castles in the context of both earlier and later buildings across the region of study, from the Neolithic up until the present day.

The book will serve as a useful source book for geologists, archaeologists, architects, representatives of the natural stone industry, historians and cultural heritage management professionals specifically and for academic and non-academic communities, travellers and tourism industry operators in general.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 110.1201/9781003002444-1

The UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) that includes the Castles and Town Walls of Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris is a particularly large one, encompassing an 80 km section of the North Wales coastline and its hinterland, which extends across the coastal plains and up into the mountains of Snowdonia. It is spread across three counties, Conwy, Anglesey and Gwynedd¹, and some 650 million years of Earth history. The Castles of Edward I and the slate quarrying districts of Arfon and Blaenau-Ffestiniog (which have also been nominated for WHS status) are located within a cultural landscape which has always had an intimate relationship with rock and stone. For this book to provide a simplistic summary of building materials over this large and geologically complex region would be an almost impossible task. Therefore, to put the use of stone in the Medieval Edwardian Castles into context requires an understanding of what had come before and how the building of the Castles and their immediate towns was influenced by this historic landscape and how, in turn, these new settlements influenced the regional development, right up until the present day.

North West (NW) Wales faces the Irish Sea. The towns of Caernarfon and Conwy, some 35 km distant from each other, sit at opposite ends of a coastal plain which extends between the Cambrian Mountains and the Menai Straits, much of this region is in the traditional administrative district (cantref) known as Arfon. Conwy lies in its own County, but the geology, west of the River Conwy, is contiguous with that of Arfon. In Welsh ‘ar fon’ means ‘facing Anglesey’, and this coastal strip is separated from the Island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn) by the NE-SW trending Menai Straits. The town and castle of Beaumaris are located in the NE of Anglesey on the Menai Straits, directly facing Arfon. Harlech Castle is an outlier, situated to the south of the Llyn Peninsula on the coast of Cardigan Bay, some 50 km south of Caernarfon. The Llyn Peninsula extends to the west separating Arfon from the Porthmadog and Harlech areas. The area described in the book covers the land west of the River Conwy to the central Llyn Peninsula, including the SW coast of Anglesey, parallel to the Menai Straits. It also includes the quarried regions of Snowdonia, Llanberis, Blaenau Ffestiniog and Dolwyddelan and the region around Harlech. The locations of the castles and towns discussed in the text are shown in Figure 1.1.

¹ The administrative district of Gwynedd was named after the ancient Kingdom of Gwynedd, established following the fall of the Roman Empire. The modern county designation was established in 1974 and until 1996 covered the whole region under study. Gwynedd today comprises the old counties of ­Caernarfonshire and Meirioneth.

Figure 1.1 A map of NW Wales, showing the location of places named in the text.

The regional geology of NW Wales comprises a sequence of Palaeozoic strata developed on an active continental margin and then, during the Carboniferous, a continental carbonate shelf. The geology of Anglesey is distinct from that of the mainland and is dominated by Proterozoic to Lower Palaeozoic igneous and metamorphic rocks and Carboniferous limestones and sandstones. Further south, Harlech belongs to a region of separate and distinct geology. The town of Harlech is located on the western side of the Harlech Dome, a broad anticlinal structure consisting of Cambrian to Ordovician deep shelf, clastic sediments of the central Welsh Basin.

This region of NW Wales includes some important building stones of both local and international significance. The Cambrian Slates of the Arfon region are designated a Global Heritage Stone (Hughes et al., 2016) and are certainly globally important building materials, and the Lower Carboniferous limestones and sandstones of Anglesey have regional importance as building stones and for the production of lime. In the last quarter of the 13th century and into the early 14th centuries, at the time of the building of Edward I’s castles, these materials and other local, site-specific building stones were employed in construction of castles and churches, the main stone buildings of this period. However, many of the lithologies outcropping in NW Wales have been exploited for stone in some form or another, whether for building dry-stone walls (which are extensive in this region) or for the monumental-scale construction of the castles. With a long history of stone building dating back as far as the Neolithic, stone as precious resource was often recycled through many buildings, and even today, good stone is frequently salvaged from construction sites. The long coastline and good harbours have meant that movement of stone by sea routes has long been possible allowing for both export of local stone and import of stone from other areas of the British Isles. As a consequence, the identification of building stones is not so straightforward as one might think, even for a seasoned geologist with local knowledge. The main problem is that in provenancing stone, we are often searching for an absence in a landscape and not a presence. It is not unusual for stone resources to have been completely quarried out, leaving little evidence of a quarry, let alone remnants of bedrock for comparative purposes. This is the case with at least three lithologies considered important building stones in the Medieval period in NW Wales. Another local problem with the identification of building stones in the region is that the geological landscape of Snowdonia is dominated by a thick sequence of lower Palaeozoic metasediments and volcaniclastic rocks; different units can often be very difficult to distinguish once they are out of stratigraphic context.

