After such a huge post for last week, and so late, it seems wise to go for something lighter this week, so here are some pictures. In July 2021, right after the digital IMC was finished, my partner and I lit out for Wales. This was still on the declining edge of lockdown, so that we weren’t always sure what would be open, but enough seemed safe that we had quite an itinerary. This was, for once, not medievalist in intent – industrial heritage, if anything, was our plan – but you can’t wander round many parts of these isles without finding something medieval, and north Wales is a particularly good illustration. For example, even standing in the upper reaches of the ruins of the massive Dinorwig slate quarries, your eye might well be drawn to this, across the Llanberis pass…
Despite being surrounded by slate, discarded or constructed, one’s eye is drawn to something made of different stone…
So obviously when that happened to us, we investigated and found this.
The keep and some of the walls of Castell Dolbadarn
And this is Dolbadarn Castle, built by Prince Llywelyn ap Iorweth of Gywnedd in the 1220s and 1230s as he tried to balance the competing requirements of being top dog in North Wales for a while and facing off the English, a balance which was not far off being tipped for the foreseeable future. But right at that time, he could imitate the Normans enough to hold a position between them and Wales that no-one could be bothered to shunt him out of, and Dolbadarn, sitting above one of the main access routes to the west of North Wales, was part of how he did it.
Somewhere in the rain there is the Llanberis pass
And even today, this looks like a pretty good way to remain safe from people coming up it
This central keep, which is most of what you now see, is actually the second phase of building, part of an upgrade with curtain walls and so on. It’s easier to see how things built up from on top.
If I understand the quite informative Wikipedia page right, then the oldest thing you can see here is the footing of a square tower at the near right, partnered by a less obvious one at middle left, and the walls which join them into a circuit. Everything beyond them came with the keep.
There’s not much left to stand on inside the tower, which was originally basically a two-floor fortified round hall, but you can see that it was impressive.
The upperworks still show pretty clearly where the floor levels were
And even though it’s far from huge, the architecture suggests it was meant to impose and maybe even daunt
We had mostly very good weather for this holiday, but as you can see this day was not one of the lucky ones. Neither is Dolbadarn even perhaps the most impressive thing in the area; the sheer mountainous ruination of Dinorwig is hours of possible exploration and contemplation of human folly or endeavour, depending on how you feel about the slate industry I guess. But it’s definitely material for us medievalists!
As this is one of my lightweight posts, the limited information above has all come from the Cadw webpage on the site, already linked, and the current Wikipedia entry on it, which is actually quite full and well-referenced. There’s really no useful information on site. If you needed to know more about Llywelyn ap Iorweth and his times, however, I’d recommend you in the first instance to Kari Maund, Welsh Kings: warriors, warlords and princes (Stroud 2011).
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
We can’t all live under the glorious red pantiles that people in East Lothian (for instance) like. If you grew up within easy trading distance of the Irish Sea (for example) you probably lived under a Welsh slate roof.
We replaced our tiled roof recently: it had lasted only a hundred years. For a slate roof you could expect double that.
Funnily enough, we’re currently having quite a lot of work done on our roof, but ours is Yorkshire setts. Marginally more expensive than slate on the reclamation market, it seems, but they may be as old as the house, whose core would remember Charles II if he’d ever been there. Not very many needed replacing, though they’ve all had to come off and go on again to deal with the slow decay of the wood that holds up the really considerable weight. They must be two or three times the tonnage of the same coverage of slate. So even at Llanberis, I could see why slate would have seemed like a better idea.