More on Walled Cities

My short fascination with walled cities led me to look at the town of Conwy in Wales and I made this picture.

I aimed more for aesthetically pleasing than accurate and I did it quickly, so don’t use it as a reference for anything.

When I visited Wales many years ago, we went to Caernafon and Beaumarais, but we weren’t specifically touring castles, so we didn’t go to Conwy despite the fact that it was right nearby. I wanted to go hiking and my ex is a linguist, so Wales was a pretty obvious trip for us. When my ex said that we had specifically gone to Wales and that he was interested in the Welsh language everyone became extremely friendly and very eager to teach him Welsh. He has unusually good language learning abilities and I was pretty much left in the dust, so I can’t say that I can even speak a word of Welsh, although I can make a stab at the pronunciation of place names. That double L? It’s a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. Whoopee! I’m not joking. My ex was thrilled.

It’s also a good place for hiking, So we were both happy.

I wouldn’t have minded the castles. I’m not the romantic sort and never gave them a lot of thought before, but they were more interesting once you start thinking about how they were built and used. However, we could have added another week on our trip if we started down that road.

There are a lot of castles in Wales. Many were built during the English conquest of Wales and were designed by the architect Jacques de Saint-Georges d’Espéranche from Savoy.