PENRHYN CASTLE, BANGOR

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Penrhyn Castle, one of the most enormous houses in Britain, is an extensive fantasy castle by Thomas Hopper, largely built from the early 1820s to 1837 for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant. The castle climaxes in a vast Norman hall and an overbearing great tower, modelled on Heddingham Castle. A mansion is recorded here in the fourteenth century and licence to crenalate was obtained in the period 1410-1431. This house was swept away in about 1782 when a castellated Gothick style house was built. The hall of the 1782 house survives as the present drawing room.

The dauntingly fine masonry of the present structure rises sheer out of the woods, and the sombre walls meet the natural slopes like a medieval castle’s. While the bulk of the work took some fifteen years from c. 1820, substantial dismantling and rearranging, using both existing stonework and new, continued in the 1840s–50s and after. Even within the main phase, the re-cladding of the Wyatt stableyard at the north with mock fourteenth century towers, as though it were defences for an outer bailey, followed the primary Neo-Romanesque domestic core. Wyatt’s version of the house proper vanished, apart from influencing the southern part of the corps de logis plan. The resulting skylines were surely designed to outpace other modern castle-making especially Rickman’s castellated scenery at Gwrych in Denbighshire, which was completed in 1816. The heroic mood suggests that Hopper and Dawkins-Pennant drew inspiration partly from ancient Mediterranean ruins (the latter’s uncle James Dawkins led the expedition which rediscovered Balbec and Palmyra) as well as from the vocabulary of eleventh and twelfth century castles or churches.

Source: Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker (2009), The Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd. Pevsner Architectural Guide, page 398.

RCAHMW, October 2009

Coflein

PENRHYN CASTLE, BANGOR

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