NORTH WALES LIVING       Issue no. 9     JUNE 2006

THE MYSTERY OF LLYWELYN’S TOWER

The lost home of the Princes Llywelyn sits upon a hillside overlooking the Menai Strait. ‘Lost’ because with the murder and death of the royal clan of Llywelyn, the first prince of Wales, in the 13^th century, the house passed from the history books.           Special report by Carolle Doyle.

It was overlooked by historians and scholars, but remembered by the people who lived with their backs to Snowdon and within the shadow of the old tower. So it entered the great stream of Welsh memory and lore and has come down the centuries as Llywelyn’s Tower.

   Now, thanks to the BBC’s team of experts, the last part of the jigsaw that makes up the identity of the old longhouse, with its curious watchtower, has been solved for Pen y Bryn is indeed the old home of the Welsh Princes. Kathryn Pritchard Gibson, who together with her husband, Brian, has owned Pen y Bryn for the past 18years, has been proved right and all her years of careful research have finally been acknowledged.

    The Gibson’s had no idea that they were buying anything other than an Elizabethan manor house when they bought the place in 1988. They simply wanted a family house to bring up their children and Pen y Bryn, which had been advertised as a 36 acre chicken farm, seemed like the ideal place.

   Here was land for the children to safely roam, a view over the Menai Strait that was more beautiful than Kathryn could have dreamed of, and a rambling old house with a curious round tower as a sort of bonus.

   Within days of moving in to the old stone house they were welcomed by their neighbours who left them in o doubt that the place had once been the royal home.

   According to local lore this was the very house where Llywelyn the Great and his son Dafydd, and grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the first prince of Wales, had lived Kathryn walked the fields, whose names have come down through the centuries , piecing together the history of GARTH CELYN, the place of the sixth century Welsh lord, Celyn ap Caw, for here legend is laid upon legend like geological strata.

   Standing in the tower looking out over the Menai Strait to Anglesey, she understood the importance of the site. Seas and rivers were the great highways of the Middle Ages, they brought commerce, clergy and, on occasion, catastrophe to the land.

   All shipping entering the narrow waist of water could be watched and any invaders would find themselves wading through shallow water, or plodding through sand if the tide was out, for miles. Time enough for the court to slip away to the fastness of Snowdonia.

   With the death of Llywelyn at the hand of Edward I and his men, the longhouse with its watchtower was seized by the crown of England. The place name was deliberately changed from Aber Garth Celyn to Aber then later to Aber Gwyn Gregyn, the estuary of the white shells.

   The name, Garth Celyn, was never quite expunged; it was from Garth Celyn that Llywelyn wrote his last., defiant letter to the English in November 1282. Then the BBc’s specialist team discovered documents which stated that a long house lay in the centre of the manor that had formerly been known as Aber Garth Celyn and the rest, as they say, is history.