Exploring Dinas Bran Castle - A Royal Enfield Adventure

Hello there, so for today's little adventure on my Royal Enfield Himalayan I headed out for a ride up to the old ruins of Dinasbran Castle, also known as Crow Castle, up in the hills near the old Welsh town of Llangollen. Conditions were icy and a bit slippy but not so bad that I couldn't get about and do a bit of exploring and of course get some filming done to make this YouTube video. So join me as I trek up a big hill to have a coffee next to some really old stone walls. Right, I'm nearly at the foot of the hill, there's a lot of ice about so it's starting to look a bit dodgy. The back end's gone out a couple of times so we're going to take our time. Hopefully I don't have to test the crash bars today. Okay, I'm already bloody knackered walking up that hill. There's the castle up there, if you can see it, it's the right hand side of that telephone pole. So that's where I'm walking up to now. Oh, here we go. All right, so I'm about halfway up, time to tell you a little bit about the castle. So it was originally a hill fort built in the Iron Age, so around 800 AD, something like that, and then the castle got built in the 13th century in the medieval times and it only stood for about 100 years before whoever owned it at the time abandoned it and decided to build the castle somewhere else. So all that work, lugging them stones up there, building a castle, lasted 200 years and somebody went, I'm not asked about this, and then just left it. Right, so as you probably already know, the reason that castles and hill forts were built where they are, right on the top of steep hills, was to make them easier to defend against or harder to attack against, whichever way you look at it. Imagine if you were carrying armour, swords, shields, you've got people shooting arrows at you from up there. Yeah, you're going to be knackered, aren't you, by the time you get there, you'll probably be too tired to swing your sword. Once again, the beautiful land of Wales. Just had a thought as well, back when the castle was full, you know, all in one piece and occupied, this nice path that's been built wouldn't be, well it wouldn't have been here, would it? So getting up here would have been a case of just climbing up a steep hill, wouldn't it, all the way up. That must be fun to live here. I'm going to get to pop to Aldi for some bread. Okay, I've reached the top, eventually. Lovely day, it's dead calm, right at the top of the world, no wind. Right, let's have a little look around. The keep, see what it says on this sign, literally above the clouds now. So that was what the castle looked like before it got left to ruin. Not much left of it really, but I still think it's interesting that these stones have been here nearly a thousand years and that some poor bugger had to carry them all up here. What's this bit? I've got a feeling that this metal's not a thousand years old, but the stones certainly are. For whatever reason they don't want people going in there. I wonder what that was then? There's great views off every side. Yeah, so I read on this side, it's basically, it's so steep that there's like a pillar there that's left of it. But yeah, it was so steep on this side. Yeah, that they didn't have to dig trenches and things, but then on the other side they actually manually dug some of the trenches down. I'm not sure if it was done in the Iron Age when it was a hill fort, which is more than likely. Yeah, to make it so that the sort of little incline all of a sudden becomes a massive drop and then you're looking right up at the castle, which will make it, well what you're going to do with an old sword really, you know. It's an ancient Costa coffee cup. Must have been left here by Edward the First. Right, I'm going to go around that way. I'm going to find somewhere nice and quiet in a minute and get my coffee out. Yeah, okay, so this here, this is one of the trenches I was on about. So that's been dug out of the bank so that when you're coming up into the castle walls it was almost vertical. Right then, I found a nice little sitting spot to enjoy my coffee. It was hard to find a lot of history about this place. I did find an interesting story that was written into folklore. The story was that there was a Norman knight who came to the area after the castle was a ruin and he heard that nobody was brave enough to spend the night here within the walls of the ruins because they feared there was evil spirits about. So being an arrogant but brave knight, he decided that him and his followers were going to stay the night up here in the castle. So they did. That night a massive storm came and appeared from a bolt of lightning. It was a big giant and he said, I am Gogmagon. Get the hell out of this place or whatever he said. Anyway, so the brave arrogant knight stood up with his sword and his shield and he bravely defended all of his followers and himself and he stabbed the giant and killed him. But as he was dying he had told the story of a man called Bran who built the castle and he said that he did it in order to try and defeat the giant but never managed to and that he'd been terrorizing the place ever since. He also told the knight the story that he had left treasure buried all around this place in various places including a giant golden ox but he never said where. Let's try not to sledge down this big hill on my arse now. Don't worry, don't believe what the English say, it's not true. Come back. Right, thanks for watching again, it means a lot. All the new subscribers, really grateful, really grateful for everybody likes and comments and hope you all have a happy new year. Ride safe, see you later.