It measures three point zero five metres by one point eight. The last person to live in it - Robert Jones, a fisherman who stood six feet three inches tall - had to bend almost double to move between rooms, and was eventually forced out in 1900 on grounds of public hygiene. The Smallest House in Great Britain still stands on Conwy quay, painted red, ducked between its tall neighbours, and visitors pay a small fee to file through its two tiny rooms. It is the kind of detail that makes Conwy a peculiar place to wander. The medieval circuit of walls, the great Edwardian castle, three landmark bridges side by side, an Elizabethan town house, a fourteenth-century merchant's hall - all packed into a small walled town on the west bank of the Conwy estuary. Locals born inside the walls are called Jackdaws, after the birds that nest in the stonework.
Conwy is one of Edward I's foundation towns: the entire walled settlement was built between 1283 and 1289, on top of the dispossessed Cistercian abbey of Aberconwy, as a deliberate act of English colonisation after the conquest of Gwynedd. The castle, eight massive towers strung along a rocky spine above the river, was the work of Master James of Saint George. The town walls - 1.3 kilometres long, twenty-one towers, three gatehouses - form a complete circuit that is still mostly intact. The oldest surviving structure inside the walls is not the castle but a section of the south-east wall, where the wall and apsidal tower of a llys - a Welsh princely court or palace - belonging to Llywelyn the Great and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd have been incorporated. Edward built around the bones of the kingdom he had ended.
Stand on the quay and look upriver and you see one of the better collections of nineteenth-century engineering in Britain crowded into a small space. Thomas Telford's suspension bridge, completed in 1826, was designed to replace the old ferry; Telford gave its supporting towers the form of castle turrets so they would not jar against the medieval keep. The bridge is now pedestrian-only, in the care of the National Trust along with the toll-keeper's house. Beside it, Robert Stephenson's Conwy Railway Bridge - a wrought-iron tubular bridge, first tube completed in 1848, second in 1849 - still carries the North Wales Coast Line as it did when Stephenson built it. Beyond them is a 1958 road bridge, and below the river itself runs Britain's first immersed-tube tunnel, built between 1986 and 1991 to carry the A55 under the estuary. Four crossings, four eras of British civil engineering, all in view at once.
Inside the walls, two buildings stand out. Plas Mawr is an Elizabethan town house built in 1576 by the Wynn family - large, ornate, plastered with original sixteenth-century decorative stucco of a richness that survives almost nowhere else in Britain. It is now run by Cadw, restored to its 1580s appearance, and open to the public. A short walk away, Aberconwy House is the only surviving fourteenth-century merchant's house in Conwy, a timber-framed building on stone foundations now in the care of the National Trust. Between them they sketch the trajectory of the town from late-medieval commerce to Tudor prosperity - the kind of layered domestic survival that walled towns tend to produce when no one bothers to knock anything down.
The Smallest House in Great Britain sits on the quay. It is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the smallest house in Britain: 3.05 metres tall, 1.8 metres wide, two tiny floors. It was occupied continuously from the sixteenth century, even housing a family at one point, until 1900. The last occupant was Robert Jones, a fisherman, who at six feet three inches tall could not stand fully upright in either room. The local council declared the conditions unfit and forced him out. The house is still owned by his descendants today, and visitors look through it for a small charge. Behind the house, on a marshy spit of land called Conwy Morfa, was where golf is believed to have been first played on Welsh soil - and where, in the Second World War, Hugh Iorys Hughes developed and built the floating Mulberry Harbour units used in the Normandy landings.
People born within the walls of Conwy are called Jackdaws, after the small grey-and-black crows that nest in the wall towers. A Jackdaw Society existed until 2011 to commemorate the distinction. The birds are still there, picking around the battlements and the quay, more or less indifferent to seven and a half centuries of human history beneath their wings. The town's name comes from the old Welsh cyn (chief) and gwy (water) - the river was originally the Cynwy, the chief water - and the spelling was officially changed from the anglicised 'Conway' to 'Conwy' on 1 August 1972. The community, including Deganwy and Llandudno Junction across the estuary, had a population of 14,753 at the 2011 census. The walled town itself is much smaller, a few thousand people living among the walls of a kingdom that ended in 1283 and the bridges of an empire that has since shrunk back to the same coast.
Conwy sits at 53.28 north, 3.83 west, on the west bank of the Conwy estuary where the river opens to Liverpool Bay. From the air the walled town is an obvious enclosed quadrilateral with the castle towers at the south-east corner and three bridges streaming away across the river. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 ft AGL flying south down the estuary or east along the North Wales coast. Nearest airports: Caernarfon (EGCK) twelve miles west, RAF Valley (EGOV) on Anglesey, Hawarden (EGNR) east toward Chester.
53.28°N, 3.83°W. Walled town on the west bank of the Conwy estuary; castle visible from miles away. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL. Nearest airports: EGCK Caernarfon, EGOV Valley, EGNR Hawarden.