Ancient Web: Castles of Wales Began After a Welsh-Language Ban

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A giant database of medieval castles is an unusual outcome of an argument in an online chat room. Yet Jeffrey L. Thomas says that is how The Castles of Wales found its start.

Visit the Castles of Wales website.

In his account of the website's origins, Thomas recalls belonging to a CompuServe forum for people interested in Welsh history, travel, genealogy, and language. In 1995, after its Welsh-speaking moderator left, the service stopped allowing posts written in Welsh. Thomas says dissatisfied participants created an independent site called WalesNet.

He took responsibility for medieval history, then started his own castle website in 1996 after finding the shared project too restrictive for photographs. He bought books about writing HTML and built the earliest pages by hand in Windows Notepad.

Four hundred castles, including the forgotten ones

The castle index now covers more than 400 known castle sites in Wales and the Marches. It distinguishes native Welsh from Norman foundations and shows whether each entry has photographs. The collection includes major fortresses such as Beaumaris and Harlech, but also earthworks, mottes, ruined towers, and sites whose histories remain uncertain.

Thomas particularly wanted to document native Welsh castles and the smaller places that general tourist guides overlook. Some entries hold many photographs, while others have none. The website invites contributions to fill those gaps.

The project grew beyond one amateur's notes. Historian Lise Hull contributed early essays, followed by researchers including John Northall, Paul M. Remfry, and others. The site's Welsh-language section contains pages translated by a contributor identified as Sian Beidas. Thomas remembers that accommodation as an answer to the original CompuServe dispute.

His history page also records the practical frustrations of maintaining a photo-heavy website in the dial-up era. Storage space was scarce, and large images strained slow connections. A later cleanup in 2023–24 repaired links and recovered old pages that had become disconnected from the main menu.

Claims that it was among the first Welsh-history sites on the Internet are Thomas's own recollections, not independently verified rankings. Its documented 1996 origin and unusually expansive surviving index are substantial enough without a superlative.

Explore the historic site and read Thomas's founding story.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.