Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd
The castles of Beaumaris and Harlech (largely the work of the greatest military engineer of the time, James of St George) and the fortified complexes of Caernarfon and Conwy are located in the former principality of Gwynedd, in north Wales. These extremely well-preserved monuments are examples of the colonization and defence works carried out throughout the reign of Edward I (1272–1307) and the military architecture of the time.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/374
The Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd are four groups of late 13th-century and early 14th-century militairy fortifications. They were built or rebuilt by the English King Edward I when in 1283 he expanded his domain into north-west Wales. He set out on an ambitious project, to build an “Iron Ring” of castles and new towns to house English settlers. All were built by the same man, James de Saint George from the Savoy, the king's chief architect in Wales.
The included structures are:
• Harlech Castle (1283) – a concentric castle, constructed atop a cliff close to the Irish Sea.
• Castle of Beaumaris (begun in 1295, but never completed because finances and material ran out) - the last and largest of the castles to be built by King Edward, also a concentric castle
• Coastal town of Caernarfon (from 1283) – has a deliberate link with Caernarfon's Roman past, and with its banded coloured stone the castle's walls are reminiscent of the Walls of Constantinople.
• Castle and town walls of Conwy (1283-1289) - no concentric 'walls within walls' here because of its strategic position on a rock; it still has a full circuit of town walls.
http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/gwynedd.html
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