On the hillside near Denbigh Castle stand the roofless walls of Leicester's Church, sometimes nicknamed 'Leicester's Folly' — one of the most ambitious building projects attempted anywhere in Elizabethan Wales or England, and one that was never finished.
The church was the initiative of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was granted the lordship of Denbigh by Elizabeth I in 1563 and became Denbigh's governor-general the following year. Construction began in 1578, and the scale of the plan was extraordinary: a new Protestant cathedral, intended to replace the ageing St Hilary's Chapel as the principal church of the diocese, enclosing a rectangle roughly 55 metres long and 23 metres wide.
Work continued for six years before money ran short; funds earmarked for the building were diverted to pay for a military campaign in the Netherlands and Ireland, and construction stopped altogether in 1584. When Dudley died in 1588 the project was abandoned for good, leaving the walls standing open to the sky, much as they remain today.
Leicester's Church is now a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument, cared for as one of Denbigh's most evocative ruins — a monument less to what was built than to Elizabethan ambition that outran its budget.
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was granted the lordship of Denbigh by his close friend Queen Elizabeth I in 1563, and his ambitions for the town extended well beyond its existing parish church. Begun in 1578, Leicester's Church was intended to be a grand new place of worship — some historians have speculated it may even have been planned as a cathedral, reflecting Leicester's considerable status at court.
Construction ground to a halt in 1584 amid funding difficulties and Leicester's declining fortunes, and the church was never completed or roofed. What remains today is an evocative shell of towering walls and empty window openings on the hillside below the castle, one of the most striking ruins in Denbigh and a monument to an Elizabethan ambition that outran its means.