Penrhyn Castle

Alistair Hennessy on the Regency North Wales family whose country seat was built on the profits from the slave plantations of the Caribbean.

To be reminded of the 'fungoid region' of our past can be an unsettling experience when visiting an architectural monument of such grandeur as Penrhyn Castle, built in the 1820s and 30s, in its magnificent setting between the Menai Straits and Snowdonia, but there is no building which illustrates so graphically the role which slave plantation profits played in the growth of British economic power.

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