The Fairies Who Destroyed Pennard Castle 🧚🏻

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Good morning, Swansea!

Most people know Pennard Castle as a ruin on a clifftop - a great photo spot above Three Cliffs Bay on Gower.

But it has a darker story - one that locals have told about this place for centuries - a wedding feast, a midnight curse, and a sandstorm so violent it was said to have stripped the beaches of Ireland bare.

This week, we tell the story of Gower fairies - the Verry Folk - and how they allegedly brought a castle to its knees.

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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In 1107, Henry de Beaumont, Earl of Warwick, was granted the Lordship of Gower by Henry I and set about cementing his grip on the peninsula with a string of fortifications.

Pennard was one of at least seven castles he built across Gower. The original structure was modest - an oval-shaped earthwork ringwork with a timber palisade and a hall at its centre, sheltered on the north and west by natural cliffs.

By the late 13th century, the de Braose family had taken over the Lordship of Gower and upgraded Pennard Castle considerably, replacing the timber defences with a stone curtain wall around eight metres tall, complete with a gatehouse, battlements, and towers.

Curiously, historians have noted some odd practical flaws in the design - the portcullis grooves don't reach the ground, and the arrow loops are poorly positioned for actual defence. Whatever its military limitations, it was clearly built to project power across the Gower landscape.

By 1317, records were already referring to "the sandy waste at Pennard." The castle and its settlement were gradually abandoned from the late 14th century onwards, and by 1650 a formal survey described it as "desolate and ruinous" and surrounded by sand.

Within a few generations of its construction, one of Gower's most imposing fortifications had been swallowed whole. The official explanation is sand encroachment, but Gower has always had a longer memory than that…

The legend doesn’t give us a year (the earliest written version dates from 1907), but the story begins with a wedding feast.

The lord of Pennard - known in some tellings as Lord Volk - had been looking to marry a local prince's daughter, and with the match agreed, he threw open the castle gates for a lavish celebration. The mead flowed, the fires burned high in the great hall where stone benches lined the walls around a central hearth, and the lord and his men revelled deep into the night.

But they weren't the only ones making merry.

At midnight, strange music drifted up from the courtyard - faint, unearthly, unlike anything the guards had heard before. They crept toward the sound and found the source: a company of fairies, the Verry Folk of Gower, dancing in the moonlight to the music of tiny harps.

The lord was summoned. Someone warned him: "Have a care - if thou attackest the fairies, it will be thy undoing." He replied: "What care I for man or spirit?" His daughter pleaded with him to leave them be, that to interfere with the fairies was to invite ruin - but he didn't listen. Deep in drink and short on patience, he drove them out of the courtyard with his men, weapons drawn. It was the worst decision he ever made.

The curse came swift: "Since thou hast without reason broken in upon our innocent sport,” said the fairies, “thou shalt be without castle or feast."

That night, a catastrophic sandstorm tore across the Gower coast. The dunes rose and swallowed the courtyard, the settlement, and the little church of St Mary's that had grown up in the castle's shadow.

According to the legend, the sand didn't even come from Gower - the Verry Folk had crossed to Ireland, loaded themselves with an entire mountain of sand, and carried it back. Old Irish records, the story goes, noted an extraordinary storm that same night that stripped a whole sand mountain from the Irish coast, which they say proves the events at Pennard were true.

By the time dawn broke, Pennard was gone.

The Verry Folk are Wales's own fairy tradition, and they predate Shakespeare, pantomime, and every children's book ever written. Also known as Tylwyth Teg in Welsh (the name translates roughly as "the Fair Family"), they sound harmless enough until you understand what “fair” means in this context.

In Gower, they were described as little people, no more than a foot high, dressed in scarlet and green, who generally showed themselves dancing on moonlit nights. By nature, the old accounts say, they were benevolent. But it was, as one record puts it, "a very risky thing to offend them."

In Welsh folklore, the rules of engagement with the Tylwyth Teg are well established. The kind and mindful are blessed; the greedy and spiteful are punished, and there is no grey area. The lord of Pennard, drunk on mead and his own importance, didn't pause to consider what he'd stumbled upon - or treat the Verry Folk with the reverence that Welsh tradition demanded of anyone fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to encounter them.

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Historians tell us that the castle and its surrounding settlement were gradually overwhelmed by sand from the late 14th century onwards - the dunes made agriculture impossible, rendering the whole area uninhabitable, not just the castle itself. St Mary's church was the last holdout, ceasing to be viable by 1532, with its parishioners retreating inland to a new St Mary's safely out of reach of the dunes. A settlement that had been slowly suffocating for two hundred years, gone.

What the legend of the Verry Folk does is compress all of that into a single night. One feast, one act of disrespect, one catastrophic storm. And standing on that clifftop above Three Cliffs Bay, watching the dunes shift in the wind, it's not hard to see how the myth took root.

Interestingly, records show that John de Braose, Lord of Gower, married Margaret, the daughter of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Prince of Wales - so a wedding feast at Pennard Castle would have been entirely plausible. The legend and the history, it turns out, might not be so far apart after all.

Even today, the legend of the Verry Folk hasn't been forgotten. Last week, GWR unveiled a fairy statue at Swansea train station - part of a series of installations celebrating the folklore and mythology of the areas it serves.

Meanwhile, Pennard Castle is free to visit and sits just a short walk from Three Cliffs Bay - one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in Wales. Just don't disturb anything after dark 😉

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

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