Denbighshire is a historic county of North Wales, bounded by Flintshire and Shropshire to the east, Merionethshire to the south, Carnarvonshire to the west, and the Irish Sea and part of Flintshire to the north. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at thirty-one miles long and fifteen broad, some 410,000 acres divided into twelve hundreds, with four market towns, fifty-seven parishes and a population of over 38,000, lying chiefly in the diocese of St Asaph. At the county's heart lies the Vale of Clwyd, described by antiquarian writers as so fruitful and delightful a spot as to be equalled by few places in Europe, stretching some fifteen miles in length and forming a fertile core to a county whose eastern and western edges, by contrast, were considerably less productive.
The River Conwy formed Denbighshire's boundary with Carnarvonshire, while the sharp, wind-scoured air of the county's mountainous districts was tempered, in the fertile vale, into one of the most pleasant climates in North Wales. Among the county's hills, antiquarian travellers noted mysterious inscribed standing stones, associated in popular tradition with the ancient Druids, whose meaning had defeated all attempts at interpretation by eighteenth-century scholars — an early instance of the antiquarian fascination with prehistoric Wales that would grow considerably in the following century.
Denbigh Castle, built by Edward I's ally Henry de Lacy after 1282 on a rocky spur above the Vale of Clwyd, and the nearby Cistercian ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey near Llangollen, founded in 1201 and one of the most evocative monastic remains in Wales, stood among the county's principal antiquities, alongside Ruthin and Chirk castles guarding the approaches to the vale. The wooded gorge of the River Dee around Llangollen, already admired by picturesque travellers in the 1770s, anticipated the tourism that would make this corner of Denbighshire one of the most visited parts of Wales in the century that followed.