Gwrych Castle

Gwrych Castle (Welsh: Castell Gwrych; pronounced [ˌkastɛɬ ˈɡwrɨːχ]) is a Grade I listed country house near Abergele in Conwy County Borough, Wales. On an ancient site, the current building was created by Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh and his descendants over much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The castle and its 236-acre estate are now owned by a charity, the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust.

The family had owned land in the area of Abergele since at least the 16th century and claimed much older descent. In the very early 19th century Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh determined to replace the existing house with a much larger building. Designs were prepared by Charles Busby and exhibited in 1815. Busby was subsequently sacked and Thomas Rickman engaged, while Bamford-Hesketh's ambitions grew from a Regency style country house into an enormous Gothic Revival castle. The foundation stone was laid in 1819. Bamford-Hesketh's heirs continued his building and at various times C. E. Elcock and Detmar Blow worked at the castle until it achieved its final, immense, extent. In the later Victorian and Edwardian eras the castle was run as a full-scale country house, receiving visits from Queen Victoria and Edward, Prince of Wales.

The presiding spirit was Winifred Bamford-Hesketh, Lloyd Bamford Hesketh's granddaughter, his sole heir, and Countess of Dundonald following her wedding to Douglas Cochrane in 1878. The marriage was not a success, and the countess pursued her interests at Gwrych and in London, while the earl served in Canada and as a courtier to Edward VII and George V. On her death in 1924, the countess left the castle, of which she had retained ownership, to George V, in the hope that it would become the official Welsh residence of the Prince of Wales but the gift was declined.

Text adapted from “Gwrych Castle” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Gwrych Castle ranks #52 of 6,412 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #4 of the 82 mapped in Wales. Founded 1819, it is older than 13% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 432 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. See how Wales compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