Two Days, Three Castles

Again, it was the photo in the travel guide that drew me in.

Just as a photo of Valle Crucis Abbey in a Welsh travel guide made me convince DW that a detour was necessary (I don't think I had to do much convincing: she saw the photo, too), a castle with a still-functioning moat was another must-see attraction, even though this castle was definitely going to take us out of our way.

It took us out of our way twice.

The photo in the guide showed two white swans swimming in the moat, and I wanted to recreate that shot (photos in travel guides have always inspired me and still do to this day). Though our schedule was tight, I thought that we could make it to Beaumaris, from Conwy, in time before the castle drew its doors closed for the day.

Following the North Wales Expressway, we headed west and crossed over onto the Isle of Anglesey, and then headed east, along the shore of the Menai Strait, just passing on the outskirts of Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, the tiny town with the longest name in all of Europe. The trip should have taken just over a half hour, but rain fell heavy along the highway and a rush-hour traffic jam on the Britannia Bridge slowed us down.

As we drove past the front entranceway, we could see an attendant closing up the gates. We found a place to park and rushed to the gates, but we were too late.

"What do you want to do?" asked DW.

Because the castle is right in the town and much of the moat could be seen through an iron gate, we took a few photos, including one that was similar to the picture we had seen in the travel guide, with the swans drifting gracefully in the moat. Again, the weather was in our favour with sunshine allowing us some golden-hour shots.

But DW's question was more along the lines of whether we wanted to settle for the photos we were able to catch outside the castle grounds or whether we wanted to return the next day. Our itinerary called for us visiting Caernarfon Castle in the morning before heading through Snowdonia National Park, to Harlech Castle.

I reminded DW that because we were camping, we were waking up with the birds, which usually meant that we were on the road at a fairly early hour. Our evening destination was a campsite just outside of Bangor (I looked for campsites that still exist and found one that rang a bell: Dinas Farm Site). It was less than 20 minutes from Beaumaris and we calculated that it was the same distance from Beaumaris Castle to Caernarfon Castle, and so we decided that we would go back to Beaumaris, get to the castle for when it opened, spend an hour, and then go to Caernarfon.

That's what we did.

Beaumaris, the last of the castles built by Edward I of England in the late thirteenth century, was never fully completed. But its symmetrical design and moat are impressive, nonetheless. DW and I walked along the drafty inner hallways that follow the walls and climbed many of its towers. The sunshine of the day made us want to linger but we knew that we had to move on if we wanted to see everything on our day's itinerary.

Caernarfon Castle, also built by Edward I on the site of an older motte-and-bailey castle that was built two centuries earlier, following the Norman conquest, lies at the western mouth of the Menai Strait. During the Welsh revolt of 1294, the castle and town were besieged, though the English were able to retake the castle. Subsequent rebellions saw the castle sacked again, though today it is best known as the site where Charles was invested, in 1969, as the Prince of Wales. (His great uncle, Edward VIII, had his investiture at Caernarfon in 1911.)

We decided to have lunch in a small restaurant just outside the castle walls and lingered a little as we waited for some mid-day rain to fall. We returned to our rented Ford Fiesta to find that both sides of the car had been keyed, likely by someone who didn't like the London license plates on the vehicle (thank goodness for insurance!).

Our delay in Caernarfon, as enjoyable as it was (scratched paint nothwithstanding), meant that we didn't get on the road again until much later. We realized that there was no way that we would be able to reach Harlech by the time its castle would be closed to tourists, so we decided to make it as far as Beddgelert (a beautiful village, by the way), have dinner, and then make our way to our campsite, on the side of Mount Snowdon.

In two days, we had seen three castles: Conwy, Beaumaris, and Caernarfon. And we were only just beginning.

As a side note, I have to clarify something I said in my first post about Wales, where I said that we saw seven castles in seven days: while that is technically true, we were actually only in Wales for five of the seven days that we had our rental car. Day one and day seven were spent in England. My memory of this trip is coming back as I recount the days and what we did. I may have to make further changes as I go along (I have updated the Valle Crucis Abbey post).