A trip to Ewloe Castle on a cold damp and misty day .which gave the place an eerie feel ..The edit is rough so please forgive me,And thanks for watching
Synopsis
Ewloe Castle (Welsh: Castell Ewloe or Castell Ewlo) is a native Welsh castle built by the Kingdom of Gwynedd near the town of Ewloe in Flintshire, Wales. The castle, which was one of the last fortifications to be built by the native Princes of Wales, was abandoned at the beginning of the invasion of Wales by Edward I in 1277. Its construction, using locally quarried sandstone, appears to have continued piecemeal over many years and may have not been completed. On taking the castle, the English Crown gave it little military value and allowed it to fall into ruin.
Ewloe was sited on high ground within Tegeingl, a cantref in the lands of north-east Wales (Welsh Perfeddwlad). Standing near the Chester road, it maintained a strategic position near the Wales-England border. The castle is located on a steeply sloped promontory within a forested valley. It overlooks the junction of two streams with higher ground to the south.
Ewloe Castle combines features from both motte-and-bailey and enclosure castles. An asymmetrical curtain wall-with parapets-encloses two courtyards. A rock-cut neck ditch defends the southern side of the castle. In the upper triangular inner ward is a D-shaped tower known as the "Welsh keep". This stands on a stone outcrop that forms the motte; it has a stone revetment around its base (a basic chemise). The lower outer ward is enclosed by two separate sections of wall that meet at a circular fortified tower, which stands upon a rocky knoll. As the curtain walls are not joined together, ladders would have had to be used to reach their parapets.
No gateways connected the inner ward to the outer courtyard. Access into Ewloe Castle was entirely via wooden ramps. The outer ward had several wooden buildings. An external defensive rampart occupies the higher ground to the south of the castle above the neck ditch.
Within the inner ward is a D-shaped (or horseshoe-shaped) tower known as the "Welsh Keep". Although a flight of stairs lead up to a first floor gateway-a similarity shared with contemporary military architecture, the shape of the tower does not conform with keeps of the later Plantagenet period. D-shaped towers usually projected out from a wall or gatehouse but at Ewloe the castle builders placed the tower/keep on a motte in the upper ward surrounded by its own curtain wall. This feature has precedence in Welsh military architecture. Llywelyn the Great built a similar D-shaped tower at Castell y Bere at Llanfihangel-y-Pennant in Gwynedd in the 1220s.
The tower's outer walls-which are 2 m (6 ft 7 in) at their base-rose to about 11 m (36 ft). They were higher than the upper storey to protect its pitched roof from projectiles. A parapet ran around the top of the tower. Spaces in the stonework show where storage slots were placed in the upper roof spaces. The tower had a single first-floor hall that stood above a lower ground floor chamber. Defensive arrowslits were placed on the curved sides of the tower. The flat side, which overlooks the outer ward, has a Romanesque window.