Do you like Castles? A walk to Dinas Bran

Castell Dinas Bran, originally uploaded by Zardoz67.

For as long as I care to remember I have been going to Llangollen, either for day trips or passing through en route to somewhere else. This lovely Welsh town is only 30 minutes away from my home town of Chester and is well worth a visit if you have never been. Llangollen, as you may know, is also home of the International Eisteddfod.

On a hill overlooking Llangollen, Castell Dinas Bran (known as Crow Castle in English) occupies a spectacular position on an imposing foreboding crag. Looking at it logically, this was an ideal spot for a castle, you wonder how any enemy would ever have got up there, surrounded as it is on all sides by spectacular views. Any castle dwellers would have seen them coming in no time. It was home to the native Welsh princes of Powys but apparently only occupied the hilltop for a few decades before beginning to crumble. Maybe it’s location was too foreboding, a little bit too remote…

Certainly, even today, the site is difficult to get too but it is open to public exploration, although not protected by the National Trust or Welsh Heritage as far as I can see; in fact the fields around it are very obviously working farmland.

At the age of 41, and despite numerous trips to Llangollen as mentioned previously, I decided to climb to the top of Dinas Bran last weekend for the first time, accompanied by my 8-year-old son. Finding the route to the top is not easy unless you know what you are looking for but fortunately there are some guides on the Internet. On climbing to the summit you really do get a sense of what a difficult place it must have been to get to and to live in, especially in the 12th century. But once you get to the top the views are genuinely spectacular, at least they were on the day we climbed, thanks to last weekend’s Indian Summer.

So onto the photo. I am really pleased with this one. I think the sky looks amazing if hazy (it was a hot day). I took the picture on a tripod with an aperture of f/22 to get as much detail in as possible. I don’t know if it’s my best picture but it’s certainly one I am extremely proud of in a ‘I can’t believe I took that’ sort of way. The picture shows Castell Dinas Bran from the side, and I’m pretty pleased about getting the people in to give a sense of perspective. There are more pictures from our walk up to Dinas Bran on my Flickr stream, please take a look and feel free to comment.

Update: A good friend and proper photographer has suggested that this picture could do with a crop; namely to remove the dark area in the lower left of the frame and to lose some surplus space on the right. I have no doubt that he’s correct so I’ll have to tinker with it later. I think I just got so carried away that I didn’t want to change it in any way.

For more on castle Dinas Bran and how to get there you could do worse than look here