Cymru, Lloegr a Llanrwst. Wales, England and Llanrwst. The saying is old, the joke is older, and it captures something true about a place that has never quite fitted into anyone else's geography. The River Conwy formed the border between Welsh and English rule in the thirteenth century, and Llanrwst straddled the river. The town belonged to neither side and answered to both. It also belonged to two dioceses and two counties for various periods, and at one point its parishioners argued the question all the way to the Pope. The local band Y Cyrff turned the saying into a song in 1989. The town still makes the case for itself.
Llanrwst takes its name from Saint Grwst, a sixth-century Welsh saint whose original church sat on the site now occupied by Seion Methodist Chapel. The current Church of St Grwst, on the riverbank, is a fifteenth-century building on land donated around 1170 by Rhun ap Nefydd Hardd of the royal family of Gwynedd. Attached to the church is Gwydir Chapel, a 1633 construction said to have been designed by Inigo Jones, the architect who brought Italian classicism to Stuart England. Inside the chapel rests the stone coffin of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Llywelyn the Great, the Welsh prince who united most of Wales under his rule in the early thirteenth century. The coffin was moved here from Maenan Abbey at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and it has stayed. The town also developed around the wool trade. For a long time the price of wool for the whole of Britain was set at Llanrwst, an extraordinary fact for a small market town. Edward I, who built Conwy Castle nearby, prohibited any Welshman from trading within ten miles of Conwy. Llanrwst, thirteen miles inland, became the legal Welsh wool market by default.
Pont Fawr, the Grade I listed three-arched stone bridge across the Conwy, was built in 1636 by Sir Richard Wynn of Gwydir Castle, the son of Sir John Wynn. The design is also attributed to Inigo Jones, although the documentary evidence for that attribution is shaky. Whether or not Jones drew the lines, the bridge is a small masterpiece of seventeenth-century engineering, three high arches springing across the river to link Llanrwst with Gwydir on the western bank, a manor house dating from 1492, and a small fifteenth-century courthouse called Tu Hwnt i'r Bont, now a tearoom with creeper that turns blood red in autumn and draws photographers from across north Wales. Drivers crossing Pont Fawr today follow the same road that quarrymen and farmers walked four centuries ago.
Llanrwst's complicated political identity has been a feature for centuries. In the 1240s and 1250s, and again in the 1270s and 1280s, the river Conwy was a working border between Welsh and English rule, and the town's status changed with the front line. The 1334 survey of the Lordship of Denbigh listed Llanrwst as one of three boroughs alongside Denbigh itself and Abergele, although its borough status was already in decline by then. Modern writers sometimes claim it was a free borough, subordinate only to the monarch. The evidence is mixed. The legend that Llanrwst tried to join the United Nations in 1946 or 1947 as an independent state appears in a 1992 newspaper article, which gave no dates or detail and noted only that the town once discussed applying. The story makes good copy. The Eisteddfod has come three times, in 1951, 1989, and 2019. The town hosts it well.
Three thousand one hundred and twenty-eight people were counted at the 2021 census. About sixty-one percent of them speak Welsh, a figure that holds steady against the slow erosion seen elsewhere. The A470 runs through the town between north and south Wales, joined by the A548 from Rhyl and Chester. Ysgol Dyffryn Conwy, the bilingual secondary school formerly known as Llanrwst Grammar School, takes pupils from across the valley. The Conwy Valley Line railway has two stations, Llanrwst and North Llanrwst, with services through to Blaenau Ffestiniog where the line ends. The town is just outside the Snowdonia National Park boundary, which gives it a base for visitors heading into the mountains. The tourist trade has overtaken wool and clock-making, the older trades that defined the town in earlier centuries.
Llanrwst's notable people make a varied list. Peter Thomas, Baron Thomas of Gwydir, born in the town in 1920, served as Secretary of State for Wales. Kai Owen, born 1975, plays Rhys Williams in the BBC's Torchwood. Mark Roberts of the band Catatonia, born 1967, came out of Y Cyrff, the local band that wrote Cymru, Lloegr a Llanrwst. Glyn Wise was a Big Brother runner-up in 2006. Erin Mai represented Wales at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2019. In November 2024 the FBI captured Daniel Andreas San Diego, an American animal-rights activist who had been on their most-wanted list since 2003, living quietly near Maenan just outside the town. Llanrwst contains multitudes. It always has.
Llanrwst sits at 53.14 north, 3.79 west, on the east bank of the River Conwy in the Conwy valley. The town is just outside the eastern boundary of Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000 to 4,000 feet for the town, Pont Fawr bridge, Gwydir Castle a mile to the west across the river, and the slopes of Gwydir Forest rising behind. The Conwy valley reads clearly running north-south. Nearest airports EGCK Caernarfon to the west, EGNR Hawarden to the east near Chester, and EGOV Valley on Anglesey to the northwest.