Qualla: Conwy Town Walls

Conwy Town Walls: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Fareham, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk the circuit and you can do something almost no other town in Europe allows: walk continuously on the wall-walk of a complete medieval fortification, one kilometre and three hundred metres around, looking down on a small town that has been living inside the same walls for seven hundred and forty years. There are twenty-one towers. There are three original gatehouses. There is a stretch with twelve medieval latrines built into the stone, the only such survival of its kind, originally for the use of the royal staff working in the buildings inside. Above all there is the fact that Conwy's town walls do not feel like a ruin or a monument. They feel like what they are: a working piece of the town's daily life, threaded through with houses and shops and gardens, the survival of an Edwardian act of colonial engineering that was, by the testimony of the historians who study such things, 'one of the most impressive walled circuits' in Europe.

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Image: Steve Fareham | CC BY-SA 2.0

Conwy Town Walls: 1283: dispossession and design

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Firth, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before the walls there was an abbey. Aberconwy, the Cistercian foundation favoured by Llywelyn the Great and his successors, had stood on the river bank since the late twelfth century. In March 1283, three months after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd ended Welsh independence, E...

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Image: John Firth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Conwy Town Walls: Master James and the building seasons

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Wilkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. The walls went up alongside the castle under the overall supervision of Master James of Saint George, Edward's chief architect in north Wales. Each summer thousands of labourers were mobilised from across England, mustered at Chester, and marched into Wales for the building seaso...

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Image: Jonathan Wilkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Conwy Town Walls: 1401: the sack

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. In April 1401, on Good Friday, two of Owain Glyndŵr's cousins infiltrated Conwy Castle while most of its garrison were at the parish church. They took it. Despite the great circuit of walls outside, Welsh forces then occupied the town for two months and sacked it. The townspeople...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Conwy Town Walls: Telford, Stephenson, Cadw

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Dbenbenn assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The nineteenth century brought new threats and unexpected respect. Thomas Telford built his suspension bridge across the Conwy in 1826, designing the bridge's stone towers to match the castle, and cutting two new gateways through the walls to carry the traffic. In 1848 Robert Ste...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Dbenbenn assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Conwy Town Walls: What you see today

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0. The east side runs four towers from the castle to the quay, with a postern gate and the Lower Gate giving access to the harbour. The west side, nine towers strong, climbs the hill toward the south-west corner. One merlon up there still wears its original stone finial - a small de...

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Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 4.0