THE town of Beaumaris, now a fashionable watering place, containing a
permanent population of two thousand four hundred and ninety-seven souls,
appears to have originated in the circumstance of a castle having been
erected here by Edward the First, in the year 1295. It subsequently
became a place of commercial importance, was erected into a borough and
constituted the shire-town; the first of these advantages it has been
gradually stripped of by its enterprising little rivals, Bangor and
Caernarvon. The situation is low, as the explanation of the name _Beau
marais_, the beautiful marsh, indicates, but the coup de œil enjoyed from
the marine parade, called the Green, as well as from Baron Hill, the seat
of Sir R. B. Williams Bulkeley, Bart., is a composition both chaste and
picturesquely beautiful:
“Hibernia’s eastern sea here Cambria laves,
And pours on either shore its restless waves,
While Mænai’s currents with its waters play,
Now roll to meet or refluent fill the bay,
And circling Priestholm shows its oval steep,
Emerging boldly from the briny deep.”