Why Medieval Wales Is Perfect for Historical Fiction

Wales is a country where the mountains hold old griefs, the rivers carry rumour, and the wind across the high passes sounds like a bard beginning a tale. It is a country made for historical fiction: beautiful, perilous, intimate and wild. In medieval times, its castles were built on contested ground, its courts were alive with ambition, its families were bound by love, blood, rivalry and betrayal and its women watched, endured, governed and sometimes defied the world expected of them.

I am often asked what North Wales in the late eleventh century would really have looked like, and whether the Norman presence would have been obvious to anyone travelling through it. It is a question I particularly love, because it asks us to look beyond the later stone castles and the neat certainties of hindsight, and instead to picture a country in transition: beautiful, formidable, and deeply unsettled.

Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd is one of the most compelling women in Welsh history. Fierce, royal, and unforgettable, she has come to embody the spirit of medieval Wales in all its courage, passion, and resilience. For readers of Welsh history and Welsh historical fiction, Gwenllian stands out as a figure of unusual power: a princess shaped by conflict, loyalty, and the struggles of a nation under pressure.

She is also one of the heroines of The Welsh Warrior Series, where her strength, heart, and determination help bring medieval Wales vividly to life.

Not every danger in the Welsh Warrior Series comes from the battlefield. Some of the most destructive threats come from those driven by envy, ambition, and wounded pride.

Three characters who embody this are Lady Marged, Bishop Richard, and Gronwy.

Historical fiction is always a balancing act. I begin with what we can know: the chronicles, the genealogies, the scraps of record that survived. Then I look for what history rarely preserves: the private moments, the tensions in a household, the choices made behind closed doors, and the emotional cost of living inside power. That is where Kinstrife was born.