Town in Conwy, Wales
Betws-y-Coed
Its Waterloo Bridge isn't in London, its name means "prayer house in the wood", and Victorian painters made it the Welsh capital of landscape art.
Key information
- County
- Conwy
- Nation
- Wales
- Known for
- Gateway to Snowdonia, waterfalls, forests and Telford's Waterloo Bridge
- Famous people
- David Cox, Thomas Telford
About Betws-y-Coed
A bridge named after a battle, a thousand feet from nowhere
The cast-iron bridge that carries the A5 over the River Conwy just outside the village is called Waterloo Bridge, and it was finished in 1815, the year of the battle. The ironwork carries a rose, a thistle, a shamrock and a leek, the emblems of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It was one of Thomas Telford's showpieces on the Holyhead Road, the great engineered route that carried mail coaches from London to the Irish ferry. Telford's road is the reason Betws-y-Coed stopped being a remote forest settlement and became a coaching stop with a reason to exist. The ironwork was cast in Shropshire by William Hazledine, Telford's regular foundry partner, and then hauled into the mountains.
Why the name means a prayer house in a wood
Betws comes from the Old English for a bede-house, a small place of prayer, and coed is Welsh for wood. So the name is "prayer house in the wood", which is exactly what the place was before the tourists arrived. The old church of St Michael, beside the river, is the oldest building in the village and holds a medieval effigy of a warrior, Gruffydd ap Dafydd Goch. It is a small, plain building, and it makes you realise how few people lived here for centuries. The village sits where three rivers join: the Conwy, the Llugwy and the Lledr. That meeting of waters, wrapped in oak and conifer woodland, is the reason it looks the way it does.
The painters who put it on the map
In the early nineteenth century, artists began arriving to sketch the tumbling rivers and wooded crags. The best-known was David Cox, the Birmingham-born watercolourist, who came back year after year and stayed at the Royal Oak Inn. He even painted the pub's sign. Other artists followed, and Betws-y-Coed became a Victorian art colony. Its mix of water, rock and trees was the kind of scene that suited the Romantic taste for wild landscape, while still being a short walk from a comfortable inn. That reputation helped create the tourism that still defines the village.
The train that turned a village into a resort
The railway reached Betws-y-Coed in 1868, and the Conwy Valley line later pushed on to Blaenau Ffestiniog. Suddenly Victorian visitors could step off a train from Llandudno Junction and be among waterfalls within minutes. Hotels, guesthouses and gift shops followed, along with the walking and fishing crowds. The station still runs trains today, and the Conwy Valley Railway Museum beside it has a miniature railway and model layouts for younger visitors. The village has long called itself the gateway to Snowdonia, and with Snowdon's summit at 1,085 metres in the park to the west, the title fits.
Bridges, falls and a very steep ladder of a footbridge
Pont-y-Pair, the "bridge of the cauldron", is a stone bridge in the village centre where the Llugwy boils and churns over the rocks beneath it. It has stood since the fifteenth century, and the cauldron name is easy to understand after heavy rain. The Miners Bridge, a little way upstream, is a wooden footbridge reached by a steep set of steps down to the river. It was used by miners walking to work at the lead mines nearby. Just west of the village, the Swallow Falls (Rhaeadr Ewynnol) is the area's best-known waterfall. Behind the village rises the Gwydir Forest, a big stretch of woodland now laced with walking and mountain-biking trails, and with zip-line and forest coaster attractions.