Have you ever walked past a row of high-street shops or a buzzing retail park and felt like you were stepping over the ghosts of a forgotten empire? Welcome to Vanished Frontiers, the history podcast that unearths the high-stakes gambles and abrupt collapses of Britain's most obscure strongholds.

In this episode, we dig into the enigmatic story of Prestatyn Castle, a fortress that rose, flourished, and was utterly obliterated in what feels like a blink of a historical eye. Most visitors to the "Sunny" North Wales coast or hikers finishing the 177-mile Offa’s Dyke Path might notice a strange, grassy mound near the railway station and think nothing of it. But that mound represents a "Solomon Grundy" existence—a Norman anchor born in 1164 and definitively buried by 1167.