Hay Castle

Hay Castle sits above the market square and is four buildings pretending to be one.

The layers

The earliest surviving element is the gateway and a fragment of keep, late twelfth century, with a fine Norman arch and the remains of a wooden door that is among the oldest in Britain still in position.

Built onto and into that is a Jacobean mansion of around 1660, gabled and mullioned, which turned a redundant fortress into a comfortable house without demolishing what was there. Then a range of later additions, and then a good deal of scaffolding.

That accumulation is normal for a Marcher castle that stayed occupied. What is unusual is how visible the joins are.

Being burned, repeatedly

The medieval history is the standard border one. William de Braose held it. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth took the town in 1231. King John burned it. Glyndŵr's forces burned it in 1401.

The modern history is not much calmer. The mansion was gutted by fire in 1939 and again in 1977, and after the second fire it stood open to the weather for decades.

Maud

The castle is attached in local tradition to Maud de Braose, also called Moll Walbee, who is credited with building it in a single night and carrying the stones in her apron.

She was a real person and her end is documented and appalling: 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 is cheerful and the history is not, and they sit side by side here.

Booth

Richard Booth, the bookseller who made Hay a book town and declared it an independent kingdom on 1 April 1977, bought the castle and ran part of it as a bookshop for years while the rest fell down around it.

It passed to the Hay Castle Trust in 2011, and after a long conservation programme it opened to the public in 2022 with galleries, a learning space, a bookshop and a café.

What to see

The Norman gateway and the door. The Jacobean frontage. A tower walk with a view over the town, the Wye and the Black Mountains, which is the best vantage point in Hay.

The interpretation covers the building's own history of near-destruction fairly directly, which is more interesting than a conventional castle display.

Visiting

Open most of the year, charged for the exhibition spaces with free access to the grounds and some public areas. It is in the middle of the town, so parking is town parking.

The honesty bookshop in the castle grounds — books on open shelves, coins in a box — is still running and is one of the more agreeable things in Wales.