Beaumaris

Gelato, waterfront and old inns

Red Boat, on Castle Street, advertises over 150 flavours of gelato and changes its specials daily, so on any given afternoon you might find Bara Brith, fig, blackcurrant cheesecake, or rhubarb and custard behind the glass. It also does gluten-free cones, which matters more than it sounds when you're a coeliac watching everyone else eat ice cream. The queue tends to confirm the 4.7-star average. People wait, and then they carry the cone out onto the seafront to eat it looking at Snowdonia across the water.

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.

You will not go hungry. The George and Dragon on Church Street is the timber-framed one, dating to 1410, all exposed beams and a fireplace that turned up during building works and is reckoned to be hundreds of years old. It pours Robinsons cask ales and does the traditional end of the menu properly: burgers, bangers and mash, fish and chips, daily specials. It is, by most accounts, extremely popular with locals and tourists alike, which is a hard trick for any pub to manage without annoying one or the other.

The Liverpool Arms on the High Street takes the more relaxed approach. It's dog-friendly, has a well-stocked bar and an outdoor seating area for the days the weather cooperates, and puts on live music. If you want somewhere to sit with a pint and a wet dog and not feel you're lowering the tone, this is it. The Bold Arms on Castle Street rounds out the town's working pubs.

Coaching tales, food and castle walls

Then there is Ye Olde Bull's Head, also on Castle Street, which is the grand one. It dates to 1472 and was substantially rebuilt in 1617; the staircase is partly seventeenth century and the cellar walls are thought to be medieval. It ran as a coaching inn on the London-to-Holyhead route before Telford threw his suspension bridge across the Menai and changed how everyone travelled. The guest book, if it kept one, would be worth reading. Charles Dickens stayed in 1859 and mentioned Anglesey afterwards in The Uncommercial Traveller. Dr Samuel Johnson is said to have put up here too. So did General Thomas Mytton, one of Cromwell's men, who stopped during the Civil War in 1648 and, by local account, left without settling his bill. It has been unpaid for getting on four hundred years.

For food that isn't a pub, the Pier House Café and Bistro is out on the seafront, does modern British cooking with seasonal ingredients from local farms, welcomes dogs, and is regularly told its fish and chips are the thing to order. Happy Valley Café is the sandwich stop, and is quietly serious about its millionaire's shortbread and its homemade Welsh cakes. W. T. Roberts is the bakery, for breakfast rolls, croissants and cakes, staffed by people who appear to genuinely like the job. Between the four of them and Red Boat you could eat your way through a long weekend without repeating yourself.

The castle is the reason the town exists, and it's worth understanding what you're looking at. Edward I began it in 1295, the last of the castles he built to hold down north Wales after conquering it, and the planned town of Beaumaris grew up alongside. Master James of St George drew it: a perfectly symmetrical concentric design, walls within walls, a moat, a dock that let supply ships sail right up to the gate. The historian Arnold Taylor called it "the most perfect example of symmetrical concentric planning," and UNESCO, which made it a World Heritage Site in 1986, rates it among "the finest examples of late 13th century and early 14th century military architecture in Europe."

An unfinished fortress and a princess's coffin

It was never finished. The money ran to Edward's Scottish wars instead. Work stopped by 1300, started again briefly in 1306, and petered out around 1330 with the towers still short of their intended height. At its peak the site had something like 1,800 workmen, 450 stonemasons and 375 quarriers on it — some accounts push the summer figure to 3,500 — and it still came out unfinished. A survey in 1343 worked out that £684 more would complete it. Nobody ever spent it. So the most perfect concentric castle in the world is, technically, a building site that was abandoned seven centuries ago and never quite got going again.

The church is Grade I listed and full of things that have wandered in from elsewhere. St Mary's and St Nicholas's was founded around 1330 to serve the new town; the nave keeps its fourteenth-century design and the chancel was rebuilt around 1500. The choir stalls and the carved misericords under the seats — late fifteenth, early sixteenth century — were most likely carried over from the Franciscan friary at Llanfaes when it was dissolved. There's an alabaster tomb of William Bulkeley, deputy constable of the castle, who died around 1490, lying beside his wife.

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

If you like your history at ground level, the Gaol and the Courthouse are both museums now and both worth an hour. The Courthouse was built in 1614 under James I and is one of the oldest in Britain; until 1971 it was the oldest building in the country where Assize Courts were still being held, and the main courtroom looks much as it did in Stuart times. The Gaol, built in 1829, is grimmer and better for it. It kept prisoners in chains, whipped them, and shut them in a dark cell for up to three days at a stretch. It has a condemned cell and a scaffold, and one of the last working penal treadwheels in Britain — except that here the treadwheel actually pumped water to the top of the building for the cells, so the prisoners' pointless labour was, unusually, not entirely pointless. It draws around 30,000 visitors a year, which is a lot of people paying to look at a prison that closed after just eleven years of use.

Walk it off along the shore. The path to Penmon Point is about four and a half miles, roughly two hours, and it passes the castle, follows the coast to the medieval priory at Penmon, and finishes at 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.

From the pier you can also get out on the water. Two operators run boat trips to Puffin Island — Starida, which is accredited under the WiSe responsible wildlife-watching scheme, and Seacoast Safaris, whose Neptune Explorer does the island, the bridges and the Swellies. Between April and July the seabirds are breeding: guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and the puffins the island is named for. There's a grey seal colony, and porpoises and bottlenose dolphins turn up when they feel like it. One reviewer records dolphins playing around the boat in the Strait for a quarter of an hour, which is the kind of thing that either happens on your trip or doesn't.

Old houses, onward travel and Welsh voices

The Tudor Rose at 32 Castle Street is one of the oldest houses in Beaumaris and reputedly one of the oldest in Britain — a timber-framed hall house whose earliest surviving beams come from the 1480s, one of them felled in the winter of 1485. Up above the town, hidden in trees, is Baron Hill, the mansion the Bulkeley family built in 1618 and lorded over the place from for three centuries. Death duties after the First World War drained the money; in the Second it was requisitioned to billet Polish soldiers, who found it so cold that they reportedly set a fire to get themselves moved somewhere warmer, and gutted the interior in the process. It's a romantic overgrown ruin now, which is roughly what it deserved.

Getting here takes a small effort, which keeps the crowds honest. Beaumaris has never had a railway station and never will; the nearest is Bangor on the mainland, and the 58 bus runs across from Bangor station in about 38 minutes. By road you come over the Menai Bridge and along the A545, four miles of coast. Just up the road at Menai Bridge is Sosban and the Old Butchers, which has held a Michelin star since 2016 and serves a seven-course surprise tasting menu with no choices to make, if you fancy dressing up one evening.

Just under 1,100 people live in Beaumaris, and more than a third of them speak Welsh. That census figure is easy to forget until you're standing on the green with a Red Boat cone, the ice cream doing its best against the sun off the Strait, and you hear it spoken behind you as easily as English.