Gwesty'r Pen y Tarw / Olde Bull's Head
HeritageGwesty'r Pen y Tarw: Over Five Centuries of Welcome on Castle Street
Step through the front door of Ye Olde Bull's Head Inn on Castle Street, Beaumaris, and the centuries fold around you. Low ceilings, time-darkened beams, the creak of boards worn smooth by generations of travellers — the building exhales its own history. Outside, the medieval grid of Beaumaris stretches toward the water, its castle walls still standing sentry over the Menai Strait. Inside, the inn holds its own vigil: over five hundred and fifty years of hospitality, shelter, and story, unbroken since the Wars of the Roses.
A Town Built for a King, an Inn Built for Everyone Else
Beaumaris owes its existence to Edward I, who in 1295 began constructing the last and largest of his great Welsh castles on the shores of Anglesey. The town that grew around it was a planned English settlement — a borough of merchants, administrators, and soldiers serving the crown's grip on North Wales. But castles need supply lines, and supply lines need places where people can eat, sleep, and do business. By 1472, someone recognised that need and built the inn that would become Ye Olde Bull's Head — Gwesty'r Pen y Tarw — on Castle Street, barely a stone's throw from the fortress itself.
The date places the inn's construction in one of England and Wales's most turbulent decades. The Wars of the Roses were tearing the kingdom apart. Anglesey, separated from the mainland by the treacherous Menai Strait, occupied a strategic position that made Beaumaris a place of consequence far beyond its modest size. The Bull's Head was born into that world — not as a palace, but as something more enduring: a place where ordinary commerce and extraordinary events would intersect again and again across the centuries.
A General's Headquarters
The inn's most dramatic chapter was written not by its innkeepers but by a Parliamentarian soldier. In 1648, during the second English Civil War, General Thomas Mytton marched his forces onto Anglesey to suppress Royalist resistance. Beaumaris Castle, that great symbol of English royal authority, had become a Royalist stronghold. Mytton chose the Bull's Head as his headquarters — a decision that speaks to the inn's stature in the town. From its rooms on Castle Street, he directed the siege that would eventually bring the castle and its garrison to submission. The walls of the inn absorbed the plans, the arguments, the dispatches. When the fighting ended, the inn remained.
The Coaching Age and the Road to Holyhead
If the Civil War gave the Bull's Head its most violent chapter, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave it its most bustling. Beaumaris sat on the route from London to Holyhead — and Holyhead meant Ireland. Every traveller, politician, soldier, and mail coach heading for the Irish packet ships had to cross Anglesey, and Beaumaris was a natural pause on that journey. When Thomas Telford completed his extraordinary Menai Suspension Bridge in 1826, connecting the island to the mainland by road for the first time, the trickle of traffic became a flood. The Bull's Head thrived as a coaching inn, its yard busy with horses, its rooms filled with the restless energy of transit.
In 1774, Samuel Johnson — then sixty-four years old, already the most celebrated literary figure in England — crossed into Anglesey with his friend Hester Thrale on their tour of North Wales. The journey was recorded in Johnson's own diary and in Thrale's later writings, and it fixed Beaumaris in the literary imagination as a place of wild beauty and deep history. For an inn on Castle Street, such visits were not exceptional. They were the texture of everyday business in a town that sat on one of Britain's great thoroughfares.
What the Walls Preserve
Today, the Bull's Head carries its Grade II listed status with quiet authority. The listing recognises a building of special architectural and historic interest — but the real preservation is less formal than any register. It lives in the proportions of the rooms, the thickness of the walls, the way the building sits so naturally on Castle Street that it seems to have grown there rather than been built. Over five and a half centuries, the inn has been altered, extended, and renewed many times, yet it retains the character described by its custodians as something "acquired over the last 550 years" — not designed in a single moment but accumulated, layer by layer, like the town itself.
The relationship between the inn and Beaumaris Castle — the medieval fortress standing just yards away, now a UNESCO World Heritage site — gives Castle Street a density of history that few places in Wales can match. The castle speaks of conquest and royal ambition. The inn speaks of something more ordinary and perhaps more enduring: the human need for shelter, conversation, and a good meal at the end of a long road.
Still Standing, Still Welcoming
Now part of The Inn Collection Group and a winner of the regional Pub & Bar of the Year award, Gwesty'r Pen y Tarw continues to do what it has done since 1472: welcome strangers and feed them well. Guests can stay in rooms that range from classic doubles to suites, dine on Sunday roasts with hand-carved meats and homemade Yorkshires, and walk out the front door into a medieval streetscape that has changed remarkably little in seven hundred years. The inn can be reached at Castle Street, Beaumaris, Anglesey, LL58 8AP, or by telephone on 01248 810329.
This article was partly inspired by old photographs and personal recordings that came to light when someone brought their family memories to be digitised. It made us wonder what else is out there — tucked into attics, shoeboxes, and old cupboards across Anglesey — connected to the Bull's Head and the life of Beaumaris. If anyone holds old media linked to this remarkable inn, services like EachMoment can help preserve them for future generations.