07/09/2026
Jethro of Crediton had never intended to build castles in Wales. This was not because he disliked castles, nor because he had any particular objection to Wales, although after his first winter in Gwynedd he developed a fairly strong objection to its rain, its mountains, its sheep and, above all, to the way in which the mountains seemed to manufacture additional rain whenever a man had just put down a perfectly good piece of dry clothing. Jethro was a Devonian stone mason, born among the red earth and damp valleys of the west country, where a man learned early that stone was heavy, chisels were sharp and the easiest way to avoid trouble with a wall was to make certain it stayed upright. He had spent most of his adult life cutting, dressing and laying stone….granite in particular…for abbeys, manor houses, bridges and the occasional wealthy man’s folly, and he considered himself a craftsman of respectable ability. His hands were permanently white with stone dust, his shoulders had the broadness of a cart horse and his face possessed the weathered expression of a man who had spent thirty years looking at pieces of masonry and silently judging whether other people had built them properly. Unfortunately for Jethro, his particular talents had come to the attention of his lord, who had received a royal demand for masons for Edward I’s enormous programme of castle building in Wales. The king had been spending years attempting to subdue Gwynedd and secure his conquest of Wales, and castles were one of the most effective ways of making that conquest permanent. Jethro’s lord therefore did what medieval lords did when confronted with an inconvenient royal summons…. he found somebody else to suffer from it. Jethro was informed that he would be travelling north to work on the king’s castles. He was not asked. He was told. His lord had explained that it was a great honour to serve the king, to which Jethro had privately concluded that honours were rather like fleas, in that they were generally more enjoyable for the person handing them out than the person receiving them.
The journey north had been long enough to make Jethro reconsider the entire concept of England. He travelled with other craftsmen and labourers, along with carts, tools, provisions and animals, moving through country that gradually changed from the familiar sunken lanes of Devon into landscapes that seemed determined to become wetter and more dramatic with every mile. By the time they reached Gwynedd, Jethro had begun to understand why Edward I had needed such an enormous logistical effort to construct his castles. Caernarfon and Conwy were not merely buildings in the ordinary sense. They were vast military projects, consuming stone, timber, iron, lime, food, animals and human labour on a scale that would have astonished anyone accustomed to thinking of a castle as a convenient collection of towers surrounded by a wall. The king’s castles in north Wales were part of a deliberate system of reconquest and administration, and Caernarfon in particular was being developed as a formidable fortress and royal centre, while Conwy was being constructed alongside a new walled town. Edward had chosen sites with care, and his master mason, James of Saint George, directed the work with the sort of uncompromising efficiency that Jethro immediately recognised as the natural enemy of craftsmen everywhere. James was an experienced architect and military engineer from Savoy, brought into Edward’s service to design and oversee some of the greatest castles of the age, and he possessed a remarkable understanding of fortification. Jethro, however, was less interested in James’s reputation than in the fact that the man had an alarming habit of appearing whenever somebody had stopped working for what they considered a perfectly reasonable reason.
At Caernarfon, Jethro first encountered the castle rising above the River Seiont like some enormous stone creature that had crawled out of the ground and decided to stay there. The site was strategically important, and Edward’s builders were creating something far more elaborate than a simple stronghold. The walls were massive, the towers were polygonal rather than the familiar round forms found elsewhere, and the whole design possessed an architectural ambition that made Jethro suspicious immediately. A sensible castle, in his opinion, was one that kept enemies out, provided shelter for its defenders and had enough room for a kitchen. Caernarfon appeared to have been designed by men who wanted to make a political statement while simultaneously terrifying anyone who approached it. Its towers and walls dominated the surrounding landscape, and the stonework was being carefully dressed into courses that required considerable skill. Jethro was given a place among the masons and quickly discovered that his Devonian experience was useful, although the local conditions were not. The Welsh weather seemed capable of turning a dry wall into a waterfall before breakfast, and the ground around the building site became a treacherous mixture of mud, broken stone, timber scraps and the accumulated remains of several hundred men’s lunches.
