Beaumaris

Gelato, waterfront and old inns

Red Boat Gelato on Castle Street has a repertoire of more than 150 flavours, including Bara Brith, fig, blackcurrant cheesecake and rhubarb and custard. Specials change daily, and gluten-free cones are available. Take a cone down to the seafront and eat it facing Eryri across the Menai Strait.

That's the thing about Beaumaris. It sits on the eastern shore of Anglesey, at the point where the Menai Strait opens out, and the mountains of Eryri are directly across the channel. The seafront is wide and flat, the buildings behind it are Georgian, and the whole arrangement of sea, mountains and old stone makes one of the most attractive waterfronts in North Wales. The town's own name comes from the Norman-French for it: beau marais, fair marsh, which is what Edward I's clerks made of a low-lying spit of land that had previously been a Viking landing called Porth y Wygyr, the port of the Vikings.

The George and Dragon on Church Street dates from the sixteenth century, and its most significant surviving feature is a painted roof truss dated 1610.

The Liverpool Arms on Castle Street has a traditional bar, restaurant and dog-friendly dining. The Bold Arms adds another pub stop, with a large bar, pool and sport on television.

Coaching tales, food and castle walls

Ye Olde Bull's Head on Castle Street is a Grade II* listed coaching inn with 17th-century origins, substantially rebuilt and enlarged in 1766. It served travellers on the London-to-Holyhead route before the Menai Suspension Bridge changed the journey. Charles Dickens stayed in 1859, and Samuel Johnson was another guest. In 1646 General Thomas Mytton took Beaumaris Castle from the Royalists for Parliament.

For food beyond the pubs, the Pier House Café and Bistro serves modern British cooking on the seafront, using seasonal ingredients from local farms; it welcomes dogs, and fish and chips are a favourite. Happy Valley Café is a stop for sandwiches, millionaire's shortbread and homemade Welsh cakes. W. T. Roberts Bakery covers breakfast rolls, croissants and cakes.

Beaumaris Castle explains why the town exists. Edward I began it in 1295, and the planned town grew alongside it. Master James of St George designed a remarkably symmetrical fortress: walls within walls, a moat and a dock that let supply ships reach the gate. Its concentric plan is celebrated as a landmark of medieval military architecture, and the castle has formed part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

An unfinished fortress and a princess's coffin

It was never finished. Money went to Edward's Scottish wars instead. Work stopped by 1300, resumed briefly in 1306 and petered out around 1330, leaving the towers short of their intended height. At its peak, the project involved around 1,800 workmen, 450 stonemasons and 375 quarriers, with summer estimates as high as 3,500. A survey in 1343 put the remaining cost at 684 pounds, but the work was never completed. The result is a remarkably complete design in an unfinished building.

St Mary's and St Nicholas's Church was founded around 1330 to serve the new town. Grade I listed, it retains a fourteenth-century nave and a chancel rebuilt around 1500. Its late medieval choir stalls and carved misericords are linked to the dissolved Franciscan friary at Llanfaes. In the north aisle, a late fifteenth-century alabaster tomb may commemorate William Bulkeley, the castle's deputy constable, and his wife Elen, or their son Rowland and his wife Alice.

But the object to find is a plain stone coffin. It belonged to Joan — Siwan in Welsh — the wife of Llywelyn the Great and the illegitimate daughter of King John. She died in 1237 and was buried at the Llanfaes friary. When the friary was dissolved in 1537 her tomb was lost, and the coffin turned up some time later being used as a trough to water horses. It was rescued, moved to a mausoleum on the Bulkeley estate in 1808, and finally brought into the church in the late 1920s. A medieval princess, daughter of an English king and wife of a Welsh one, spent a good stretch of the intervening centuries as farmyard plumbing.

Gaol, coast and wildlife cruises

The Gaol and Courthouse bring the town's history down to human scale. Built in 1614, the Courthouse kept holding Assize Courts until 1971, and its main courtroom survives much as it did in Stuart times. The Gaol was built in 1829. Prisoners faced chains, whipping and confinement in a dark cell; the building retains a condemned cell, a scaffold and a working penal treadwheel that pumped water to the cells. The prison was enlarged in 1867 and closed in 1878.

Walk it off along the shore. The path to Penmon Point is about four and a half miles, passing the castle and the medieval priory at Penmon before reaching Trwyn Du, the black-and-white striped lighthouse looking across to Puffin Island. Beaumaris also sits on the Anglesey Coastal Path, the 130-mile loop of the whole island, so you can pick up a longer stretch in either direction across farmland, coastal heath and cliff. Or just walk the promenade to the pier and watch the light move over the mountains, which costs nothing and never gets old.

Boats from Beaumaris Pier head out towards Puffin Island. Starida is accredited under the WiSe responsible wildlife-watching scheme, while Seacoast Safaris runs cruises aboard Neptune Explorer around the island, the bridges and the Swellies. Breeding seabirds include guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and puffins; grey seals live around the island, and porpoises or bottlenose dolphins may appear in the Strait.

Old houses, onward travel and Welsh voices

The Tudor Rose at 32 Castle Street is a surviving timber-framed hall house, with timbers dating from the 1480s; one was felled in the winter of 1485–86. Above the town, the Bulkeley family established Baron Hill in 1618. Death duties after the First World War strained the estate, and a fire during the Second World War left the mansion ruinous.

Beaumaris has never had a railway station. Bangor, on the mainland, is the nearest rail stop, with route 58 linking it to town. By road, the approach crosses the Menai Bridge and follows about four miles of the A545 along the coast. In Menai Bridge, Sosban and the Old Butchers received a Michelin star in 2016 and serves a surprise tasting menu.

Around 1,100 people lived in Beaumaris at the 2021 census, and more than a third could speak Welsh. On the green, with the Strait catching the light, Welsh belongs to the everyday sound of the town as much as English.