The Fair Marsh
Victoria Terrace, Beaumaris — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Beaumaris is a planned town. After crushing the last Welsh revolt, Edward I founded the borough in 1295 on flat coastal marsh — the Norman-French beau marais, "fair marsh", gave the town its name — and began the castle the same year. English settlers were installed and given trading privileges; the existing Welsh town of Llanfaes, a mile up the coast and then the most important commercial centre on Anglesey, was dismantled, its people moved across the island to a new settlement they called Newborough. The friary at Llanfaes was left in place until the Dissolution; the coffin of Princess Joan, wife of Llywelyn the Great, was later rescued and now rests in St Mary’s Church.
Port, County Town, Resort
For centuries Beaumaris prospered as Anglesey’s county town and principal port, its ships trading down the strait and across to Liverpool — a trade remembered in the name of the Liverpool Arms, open since 1706. The Courthouse of 1614 heard the island’s justice; the town’s inns, notably the 15th-century Ye Olde Bull’s Head, put up judges, drovers and travellers bound for the Irish ferries.
The 19th century remade Beaumaris as a genteel resort. Architect Joseph Hansom — later famous for the Hansom cab — gave the town its Grade I listed Victoria Terrace (1833), the Bulkeley Hotel (1832) and the Gaol (1829). Princess Victoria herself stayed at the Bulkeley in 1832, the year it opened. The pier followed in 1846, and steamers brought trippers from Liverpool for a century.
Reading the Town Today
The street plan is still Edward’s grid; the architecture is Georgian and early Victorian laid over medieval bones. Walk Castle Street for the set pieces, the Green for Hansom’s seafront, and the back lanes — Church Street, Wexham Street — for the older grain. Then stand on the pier and look across the strait: the view that made the town a resort is unchanged.
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