Beaumaris Accommodation

More About Beaumaris

Start at the castle and then walk the green. Boat trips run out to Puffin Island from the pier through the season, the old gaol and the courthouse are both open to look round, and you can walk Castle Street end to end in a few minutes. It is a small town and an easy one to spend a day in.

You can get about easily from here. Penmon and the lighthouse are about ten minutes up the coast road, Menai Bridge nearer fifteen, and Bangor is just over the Strait. The beaches at Llanddona and Red Wharf Bay are twenty minutes or so to the north, and Snowdonia starts as soon as you cross back over the bridge.

Beaumaris was a new town, built to a plan. Edward I laid it out alongside the castle and handed out 132 building plots inside ten years, each one eighty feet by forty. You can still see them. The shops along Castle Street stand on the plots they were given more than seven hundred years ago, with long thin gardens running back behind them.

It was meant to be an English town and it did not stay that way. Welshmen took the plots anyway. Dafydd ab Einion was the richest man in Beaumaris in the 1300s, and a Welsh burgess known as Einion Bach was sheriff of Anglesey from 1316. By the middle of that century the borough had its rights suspended on the grounds that too many of its burgesses were Welsh — the only place in North Wales that happened to.

It was run oddly for a long time after that. Beaumaris was the only corporation borough in Wales, which meant a small self-appointed group chose the MP and nobody else in the town got a say. That lasted until 1832. It was the county town as well, and Anglesey County Council held its first meeting here in 1889 — then Llangefni took the council, and Beaumaris stopped being the centre of anything.

That is rather why it looks the way it does. The town made its money early and lost it early, so nobody knocked it about afterwards. There are more than two hundred listed buildings in a town this size, and the medieval street plan is still there underneath the Georgian fronts.

The castle is open all year. The gaol and the courthouse are open too, and they are worth doing together as they sit a few minutes apart — though it is worth ringing ahead, because they have had a difficult year over funding and the hours can change.

The busiest fortnight is the end of July into early August, when the Menai Strait Regattas are on and most of the racing is based here. There is an artisan market on Rating Row on Sundays from Easter through to the end of October, and Penmon, ten minutes up the road, is free to walk into — though the lane on to the point and the lighthouse is a private toll road, so take some change.