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More About B&Bs and Guest Houses in Caernarfon

The castle gate, the market square, the quay and the walls are all within a few minutes of each other. An evening in Caernarfon need not involve the car at all. Welsh is the working language of the shops and the pubs, which is worth knowing and no trouble at all if you have none of it.

It suits people who would rather be in the middle of somewhere than on the edge of it. Caernarfon fills up from July onwards, so book earlier here than the size of the town suggests.

In the middle of the nineteenth century this was a working port, and many lodging in the town were not visitors but young men learning to take a ship to sea. Their teacher, time and again, was Ellen Edwards, who ran a navigation school in New Street.

She came from Amlwch, the daughter of a sea captain, and the 1841 census lists her plainly as a schoolmistress. Her successful pupils were printed in the local paper each year, up to thirty in a good season. Over a working life she put more than a thousand men through their certificates.

That was an extraordinary thing for a woman to be doing in the eighteen-fifties, teaching master mariners to command large vessels. When she reached seventy the Harbour Trust petitioned the Government for a pension, and she was granted seventy-five pounds from the Royal Bounty Fund. She died in 1889 and is buried at Llanbeblig.

There is a slate plaque to her on the town’s former mortuary, and her portrait, painted by William Roos in 1859, is kept in the county archive. It is a modest trail for a woman who taught a thousand men, and exactly the sort of thing nobody points you at.

The castle she taught beneath has changed more than the school has. Cadw reopened its King’s Gate in 2023, with a glass lift to the top of the gatehouse and a rooftop view, and the work won a Civic Trust Award in 2026. The Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum keeps two of the castle’s towers.

The navigation school is long gone. What has not changed is what she taught those men to read. The Strait still runs in front of the town, with Anglesey on the far shore and the tide hard through the middle. Walk down to the quay from the old town and it is all still there.