North Wales: Conwy

Conwy suffers in comparison with the others because it was the worst weather all week. I’m not complaining in the least; the weather in general was fantastic for the middle of February in north Wales. I took my big blue-plaid Roman Christmas Eve umbrella and my new rain boots all the way to the Wales; the boots stayed under my bed all week, but I toted that umbrella every place I went. Because of this, it didn't rain significantly for the entire trip. But Tuesday was the one day that the sun didn’t come out for very long.

The major difficulty with traveling by bus in a place you’ve never been is that it’s hard to know where you are and where you ought to get off. There were a few stops in Conwy, and I kept waiting for the one that would be closest to the castle until we passed it altogether. Conwy is right on the edge of the Menai Strait, and the next stop was on the other side of the bridge, so I got off there. It gave me an opportunity to see the town from a different viewpoint than I would normally have had. And I'm a fan of bridges in general, so when I realized I'd gone too far I thought, 'Oh, the horror, you'll have to walk across that bridge.' Conwy, like Caernarfon, is a walled town, but it still has most of its walls today. They go from the castle up to a high point in the town, and then back down to the water. A few stretches of the wall were closed, but I think I covered most of it. There are only three places where you can ascend to or descend from the wall, and I had to walk along it for a minute to get to one of them. The section up to the high point, where I took the picture above, was pretty steep. The town inside the wall wasn’t huge; about 300 people probably lived there. It was granted a charter, giving it certain rights that other towns wouldn't necessarily have had, by Edward I in 1284. I joke about being old, and sometimes I really do feel quite old, but Conwy has 699 and a half years (give or take, for calendar changes) on me. It's pretty amazing that not only are these places still standing after all this time, but that they let people like me, whose enthusiasm occasionally outruns their common sense, tromp around on them.

The most interesting thing about the castle for me was probably the great hall. It wasn't just a long, perfectly rectangular room. It had a bend in it. In the picture, the great hall runs along the left side, and you can see the kink. The other thing that I noticed at all of the castles was the fireplaces just hanging in the middle of the walls. Of course, when the castles were complete, these fireplaces would've been attached to floors, but nowadays they're suspended in midair, a good distance above head-height. I've mentioned before that I don't have a very good imagination for how things would have looked in the past, so it was easy for me to forget that where there is grass now used to be indoors.

On the bottom floor of one of the towers there was an exhibit about castle chapels that was moderately interesting. Unfortunately, visitors couldn't actually go into Conwy's chapel, which was the next floor up. Some of the things I read in the exhibit I remembered the next day, when I was at Beaumaris and could go in the chapel.

For lunch I had Welsh rarebit, which was basically cheese on toast, but tasty. Look, it even came with a little salad. (I find that I appreciate salads more after having lived in a place where they sort of don't exist.) And I had tea with it, of course.

And because I know this is the question you've all been asking all along, here is what a Welsh police car looks like. Okay, it's really not that shiny, but the flash went off and lit up all the reflective bits. Please note that this is indeed a bilingual car. Also, I smudged the numbers on the plate, just in case anyone had any bright ideas about making their own counterfeit Welsh police car.