Caernarfon Accommodation

More About Caernarfon

Inside them the streets are narrow and the shops mostly independent, with the quay two minutes from the castle gate. It is a working town rather than a preserved one. There is a market twice a week on Y Maes, an arts centre running all year, and restored workshops, a bakery and a forge at Cei Llechi by the harbour.

The national park boundary runs a little way inland, so Caernarfon sits at the edge of the mountains rather than among them, with the Llanberis Pass within half an hour. Going the other way, the Welsh Highland Railway leaves St Helen’s Road and covers twenty-five miles to Porthmadog by way of Beddgelert — the longest heritage line in Britain.

Caernarfon was laid out as an English borough. The charter was witnessed at Flint in September 1284, and by 1298 there were fifty-five burgage plots inside the walls. The burgesses came largely from the English midlands and held the trade and its privileges. Welsh people were shut out of that class, though not out of the place, which filled with Welsh residents from the start.

In 1294 Madog ap Llywelyn’s revolt reached the borough, and Welshmen from Anglesey raided the town and hanged the sheriff sent to collect an unpopular tax. The rising brought down nearly half the new defences. The castle, for all its scale, was never actually finished: the major work stopped around 1330 and the gaps are still there.

The borough built to keep Welshmen out of power is now the most Welsh-speaking town of its size in the country. At the last census 81.5 per cent of the Caernarfon area spoke Welsh, against 17.8 per cent for Wales as a whole.

The town has its own dialect to go with it: Cofi is both what a Caernarfon person is called and how they speak. For a visitor the effect is that Welsh is the everyday language of the market and the pub. Nobody minds in the least if you have none of it.

The best hour in the town is spent on the High Street, where the plot widths under your feet were set out in 1284. Some frontages still run to the old standard, sixty feet broad by eighty deep. The town fills each summer for Gŵyl Arall, its arts festival, held most recently from 9 to 12 July 2026.