Approaching Conwy Castle. (That's Maggie.)
Edward I's castles in Wales are all about defense and archers.
Maggie standing in one of the arrow loops in the guard towers.
Notice how the arrow loops deliberately line up on important defense positions? This one covers the one entrance gate to the castle.
Conwy was built in conjunction with a walled town. The city of Conwy has kept its walls intact. (They built overpasses over them when they needed a road to go through.) In order to get into the older part of town, we had to drive through one of the old medieval wall gates.
This is the entrance to the inner ward. Notice it's a barbican?
From the towers you can see the Welsh "mountain lice" as Maggie coined the term. Sheep dotting the hillsides.
This is the inner ward. To your left is the great hall and bakers tower, and to the right are the kitchen tower, stables, and chapel tower. (Not necessarily in that order.) Amusing that they put the kitchen way across the square, but the baking is right next to the great hall. Obviously they all liked smelling Aeddan's bread baking as well as I do.
The furthest chamber was the great hall. you can see the fireplace through the arch. (Of course, they would have had a roof on this when it was being used.)
Ox and Maggie looking up on a walkway between the towers.
Maggie sitting in one of the window seats next to the windows that face the inner square. Because the inner square cannot be gotten to from outside the castle, the windows towards it are generous and wide. They let in a lot of light.
This is the kitchen tower. On the inside it had an extra reinforced floor over it's cellar, but the same fireplace that was in all the others. Servers would have to have either walked all the way around the corridors to the other side of the square, or cut across the middle by going outside.
Another arrow loop that lines up on the approach from the river. At the time it was completed, a 6 ton ship could dock just outside the castle by coming up the river at high tide.
Notice that Conwy is built on solid rock. There will be no mining those walls.
Here is the view from the river side of the castle.
This is the same fireplace that was in all the tower rooms.
This is what most of the towers look like now, just floorless, roofless shafts.
This is a reproduction of what the castle and walled town of Conwy would have looked like when the building had finished.
One of the few exceptions is the chapel tower which has a roof and a floor. In most of the Castles, they have gone out of their way to save or restore the chapels.
A great looking snail that we saw as we were leaving the castle grounds.