His first task was dressing blocks of stone, and Jethro attacked the work with the concentration of a man who had decided that if he must be miserable, he might as well be professionally miserable. The stone rang beneath his hammer, each strike producing a sharp metallic note that mingled with the heavier thuds of sledges, the groaning of carts and the shouted instructions of overseers. Around him, labourers hauled materials, carpenters worked on scaffolding and temporary structures, smiths repaired tools, and masons shaped the stone that would eventually become part of the fortress. The building of a medieval castle was an extraordinary exercise in coordination. Stone had to be quarried, transported and prepared; lime had to be burned and mixed into mortar; timber had to be felled and brought to the site; ropes, carts, tools and lifting equipment had to be maintained; food had to be supplied to thousands of workers; and every stage depended upon the others functioning well enough to prevent the whole enterprise from collapsing into a gigantic medieval traffic jam. Jethro had once complained that a Devon manor house was badly organised because the carpenter had arrived before the lime. At Caernarfon he discovered that this was nothing…..Here, if the lime failed to arrive, hundreds of men could stand around looking at one another while an entire day’s labour disappeared into the rain.
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The royal works employed craftsmen from many parts of Britain and beyond ( although there were many fellow Devonians), and Jethro soon found himself surrounded by a mixture of accents that made the site sound like the largest and angriest market in Christendom. Welsh labourers worked alongside English masons, carpenters and labourers, while specialist craftsmen and administrators came from further afield. Jethro developed an uneasy friendship with a mason from Lincolnshire who possessed an enormous moustache and the deeply held belief that everything could be improved by adding more ale. There was also a French-speaking clerk who kept records of materials with terrifying enthusiasm, and a Welsh quarryman who could lift a stone that Jethro considered heavy enough to require a small religious ceremony. The workers were paid according to their skills and roles, with wages recorded carefully by officials, because royal building projects required accounts almost as formidable as the castles themselves. Jethro had always believed that the surest sign of civilisation was a good wall. He now began to suspect that the second surest sign was a clerk capable of counting exactly how many pennies had been spent on nails.
The most impressive machinery on the site was the lifting equipment (medieval builders were considerably cleverer than people sometimes imagine). Timber scaffolding climbed the walls, and cranes and hoists, operated by teams of men, allowed heavy stones to be raised far beyond the strength of any single labourer. Jethro watched one enormous block being hauled upwards and experienced the peculiar mixture of admiration and fear that accompanies any machine whose failure would result in several tons of stone falling directly onto the people standing underneath it. He immediately moved sideways. The Lincolnshire mason remained where he was, apparently trusting either engineering or Providence, and Jethro decided that the man had confused the two. The stone swung slowly above them, creaking ropes stretched tight, and the workers below shouted instructions as the crane operator adjusted the load. Eventually the block settled into position. Jethro nodded approvingly and returned to his work, having learned a valuable lesson about medieval construction: the safest place on a building site was always somewhere else.
Caernarfon also possessed a feature that fascinated Jethro, because the castle’s location beside the river and waterway was as much a part of its design as the walls themselves. The fortress could control movement along the River Seiont and had access to the Menai Strait, making it part of Edward’s broader strategy for dominating north Wales. Jethro did not concern himself with the finer points of royal strategy, but he understood the practical meaning of a defensible position. If a castle sat where men could control roads, rivers and approaches, then an enemy had to work much harder to reach it. If it also had enormous walls and towers, the enemy presumably became tired before reaching the gate and went home. This, Jethro thought, was excellent planning.
The work at Caernarfon was hard enough, but Jethro’s real misery began when he was told that he would be sent to Conwy…there was more work to be finished there.
He had assumed, foolishly, that once assigned to a castle he would remain there until the work was finished or until his skeleton was discovered beneath a later paving stone. Instead, the royal administration moved labour according to need, and Jethro found himself once again packing his tools. Conwy was another extraordinary project, begun in 1283 as part of Edward’s campaign to secure the newly conquered territories. The castle and town were being built together, with the fortress occupying a commanding position above the River Conwy and the town enclosed within substantial defensive walls. The broken teeth of a former castle sat atop a hill on the other side of the river……The setting was magnificent, which Jethro regarded as yet another example of the king spending money to make his labourers feel inadequate. From the heights around the site, the landscape opened in every direction, with mountains beyond, the river below and the estuary stretching towards the sea. Jethro looked at it all and admitted, reluctantly, that the king had chosen well.