Nevertheless, an understanding of stone and its properties has always been part of the culture of this region of Wales. The local landscape has long been a defensive one with a series of castles built in the region during the Norman and Medieval periods, and a millennium before that, the region was defended and garrisoned by a series of Roman forts. Prior to the Roman invasion, local communities in the Iron Age had constructed hill forts that could be defended in times of peril. Wooden forts and castles were constructed in both the Iron Age and the Norman period, and yet without stone, a castle is a vulnerable and an indefensible building. A wooden fort may be garrisoned but would be soon burned to the ground during a siege or indeed even a minor assault. Stone is required for truly defensive architecture.

The English King Edward I (1239–1307) was responsible for building the monumental stone castles at Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris. Edward spent most of his adult life at war. He succeeded his father, the relatively peaceable King Henry III, in 1272. At the time of his father’s death, Edward was returning home from the Ninth Crusade. His wars against Wales began in 1277 when a short-lived campaign set out from the English border town of Chester. A full invasion of North Wales began in 1282 with the intention of total conquest and suppression of the local aristocracy. The building of a chain of castles was an important part of this military campaign, Edward fully understood both the defensive nature of castles and their ability to subdue and control local populations. Rhuddlan and Fflint Castles were the first to be built during the 1277 campaign, and the first to employ Edward’s master castle builders were James of St George and Richard the Engineer. Both men were to go on to have a major part in the organisation of labour and materials as well as the architecture and construction of the four great castles of the Second Welsh War, the four new castles at Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris. Edward and his builders also modified and strengthened castles formerly in Welsh ownership, such as Criccieth and Dolwyddelan, and put garrisons in these structures. Rhuddlan and Flint Castles are outside the area of the current study. Located in the County of Clwyd, neither are they included in the UNESCO WHS.

Since the mid-19th century, NW Wales, with its rugged mountains and beautiful beaches together in close proximity, has been a popular tourist destination, and the castles of the Welsh Princes and Edward I have added to the attractions of the countryside and the castle towns. Subsequently, income for tourism has been of enormous economic importance to the region. The increase in the popularity in outdoor sports and activities, and particularly hillwalking, throughout the course of the 20th century has brought a huge influx of visitors to the region with an interest in the great outdoors and the natural history of the environment. Despite this, Snowdonia is one of the areas with the highest rainfall in the United Kingdom with an excess of 3,000 mm per year.² Visitors arriving with the intention to climb the mountains of Snowdonia are often driven to the lowland and coastal regions for alternative, wet-weather activities including the castles and other ancient and historic monuments in the care of Cadw and the National Trust for Wales. Visitor attractions focussed on geoheritage have recently also become popular destinations, from adventure activities and museums in the slate quarries at Penrhyn, Dinorwig and Blaenau Ffestiniog to the Bronze Age Copper mines on the Great Orme, near Llandudno. The island of Anglesey has been designated a UNESCO Geopark with an information hub at Port Amlwch. The reason for designating landscapes and monuments as WHS is two-fold. Primarily the intention is to protect them and ensure that they are appropriately managed and conserved but the designation also encourages tourism and brings visitors to these areas. NW Wales has an important place in the history of geology, and with this legacy and that of the minerals industry, it is beginning to embrace the concept of geotourism.

Tom Hose has defined ‘geotourism’ as ‘the provision of interpretive and service facilities to enable tourists to acquire knowledge and understanding of the geology and geomorphology of a site (including its contribution to the development of the Earth sciences) beyond the level of mere aesthetic appreciation’ (Hose, 1995, 2008). This definition forwards the belief that landscapes, outcrops of rock and buildings of stone should be appreciated not for their awe inspiring qualities alone but that a means should also be provided for obtaining a deeper understanding of their geology and materiality, posing the following questions: What type of rock is this? How did it form? Why was it chosen to be quarried? At present, in NW Wales (as in many other locations), these questions are rarely answered in visitor centres where an emphasis is (not unreasonably) placed on the human story and aspects of engineering and transport infrastructure. For the slate quarries in particular, the engineering structures and particularly the influence of the slate industry on the development of the railways are perceived as the main focus of interest, with minimal description or discussion of the main purpose of a quarry, i.e. the stone which was won there. Far more has been written about the NW Welsh qu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author
• List of abbreviations and acronyms used in the text
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Regional geology, building stones and quarries in North West Wales
• 3 North West Wales before Edward I
• 4 The castles and town walls of Edward I
• 5 Building the towns of North West Wales: churches, civic centres and manor houses
• 6 The building stones of North West Wales: a final word
• Gazetteer of sites mentioned in the text
• References
• Index