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One of Denbigh's more unusual surviving buildings no longer stands in Denbigh at all. The Denbigh Cockpit, a circular stone building around 26 feet across with a conical, thatched, oak-timbered roof, originally stood in the yard of the Hawk and Buckle Inn on Vale Street, and is thought to date from the late 17th century.
Cockfighting, introduced to Britain by the Romans, remained a popular pastime across all levels of Welsh society from the Middle Ages right up until the mid-19th century, and the Denbigh cockpit was very much a working venue in its day — a surviving silver tankard, presented as a cockfighting prize at the pit in 1726, is held in the Museum of Wales's collections as physical evidence of its use.
Cockfighting was banned in Britain in 1849, after which the building was put to other, more mundane uses, including service as a garage. By 1965 it had fallen into a poor state of repair, and the decision was taken to dismantle and relocate it to St Fagans National Museum of History near Cardiff, where it reopened to the public in 1970. It remains there today — a small, physical piece of Denbigh's social history, preserved four counties away from where it was built.
Cockfighting was a popular, if brutal, pastime across Wales and England from the medieval period right through to its prohibition in 1849, and small market towns like Denbigh typically had a purpose-built cockpit attached to a local inn where matches were staged on market days. The Denbigh Cockpit was a modest circular thatched structure, sunk slightly below ground level with tiered standing room around a central pit, built to a pattern repeated in dozens of Welsh towns.
After cockfighting was outlawed, many such buildings were demolished or repurposed, which makes the survival of Denbigh's cockpit unusual. It was eventually dismantled and rebuilt at the National History Museum at St Fagans near Cardiff in 1970, where it remains on public display as one of the best-preserved examples of its kind in Wales, giving visitors a rare look at a piece of everyday Georgian and Victorian small-town life.