Aberconwy House
| Aberconwy House | |
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National Trust | |
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| Grid reference: | SH781777 |
| Information | |
| Website: | Aberconwy House |
Aberconwy House is a 14th-century merchant's house on the corner of Castle Street and the High Street in Conwy in Caernarfonshire. It was one of the first buildings built inside the walls of Conwy and today is the oldest building in the town apart from Conwy Castle itself. Today the house is in the care of the National Trust.
The house
Aberconwy House is a half-timbered house, built as a merchant's house in the fourteenth century. Once there would have been many like it, but this is the only mediæval merchant's house to have survived the town's turbulent history. Indeed, the house is the oldest recorded dwelling of its kind anywhere in Wales. By the tree-ring analysis of its timbers it has been dated to around 1420.
In form of the Middle Ages, within the building, three later styles are displayed; Jacobean, Georgian and Victorian.
The house contains furnished rooms and the National Trust have created an eight-minute audio-visual presentation which depicts daily life from different periods of the house's history.
History
Aberconwy House was built for a merchant in the early days of Conway town, initially one of the English merchants, to whom the town was reserved in its early years. Over the ensuing centuries it belonged to various merchants and wealthy men of the town.
In the late nineteenth century, Aberconwy House became a temperance hotel.
After the hotel closed, an American planned to dismantle the house and carry it across the Atlantic, but the plan came to nothing. Aberconwy House was saved from further alteration by Alexander Campbell Blair, who gave it and its contents to the National Trust in 1934.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Aberconwy House) |
- Aberconwy House – National Trust