Conwy’s walls were particularly impressive, forming a great enclosure around the planned town, while the castle itself possessed enormous towers and walls that made Caernarfon seem almost sociable by comparison. The castle was positioned beside the river, and its massive stonework gave it the appearance of having been designed by somebody who had asked how much stone could reasonably be put between a king and an angry Welshman and then decided that the question deserved further investigation. Jethro was assigned to a section of masonry where the foundations had already been established. The work required careful laying, because although the wall looked simple from a distance, every course depended upon the quality and position of the stones beneath it. A mason had to judge the face of each block, the thickness of the limed joints and the relationship between the outer facing stones and the rubble core. A careless piece of work might remain hidden for years, only to become a weakness when the wall was subjected to stress. Jethro took great pride in this part of the craft. He believed that stone should be persuaded into its position rather than bullied into it, although he was perfectly willing to persuade particularly stubborn pieces with a hammer.
The days were governed by light rather than clocks, and Jethro became intimately acquainted with sunrise, sunset and the precise moment when his stomach began to demand food regardless of what the sun was doing. Breakfast was substantial when provisions allowed it, because hard physical labour required fuel, and the workers needed enough strength to spend the rest of the day carrying, lifting, cutting and building. Bread, ale and other available provisions formed part of the ordinary diet, supplemented by meat, fish, cheese and whatever could be obtained locally or supplied through the royal administration. Jethro had discovered that nothing encouraged friendship between exhausted labourers faster than the arrival of food. A man might spend six hours silently cursing another mason’s technique, but if the same mason produced a particularly generous piece of bread, all previous disagreements could be postponed until after lunch.
The weather remained the great enemy. Wales seemed determined to demonstrate every variety of rain known to mankind, from delicate drizzle to the sort that arrived sideways and appeared personally offended by the existence of roofs. Jethro’s boots became permanently muddy, his cloak acquired the weight of a small animal and his beard frequently contained evidence of whatever he had eaten earlier. Stone dust adhered to wet clothing with remarkable determination, producing a surface that made him resemble a badly carved statue of himself. The scaffolding became slippery, the ropes became wet and the timber swelled. Every worker learned to respect the weather, not because they admired it but because ignoring it was an efficient way of breaking a leg.
One afternoon, while working high on the walls at Conwy, Jethro paused to look across the landscape. Below him the River Conwy wound through the countryside, and the newly constructed town was beginning to take shape within its walls. Beyond it rose the mountains of north Wales, dark and immense beneath a sky that could not decide whether to rain or merely threaten to do so. Jethro found himself thinking about Devon, about the familiar red soils and green fields, about the lanes he knew and the houses whose walls he had repaired. He wondered whether anyone back home imagined where he was. His lord certainly did not. The lord had probably forgotten him entirely, which Jethro considered one of the more agreeable features of the arrangement. Then he looked at the wall beneath his hands and felt the strange satisfaction that came to a craftsman when he realised that his work might outlive him by centuries. He was tired, cold, underpaid in his opinion and hundreds of miles from what he considered sensible weather, but he was helping construct something that would remain long after everyone on the site had disappeared. He thought about staying here ! ….That thought lasted approximately twelve seconds before a labourer dropped a bucket of mortar on his foot…..Jethro’s opinion of eternity consequently became less philosophical.
As the afternoon wore on, the site grew louder. Hammers rang against iron, chisels struck stone, carts rattled across uneven ground and men shouted to one another from different levels of the works. The great castle was slowly taking shape through thousands of individual acts of labour, each one apparently insignificant but collectively transforming the landscape. This was the real wonder of medieval construction. There was no single moment when a castle suddenly existed. Instead, it emerged gradually from quarry, forest, workshop and earth, built by generations of craftsmen whose names would rarely survive. Kings received the credit because kings paid for the work and commanded its construction, but the walls themselves were the achievement of masons like Jethro, labourers who hauled stone, carpenters who raised scaffolding, smiths who sharpened tools, quarrymen who broke blocks from the earth and countless others who supplied the enormous machine of construction.
