Qualla: Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sirfurboy, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the spring of 1401 Owain Glyndŵr had begun to look like a failed rebel. He had declared himself Prince of Wales the previous September, been defeated twice in north Wales at Mawddwy and Cadair Idris, and seen his Pembrokeshire allies pillaged by the English king's forces. He had retreated, with what one chronicle calls "six score wicked men and thieves," into the empty quartz-grey uplands of Plynlimon, where the rivers Severn, Wye, and Rheidol all rise within a few miles of one another. The English settlers of west Wales mustered around 1,500 men to finish him. They climbed onto Mynydd Hyddgen one June morning expecting to capture a fugitive. What they encountered there ended differently than they had planned, and what happened on that bare slope between June 1401 and the autumn changed the next fifteen years of Welsh history.

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Image: Sirfurboy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: Six Score Men and a Trap

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Red Fairy, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sole surviving account, the fifteenth-century Annales Oweni Glyndwr, is brief and partisan. "The next summer after that, Owain rose up with six score wicked men and thieves, and he brought them as to war into the uplands of Ceredigion. And fifteen hundred men from the lowland...

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Image: The Red Fairy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: The Ground That Won the Day

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sirfurboy, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk up onto Mynydd Hyddgen today, with the Nant y Moch reservoir below you and Plynlimon's broad summit a few miles north, and the landscape itself gives a sense of why the larger force lost. The Hyddgen valley is boggy ground threaded with springs and small streams, the kind of...

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Image: Sirfurboy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: Two Hundred Dead

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William M. Connolley at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Annales says two hundred English and Flemish were killed before the survivors fled. There were prisoners. The losses on Glyndŵr's side are not recorded, but they were small enough that he was able to march south almost immediately and rally fresh support in the Tywi valley. S...

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Image: William M. Connolley at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: The Memorial at Nant y Moch

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sirfurboy, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is no battlefield visitor centre at Hyddgen. The site lies four miles east of the road and requires a steep walk in over wet ground. In 1977 a memorial stone was erected at the Nant y Moch reservoir dam, where the road from Talybont meets the lake. The stone was unveiled by...

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Image: Sirfurboy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Mynydd Hyddgen: What Hyddgen Bought

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Voice of Clam, Public domain. The victory bought Glyndŵr eight more years of war, time enough to take much of Wales, to crown himself prince at Machynlleth in 1404, to negotiate with France, Scotland, and Ireland, to defeat the English again at Bryn Glas in 1402, and to come closer than anyone had since 1282 ...

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Image: Voice of Clam | Public domain