Cloth coming off a river
Water off the hills behind the village turns a turbine, the turbine drives the shed, and the shed is open to anyone who walks in.
03Story
Everything here came out of the water
Wool, iron, lead and a thousand day-trippers: four different industries, and all of them arrived or left along the same rivers.
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The church on the hill, and the one below it
The oldest surviving fabric in this parish is not in the village. St Rhychwyn’s, up on the hill to the south-west, has work from the late eleventh century on a site tradition puts back to the sixth. Llywelyn Fawr kept a lodge at Trefriw and worshipped up there with Joan; the story is that she tired of the climb, and about 1230 he endowed a church on the valley floor. Nothing of that date survives at St Mary’s; the building you see is late medieval, and restored again in the 1850s.
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Lead down the river, from 1622
A quay was working here by 1622, taking lead ore downstream to Beaumaris for carriage on by sea. The Conwy is tidal as far up as Llanrwst, and Trefriw stood at the head of navigation, which in the nineteenth century made it the largest inland port in Wales. There is nothing to see now but a grass bank; the river silted, and the boats stopped coming.
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A fulling mill, and then a business
Cloth has been finished on this stretch of the Crafnant since the fifteenth century, when a fulling mill stood here. A new mill, the Vale of Conwy Woollen Mill, went up in 1820, but the enterprise that survives begins in 1859, when Thomas Williams bought it. His descendants still own it, and the river still turns the machinery.
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Taking the waters, and the thousand a day
A mile north of the village, chalybeate springs were developed from about 1700, and Lord Willoughby de Eresby built a bath house over them in 1743. The story locals tell is that soldiers of the Twentieth Legion at Canovium found them first; no excavation record has been published to settle it. What is certain is how the Victorians arrived. Paddle steamers began running up the Conwy in 1847, and at the height of the trade they were putting over a thousand passengers a day onto Trefriw quay.
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What the water does now
The steamers stopped in 1939 and never properly restarted; siltation prevents cruise boats reaching Trefriw at all. The spa site was bought by Nelsons in 2003 and bottles its water as a mineral supplement, a working plant, with no visitor access. The mill still weaves, the falls still run, and the road up to the lakes still fills with cars on a fine morning.
Five steamers on the river, and over a thousand people a day stepping off onto a bank that is now grass.
Trefriw quay, before 1939
