Builth Castle

Builth is the most frustrating castle site in Wales and one of the most useful.

Edward I rebuilt it in stone between 1277 and 1282, at the start of the programme that would produce Flint, Rhuddlan, Conwy and Caernarfon. It had a stone keep on the motte, six towers round the bailey, a substantial gatehouse and a walled outer ward. The accounts survive and the expenditure was considerable.

There is nothing left. Not a wall. Not a footing above ground.

Where it went

Stone is a building material, and a redundant castle in a town short of good masonry is a quarry. Builth's masonry went into the town over several centuries, unrecorded, and by the eighteenth century antiquarian visitors were already describing bare mounds.

That process happened everywhere. What makes Builth unusual is how complete it was.

What survives, and why to go

Earthworks, and they are superb. A large motte with a deep encircling ditch, a bailey with its own bank and ditch, an outer enclosure, and the counterscarp banks thrown up from the digging.

Because there is no masonry, there is nothing distracting from the shape of the thing. If you want to understand how a castle earthwork was actually laid out — where the ditches run, how the approach was forced to turn, how much ground was moved — Builth is a better teacher than most sites with walls on them.

The scale of the earth-moving is the part that surprises people. This was done with picks, shovels and baskets.

1282

The castle's most significant moment is one it took no part in.

In December 1282 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was in this district with a small force, separated from his army, and was killed at Cilmeri three miles west on 11 December. The castle was garrisoned for the English crown at the time.

Tradition holds that the townspeople refused Llywelyn shelter, which is why they were remembered as bradwyr Buallt, the traitors of Builth.

Visiting

Free, open, on the edge of Builth Wells with a short walk up from the town. There is an interpretation board and no facilities.

Cilmeri is three miles west on the Llanwrtyd road. The monument, a rough granite monolith set up in 1956, is beside the road and easy to miss. People still leave flowers there in December.