Discover Conwy

The town Edward I built, and the town that grew back into it

Conwy stands on the west bank of Afon Conwy where the river narrows before it opens into the estuary, and almost everything about the town's shape comes from one decision. In 1283, after the conquest of Gwynedd, Edward I moved the Cistercian monks of Aberconwy Abbey up the valley to Maenan and put a castle and a walled borough on their site. The castle and the walls went up together between 1283 and 1287 under the direction of Master James of St George, and the walls have never been broken: roughly 1.3km of curtain, 21 towers and three gateways, still enclosing the streets. The parish church of St Mary and All Saints in the middle of town keeps parts of the abbey church in its walls, which is why the oldest thing inside the medieval town is older than the medieval town.

What grew back inside the walls was never curated. Buildings changed use whenever it suited whoever held them, and they still do. Robert Wynn built Plas Mawr on the High Street between 1576 and 1585 and its plasterwork survives largely as he left it. Aberconwy House on Castle Street has been a hotel, a museum, an antique shop and is now a second-hand bookshop run by the National Trust. Conwy is the administrative centre of Conwy County Borough, where 25.9 per cent of residents aged three and over said they could speak Welsh at the 2021 census, down from 27.4 per cent in 2011, so signage, council business and a good share of the conversation in the shops are bilingual by default rather than by gesture. The Honey Fair has been held on or about 13 September under a royal charter for centuries, and it still closes the High Street. The mussel beds in the estuary, hand-raked by a handful of families for generations, are closed to fishing under a Welsh Government notice. Both of those facts are the same town.