Taken together, the castle and town walls of Conwy are the most impressive of all the fortresses raised by King Edward I to subdue Wales. Planned as a single unit and substantially built in an astonishing four and a half years between 1283 and 1287, they remain the finest and most complete example of a fortified town and castle in Britain.

Over three-quarters of a mile long, the town walls defended the largest of Edward's Welsh "frontier towns"; each of their twenty-one towers ingeniously served as a circuit breaker, allowing attackers who scaled the intervening tower to be cut off and slain.

Conwy's town walls also acted as the outermost defences of the royal castle, an imposingly compact eight-towered stronghold on a promontory surrounded by water on three sides. Nearest the town, the castle's own outer ward housed the garrison. Then, doubly defended by town wall and outer ward, came the king's private apartments in the castle's inner ward, its towers still crowned by turrets for the royal standards.

Conwy's triumph of medieval fortress-building is not to be missed by any visitor to north Wales, A World Heritage Listed Site.