Conwy

Conwy, town, Conwy county borough, historic county of Caernarvonshire (Sir Gaernarfon), northwestern Wales. The town lies on the west bank of the River Conwy’s estuary, near the river’s mouth on Conwy Bay of the Irish Sea. It is the administrative centre of the county borough.

Conwy was founded by the English king Edward I in 1283 as one of a chain of fortified towns in the then newly invaded North Wales. A Cistercian monastery already occupied the site, but Edward removed the monastery upstream to Maenan, leaving its church as the borough’s parish church. Edward built a castle, a town, and walls to surround them both. The town was built on a grid plan as nearly as the site permitted, with the castle on the riverbank in the southeast corner. The castle is roughly rectangular, with eight round towers, each 40 feet (12 metres) in diameter, along its sides. The town walls themselves are fortified with 21 towers and have 3 gateways. Though the castle was partially dismantled in 1665, the town walls have remained virtually complete, making Conwy one of Europe’s finest surviving examples of a medieval bastide (a town laid out according to a definite geometric plan). Sixteenth-century buildings in the town include the mansion Aberconwy (c. 1500), Plâs Mawr (the “Great House,” built in 1577–80, now housing the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art), and the Black Lion (1582; a coaching inn). Deganwy, across the Conwy estuary, is of much greater antiquity, with a 6th-century Welsh fortress, but little remains of its fortifications, and after Conwy was founded it became subordinate to the new town. Conwy’s fortifications and those in other North Wales towns constructed by Edward I were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986.

The deeply indented estuary of the River Conwy has long been an obstacle to travelers along the coast of northern Wales. The Scottish engineer Thomas Telford designed the first bridge across the estuary at Conwy; the roadway of his innovative Conwy Suspension Bridge (1822–26) is suspended from huge wrought-iron chains. To carry a rail line across the estuary, the English engineer Robert Stephenson completed a tubular iron-and-steel bridge at Conwy in 1848. A modern road bridge was completed alongside these two bridges more than a century later (1958), but it proved insufficient to accommodate the growing automotive traffic along North Wales’s coastal highway. In 1990 a concrete road tunnel was completed beneath the Conwy estuary’s channel to allow much of that traffic to bypass the town of Conwy. Conwy is now primarily a tourist centre. Pop. (2001) 14,208; (2011) 14,723.