Situated between Snowdonia and the Menai Strait in Llandygai, Bangor off the A55 is a country house built in the form of a Norman castle, called Penrhyn Castle. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house constructed for Gwilym ap Gruffydd c 1438 who could trace his lineage back to Ednyfed Fychan who was Seneschal to Llywellyn ap Iorwerth, Lywellyn the Great - Prince of Wales. The Griffiths family occupied the site for centuries, ending with Pyrs Griffiths who inherited it in 1580. Pyrs was rumoured to have been a pirate, fought against Armada in 1588, and to have built a secret passage from Port Penrhyn to the house. He mortgaged the estate several times and was imprisoned for non-payment of his marriage settlement by his father-in-law in 1616. He sold the estate in 1617 and died in 1628 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1622 John Williams bought the estate from Ievan lloyd of Ial. An ambitious man, he rose to be the Archbishop of York and acted for both sides during the English Civil War. The Williams family and their descendants had posession of the inceasingly fragmented estate until 1767 and the house and its chapel stood more or less intact until 1782 when Richard Pennant built his new house. Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate, founding the stone castle to which he added a tower house and Samuel Wyatt then reconstructed the property in the 1780s. The present building was built between about 1822 and 1837 to designs by Thomas Hopper on behalf of its owner who expanded and transformed the building beyond recognition. Thomas Hopper also designed much of its furniture and filled the castle with intricate carvings, stained glass and handmade wallpapers from China.
Among its fascinating features is a spectacular Grand Staircase which took ten years to build. Unfortunately, George Hay-Dawkins Pennant lived for only three years after the completion of fifteen years of construction work at the castle. After this rebuild, a spiral staircase remains from the original structure, and a vaulted basement and other masonry were incorporated into the new structure. The cost of the construction is disputed, and very difficult to work out accurately, as much of the timber came from the family's own forestry, and much of the labour was acquired from within their own workforce at the slate quarry. The furnishings drew on the skills of local craftsmen, with furniture created in oak, ebony, marble and slate from Penrhyn quarry. In fact a lot of the fixtures that appear to be of stone and marble are in fact wood and a bedroom fireplace is made of Penmon limestone which has been highly polished until it looks like marble. It cost the Pennant family an estimated £150,000. This is the current equivalent to about £49,500,000.
However, behind the formidable architecture, Victorian grandeur and fine interiors, present day Penrhyn Castle's foundations were built on a dark history. One of exploitation, Jamaican sugar fortunes and the transatlantic slave trade. During the latter half of the 17th century Gifford Pennant, originally from Flintshire, began acquiring land in Jamaica and came to own one of the largest estates on the island – twenty times larger than the average. His son Edward, born in 1672, became Chief Justice of Jamaica and one of Edward's sons, Samuel, born in 1709, became Lord Mayor of London, and another, John added even more to the Jamaican estate by a judicious marriage to the Jamaican heiress Bonella Hodges in 1734. In Jamaica there exists a community called Pennants named after the family who gave their name to their slaves with many living there today still bearing the surname. By the 1700s the Pennant family had returned to Britain and by the time Richard Pennant, born in 1739, became the 1st baron Penrhyn, they were controlling their Jamaican properties by letter. As the estate grew so did the numbers of enslaved people and by 1805 Richard Pennant owned nearly 1000 enslaved people across his four plantations in Jamaica,. This equated to an average of 250 people per plantation compared to the Jamaican average of 150. After the abolition of slavery, their fortune continued to be amassed through the exploitation of generations of Welsh slate miners as by the late 19th century, over three thousand men worked the Penrhyn mine, the largest slate mine in the world.
Despite his links to slavery, he was known as Richard Pennant the Improver as he invested his fortune in his North Wales estate. Money from Jamaica paid for roads, railways, houses, schools and the Penrhyn Quarry, and changed the landscape of North Wales forever. Richard became MP for Petersfield in 1761 and six years later he became one of the two MPs for Liverpool, which was by this time the major slave trade port of Britain. Through his family, business and political connections, Pennant became part of a powerful and influential pro-slavery network and held connections to virtually all the major absentee plantation owners in Britain. He became chairman of the West India Committee, an organisation of merchants and plantation owners, and from 1788 chaired a special sub-committee to organise opposition to abolition. Its tactics included sponsoring petitions to parliament and producing pamphlets that supported the slave trade explaining its economic benefits and Richard used his position as MP for Liverpool to speak in the House of Commons against the abolition of the slave trade. Slavery was finally outlawed in all British colonies between 1833 and 1838 and as the building of Penrhyn Castle came to an end, the Pennants received £14,683 17s 2d (around £1.3million today) for the freeing of 764 enslaved people in Jamaica.
The last member of the Penrhyn family to live in the castle was Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant who died in June 1949 when the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and its 40,000 acres of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties from Lady Janet. It now belongs to the National Trust and is open to the public receiving 139,614 visitors in 2019/20. It is one of the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century with Christopher Hussey describing it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival." It is a picturesque composition that stretches over 600 feet from a tall donion containing family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables. Built in a sombre style allows it to possess something of the medieval fortress air despite the ground-level drawing room windows. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The many attractions of the castle include one of the best art collections in Wales, paintings hanging on its walls include those by Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Canaletto, worth the admission price alone. Some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made out of Pennant slate for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859. The queen, however, refused to sleep in it as it reminded her of a tomb. The restored kitchens are a delight and the stable block houses a fascinating industrial railway museum and a model railway museum and a cafe and shop. The 24.3 hectares of grounds include parkland, an exotic tree and shrub collection as well as a Victorian walled garden.
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