The Town and Castle of Conwy: Preservation and Interpretation

Abstract

This note summarizes and expands one of the short papers communicated to the Society on 23rd February 1995 under the title of ‘New Thoughts on Some Castles in Wales’.The paper's purpose was twofold. First, it sought to present, through a series of ‘before and after’ photographs (figs. 1-8), an up-to-date picture of the transformation effected at Conwy in the course of the last forty years, not only by the careful and conservative repair of the fabric of both components of the monument, i.e. town walls as well as castle, but also by the systematic clearance wherever possible of every kind of built disfigurement from the forefront of the medieval enceinte, so as to reveal and display anew the whole circuit of towers and curtains in an ambience worthy of Britain's most outstanding example of medieval town fortification. Closely related to the process of gradually re-establishing awareness of the monument's unity, with the walls receiving the same respect, in financial as in other terms, as the castle and the work of repair proceeding simultaneously on both, was the defeat, likewise a long and complex process, of the Welsh Office's proposal effectively to destroy the natural setting and amenity of the whole southward aspect of castle and walls alike by driving a dual-carriageway ‘express-way’ through the Gyffin valley (brazenly promoted as the Minister's ‘preferred route’) and erecting a monster new suspension bridge whose ‘goalposts’ would have overtopped even the turrets of the castle towers. The abandonment of this disastrous plan, in favour of the submerged tube tunnel under the river opened by H.M. the Queen in October 1991, was of incalculable benefit in preserving Conwy's unique character into the future. As such, it has its proper place in the present record (figs. 9-12).