The grassy mound where Owain Glyndwr’s fine house once stood has a powerful pull on the imagination. Thanks to Glyndwr’s bard, Iolo Gogh, we can picture the grand house, with its hospitality and splendour, its fishponds, its colourful pennants flying.

The site is also a kind of repository for Welsh identity. Standing on the site today, one can somehow still sense the grandeur, but there is also a grave atmosphere of loss, a permanent sense of what might have been. Here, time collapses into nothing.

The house was burned down in 1402, during Glyndwr’s rising against the English. The last leader of an Independent Wales, Glyndwr is said to be sleeping in the hills, ready to rise again and save Wales…