Jethro understood this better than most. He also understood that kings had a peculiar talent for ordering other people to perform exhausting tasks while describing the result as glorious. Edward I had not personally carried the stones up the scaffolding, nor had he stood in the rain trying to cut a straight line through a block while somebody shouted that the king wanted it finished. Yet the king’s determination had created the work, and his officials ensured that it continued. The castles were instruments of power as much as military buildings, designed to demonstrate that Edward’s conquest was not temporary. The stone itself announced permanence. The Welsh princes might have resisted, but these walls were intended to tell them that English royal authority had arrived with foundations deep enough to survive generations.
At sunset, Jethro finally put down his tools. His hands were aching, his back felt as though it had been beaten with a plank and one knee had developed an opinion of its own. He descended from the scaffolding slowly, because medieval builders had many skills but had not yet invented the modern miracle of pretending that ladders were not dangerous. At ground level he washed the worst of the dust from his hands and collected what remained of his dignity. Around him the day’s work was ending, though the castle itself seemed no closer to being finished than it had that morning. This was another of the great peculiarities of castle building: a man could spend an entire day constructing a wall and, at the end of it, stand back and discover that the wall appeared to have moved only slightly upwards.
Jethro ate his evening meal among the other workers, listening to the mixture of languages and accents around him. Someone had found ale. Someone else had found more bread. The Lincolnshire mason was attempting to explain an engineering problem using his hands, a stick and several increasingly complicated gestures, while the Welsh quarryman watched with the expression of a man who had long ago decided that Englishmen were fundamentally mysterious.… Jethro laughed ….. he was too tired to know exactly why. The day had been hard, but there was something satisfying about belonging, even temporarily, to such a vast undertaking. He was one man among hundreds, perhaps thousands, but his stones would become part of towers that would dominate the landscape for centuries.
Eventually Jethro retired to his quarters, removed his boots and inspected his feet with the solemnity of a physician examining a battlefield casualty. He then lay down, staring into the darkness, listening to the muffled sounds of the camp gradually fading. Tomorrow would bring more stone, more mortar, more scaffolding, more rain and almost certainly another opportunity for somebody to drop something heavy near him. He thought of his lord comfortably installed far away in Devon and imagined the man sitting beside a warm fire, congratulating himself on having done his duty to the king. Jethro decided that if he ever returned home, he would explain the matter carefully. He would tell his lord that Caernarfon was magnificent, that Conwy was magnificent, that Edward’s castles were among the most extraordinary works of engineering he had ever seen and that he was immensely proud to have contributed to them.
He would also tell him that if the lord ever sent him to Wales again, he would personally build the man a castle out of wet sheep.
Then Jethro fell asleep, exhausted beneath the northern Welsh sky, while outside the half-built walls of Conwy stood dark against the mountains. The king’s fortress was still rising, stone by stone, and Jethro’s hands had helped raise it. Centuries later, visitors would walk beneath its towers, photograph its walls, admire its arches and wonder at the skill of the medieval builders. They would rarely know the name of Jethro of Crediton, Devon, or the many men who laboured beside him. Jethro, however, would probably have been perfectly content with that arrangement. He had never sought fame. He had sought only decent wages, dry boots and a lord who understood that a good stone mason was considerably more useful when he was allowed to remain somewhere with a sensible climate.
….Unfortunately, history had other plans….
And so, the next morning, when the first light appeared over the mountains and the overseer’s voice echoed across the building site, Jethro opened one eye, remembered where he was, and briefly considered pretending to be dead……Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a cart arriving with fresh stone.
Jethro sighed, got up, put on his boots and went back to work, because castles, unlike men, did not build themselves.
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( I hope you’ve enjoyed this story. As a former Rick Steves guide I used to write them as blogs to encourage travel and a sense of curiosity. I am leading more tours in Devon and Cornwall and in North Wales in 2027. Join me ! Please ‘like and share’. Thank you. )
