Painscastle

There are perhaps twenty buildings at Painscastle and beside them one of the largest castle earthworks in Wales.

The disproportion is the whole story. This was a place of real strategic weight in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, holding the commote of Elfael in the middle of contested Radnorshire, and when it stopped mattering there was nothing else to keep a settlement here.

1198

In the summer of 1198 Gwenwynwyn ab Owain, prince of southern Powys, besieged the castle with a substantial Welsh force, aiming to take Elfael and press further east.

An English relieving army under Geoffrey fitz Peter came up and broke the siege. The Welsh losses were heavy — Brut y Tywysogion puts them in the thousands, which is certainly inflated but indicates how the defeat was remembered — and Gwenwynwyn's ambitions in the March effectively ended there.

Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts give Welsh dead in the region of three thousand.

The earthwork

What survives is a very large motte and bailey with deep ditches, remodelled in stone by Henry III's masons in the 1230s and then, as at Builth, robbed out completely. There is no masonry visible.

The scale is what impresses. The ditches are substantial, the bailey is large, and the whole thing sits on a slight rise with clear ground round it.

The name comes from Payn fitz John, a Herefordshire baron who held it in the early twelfth century. The Welsh name is a straight borrowing.

Maud de Braose

The castle was also held by the Braose family, and Maud de Braose — Matilda de St Valéry — is attached to it in local tradition, sometimes under the name Moll Walbee. The stories credit her with building the castle in a night and carrying stones in her apron.

She was a real person with a documented and appalling end: she and her eldest son were starved to death in a royal prison around 1210 after her husband fell out with King John. The folklore and the history run alongside each other here and are not the same thing.

Around

The Begwns, an area of open common to the south-east managed by the National Trust, give a wide view over Elfael and towards the Black Mountains and are the best place to understand the geography that made this castle matter.

Hay-on-Wye is seven miles south-east.