Beaumaris
Castle • Pier • Puffin Island • Menai Strait
Castle • Pier • Puffin Island • Menai Strait
Castle, pier, boat trips and Anglesey coast.
UNESCO World Heritage — the finest concentric castle in Britain
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Puffin Island seal & seabird cruises from the pier
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Victorian pier with crab fishing and Snowdonia views
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Activities, gaol, church & days out on Anglesey
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Isle of Anglesey Coastal Path from Beaumaris
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Best restaurants, cafes & pubs in Beaumaris
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Beaumaris Castle from the air, with the Menai Strait and the mountains beyond — © Llywelyn2000 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Beaumaris is the prettiest town on Anglesey and one of the most rewarding small towns in Wales. Founded by Edward I at the end of the 13th century — the name comes from the Norman-French beau marais, "fair marsh" — it packs a World Heritage castle, a Victorian pier, Georgian streets and a working seafront into a few compact, strollable blocks on the shore of the Menai Strait, with the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri) filling the horizon across the water.
It is a town for unhurried pleasures: walking the moat at the castle, taking a boat trip to Puffin Island from the pier, eating well in inns that have been trading for centuries, and watching the light change over the strait from the Green.
The last and most technically perfect of Edward I’s Welsh castles — a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a swan-patrolled moat, left magnificently unfinished when the money ran out in the 1290s.
Castle guide →
Hour-long boat trips from the pier to a seabird sanctuary — grey seals year-round, puffins April to July, and the Menai Strait’s bridges on the longer cruises. Dogs welcome with both operators.
Boat trip guide →
Anglesey’s most photographed corner — the black-and-white Trwyn Du lighthouse of 1838, its tolling fog bell, the Pilot House Café and a 13th-century priory on the lane behind.
Penmon guide →The grandest view in this island of grand views — the strait below, and all Snowdonia beyond.— the prospect from the Green, as visitors have described it for two centuries
Swans on the moat at Beaumaris Castle — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Beaumaris Castle is often called the greatest castle never built — the last and technically most perfect of Edward I’s Welsh strongholds, left unfinished when the money and attention ran out, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (part of the Castles and Town Walls of King Edward I in Gwynedd, along with Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech). Its concentric walls-within-walls design and water-filled moat make it arguably the most beautiful of the four. It is in the care of Cadw.
Beaumaris Pier reaching into the Menai Strait — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
From Beaumaris Pier, cruise boats run from spring to autumn out to Puffin Island — a seabird sanctuary with breeding puffins, guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes, plus a resident colony of grey seals — and along the Menai Strait beneath the great bridges. Two long-established operators, Seacoast Safaris and Starida, sail from kiosks by the pier.
For a small town, Beaumaris eats remarkably well. Ye Olde Bull’s Head Inn has been trading since the 15th century; the Liverpool Arms has poured pints since 1706; the Georgian Bishopsgate House Hotel holds an AA Rosette; and the queue outside Red Boat Ice Cream Parlour is a fixture of Castle Street in summer. See our guides to restaurants, pubs and cafes, and to hotels, guest houses and cottages in and around the town.
The Menai Strait at Beaumaris — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
The Anglesey Coastal Path (part of the Wales Coast Path) runs right through town — south-west along the strait to Menai Bridge, or north-east to Penmon Point, where the black-and-white Trwyn Du lighthouse stands off the headland opposite Puffin Island. Red Wharf Bay’s vast sands lie beyond.
Start with our one-day guide or the weekend itinerary. Getting here is easy: Bangor is the nearest railway station, with buses across the bridge every 20–30 minutes — details in Getting Here and Beaumaris Without a Car. In late July and early August the Menai Strait Regattas fill the water with sails — the town’s signature spectacle.
Search hotels, B&Bs and self-catering across Beaumaris and Anglesey.
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