Qualla: Conwy

Conwy: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Conwy: Built for conquest, kept for centuries

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Conwy: Three bridges, one estuary

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Conwy: Plas Mawr and Aberconwy House

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, resto...

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Conwy: Robert Jones and the smallest house

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, ...

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Conwy: Jackdaws and Plas Mawr's birds

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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