Beyond the castle and the town walls, Denbigh's history runs through a Victorian asylum, an unfinished Elizabethan cathedral, an explorer who found Livingstone, and a poet buried a mile outside town. These pages dig into the detail.
Born in Denbigh in 1841 as John Rowlands, Stanley became one of the Victorian era's most famous explorers of Africa.
A vast Elizabethan church begun by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, abandoned unfinished in 1584 and never completed.
Founded in 1289, Denbigh Friary was the sole Carmelite house in Wales and is now a quiet ruin below the town.
A 16th-century Denbighshire heiress whose four marriages connected her to so many Welsh gentry families she became known as the Mother of Wales.
Opened in 1848 to give Welsh-speaking patients care closer to home, the North Wales Hospital grew into a small self-sufficient community before closing in 1995.
Denbigh Castle held out for six months against Parliamentary forces in 1646, surrendering only on the king's own order.
Thomas Edwards, known as Twm o'r Nant, was a largely self-educated Welsh interlude-writer who lived, worked and is buried in Denbigh.
Denbigh's 1860 eisteddfod helped establish the body that runs the modern National Eisteddfod, and the town hosted the festival again in 1939.
A branch line linked Denbigh to Rhyl and the main coastal railway from 1858 until the last services ended in the 1960s.
On the eastern town walls, the Countess Tower and the polygonal Goblin Tower once guarded Denbigh's water supply — and bore the brunt of the 1646 siege.
The Earl of Leicester's 1572 Shire Hall and its Victorian successor market halls trace the changing civic life of Denbigh's High Street.
Also known as Whitchurch, this 15th-century church was Denbigh's parish church for centuries and is the burial place of Twm o'r Nant.
This circular thatched cockpit stood behind a Denbigh inn for centuries before being moved to the national museum at St Fagans in 1970.
Founded in 1859 on a 1537 charitable trust, Howell's School educated generations of Welsh girls before closing in 2013.
Completed in 1917 to a competition-winning design by C. E. Elcock, Denbigh Town Hall remains the meeting place of the town council.