Llanrwst Accommodation

More About Llanrwst

The bridge is what everyone photographs: a narrow three-arched crossing dated 1636, with an ivy-covered tea room on the far bank. Over the river stands Gwydir Castle, a Tudor house open to visitors through the summer. Above it, the little chapel at Gwydir Uchaf is free to look inside if you arrange the key beforehand.

The Gwydir Forest rises behind the town with small lakes hidden in it and waymarked trails from several car parks, though felling work closes trails from time to time. Llanrwst has a station of its own, so Betws-y-Coed and Llandudno are within reach without a car. Prices here tend to sit below the busier places up the valley.

In the Gwydir Chapel at St Grwst’s church there is a stone coffin, seven feet long inside. It is the coffin of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth — Llywelyn the Great — who died in 1240 and was the most powerful ruler Wales produced. He was not buried here. He was buried at Aberconwy Abbey on the coast at Conwy, in the Cistercian house he had founded himself.

The abbey did not stay there. In 1283 Edward I took Conwy for his own castle and town, and the monks were moved eight miles upriver to Maenan. Edward paid for the new abbey, which was a courteous way of evicting somebody. In 1537 Henry VIII dissolved it, and its stone was carted off to repair the castle walls at Caernarfon.

The coffin was brought here, and that is not a modern tourist story. Thomas Dineley saw it in this chapel in 1684 and noted that its brass plates had already been stripped by Civil War soldiers. Edward Lhwyd, one of the finest Welsh scholars of his age, recorded it here again in 1695.

The chapel that holds it was built in the 1630s by Sir Richard Wynn of Gwydir, whose family lie buried around the coffin they gave a home to. It is empty — the lid is long gone, and what became of Llywelyn himself is simply not recorded. You are looking at a container for one of the great figures of Welsh history, moved twice, robbed once, and parked in a side chapel.

Today the difference between the two towns is easy to feel. Betws-y-Coed, four miles away, is where the coaches stop. Llanrwst has a working high street instead, with a butcher, a bakery and a square that still fills on market day. For a visitor that usually means the same valley at a lower price, and somewhere to leave the car.

You can go and see the coffin for nothing. St Grwst’s is open most days and free to enter, though it is a working church and asks anyone travelling a distance to ring first. Guided tours run at around £5 a head and take in the chapel and the climb to the rood loft.