Penarth-fawr

The first mention of Penarth Fawr is in the Record of Caernarfon, a mid-fourteenth century survey of tenants and their land in North Wales. Penarth was a free township, meaning its tenants held their lands directly from the Crown, and it is likely that there was a house on the site of the present hall. The first recorded owner of the site is Madog ap Hywel (d. 1461), who with his kin claimed descent from Collwyn ap Tagno, a twelfth-century prince. The fourteenth and fifteenth century history of Eifionydd (the commote within which Penarth lies) is characterised by often violent feuds between those families that claimed descent from Collwyn and those that claimed descent from Owain Gwynedd,…

Pennarth Fawr is located on a minor road off the A497, south of Llanarmon, south-west of Chwilog, and north-east of Abererch. The surviving fifteenth-century house is a rectangle four bays long, with the long sides running north-south. The northern two bays contained the hall, the third bay the screens passage, and the southern bay the service rooms. A seventeenth-century extension is attached at right angles to the southern half of the east wall of the hall and extends east. Both parts of the house are constructed of rubble stone under slate roofs, however the hall roof was originally of stone. The west wall of the hall contains the majority of the externally visible medieval fabric,…