Miss Mostyn gives key Llandudno history facts, from Bronze Age copper to Victorian order and estate influence.

Llandudno’s history begins long before the resort. The Great Orme has Bronze Age copper mines that date from approximately 1700 BC, making them the largest known prehistoric copper mines in the world. Six miles of tunnels were worked using bone and antler tools for over a thousand years.

Those mines make the Orme one of the most important prehistoric industrial landscapes in Britain. This is not a decorative fact. It should change the way one looks at the hill.

The Roman period left evidence on and around the headland. The medieval period gave the town St Tudno’s Church, a twelfth-century building associated with the sixth-century saint whose name the headland and town both carry.

The modern town grew rapidly in the nineteenth century as a planned seaside resort. The Mostyn estate laid it out in the 1840s and 1850s with controlled building and broad streets. It did not simply sprawl into being after someone discovered deckchairs.

The railway branch from Llandudno Junction opened in 1858, connecting the resort to the Chester and Holyhead main line. The pier opened in 1877, reaching 700 metres (2,295 feet) into the bay and still standing as the longest pier in Wales.

Marine Drive, the toll road circling the headland, was completed in 1878. The Great Orme Tramway opened in 1902, and it remains the only cable-hauled street tramway in Britain. The cable car opened in 1969.

The Victorian Extravaganza event has been held annually since 1988, celebrating the resort’s Victorian heritage at the May bank holiday.

The Kashmiri goat herd on the Great Orme descends from animals given to Queen Victoria by the Shah of Persia in 1837, transferred from Windsor Castle to the Orme at some point in the following decades. Approximately two hundred animals now graze the headland freely.

The result is a town of several histories: prehistoric, medieval, landed, Victorian, commercial and stubbornly modern. Llandudno is not one story. It is a well-dressed argument with a goat herd.

The Mostyn Gallery, founded in 1901, was substantially refurbished in 2010 at a cost of approximately four and a half million pounds. Alice Liddell, connected with Lewis Carroll’s Alice, holidayed at Pen Morfa on West Shore in the 1860s with her father, Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church Oxford. Venue Cymru, the town’s principal arts venue, opened in 1994 with a capacity of 1,500.