Beaumaris B&Bs

More About B&Bs in Beaumaris

The castle, the pier and the whole length of Castle Street are inside a ten-minute walk of each other, and the green runs down to the shore. The Victorian pier is free to walk out along, and it is the best place in Beaumaris to stand and look at the Carneddau, the mountain range across the Strait.

The old gaol on Steeple Lane, built in 1829, has the only working treadwheel left in Britain — a giant wooden drum that prisoners were made to walk inside, hour after hour, to pump the building’s water. The courthouse of 1614 stands on Castle Street. Between them they take a morning.

People were staying in Beaumaris long before it tried to be a resort. The port trade faded through the 1700s, the town went quiet, and visitors began coming simply to look at the castle. The Liverpool Arms was built around 1700 to put them up. Daniel Defoe came through in 1724 and wrote that there was nothing worth seeing on Anglesey except the town and the castle of Beaumaris.

In 1822 the corporation decided to make a proper job of it. The green had to be dealt with first — it was salt marsh that went under at high tide, and the town had been using it for grazing and for dumping. It was drained in 1823 and the sea wall went up in 1832. In between, in 1825, came Green Edge: seven houses by John Hall, an architect from Bangor, built for the corporation specifically to provide comfortable accommodation for visitors. It was the first building in Beaumaris put up specifically to lodge visitors, rather than an inn taking them in as the Liverpool Arms had been doing for a century.

It did not work out as intended. Beaumaris never pulled in the rich and fashionable crowd the corporation had in mind. What it got instead was the middle classes — professionals and families taking rooms for the season — and that is more or less the trade the town has had ever since.

You can still see the shape of it. The guest houses are in the Georgian and Victorian townhouses that went up for this exact purpose, and you can date the later ones from the street names: Alma Street and Raglan Street are both named after the Crimean War, so nothing on either predates 1854.

Green Edge is still standing, and numbers six and seven are now the Royal Anglesey Yacht Club. The club started in the town in 1802 as a reading society, moved into Green Edge in 1826, was prominent in the Beaumaris regatta of 1830, and was granted the Admiralty warrant to call itself Royal in 1885. The terrace built to house visitors ended up as the yacht club.

The yacht club still races off the green through the summer. Some places to stay are still in those Georgian streets and some are on farms a mile or two out, and in Beaumaris in August the difference between walking home and driving is worth thinking about.