Ruthin Craft Centre
The Centre for the Applied Arts

Visit Ruthin

Visit Ruthin

The historic market town of Ruthin was built on a red sandstone hill as a strategic lookout over the River Clwyd. Its strategic position between the Hiraethog Moors and the Clwydian Hills has led to this being an important agricultural and trade area.

Ruthin has a lively and interesting history with many historical attractions to explore:

Ruthin Gaol
Ruthin’s Pentonville style Gaol offers the opportunity for visitors to experience life as a Victorian Prisoner.

Nantclwyd y Dre
Take a tour of Wales’s oldest timber framed town house.

Download a map of these locations and more attractions here

For tourist information visit Denbighshire County Council here

For accommodation visit ‘Visit Wales’ here

Art Trail

Ruthin Art Trail aims to encourage visitors to Ruthin Craft Centre to visit the centre of town, and to link the community of Ruthin with the Craft Centre. The Trail is designed by Fred Baier and Lucy Strachan and encourages people to look and through looking discover the beauty and mysteries of the town.

You can discover the 10 spy holes set into the town walls and spot the 22 figures hidden amongst the facades and roofs around the town. While searching for these figures there is every chance that you will notice, and for locals to be reminded, how beautiful the town is, and how the architecture from many centuries sits harmoniously together.

The intention of the Art Trail is that visitors will be rewarded by chance sightings of the acrobatic figures and appreciate the allusions to myths memories and historic moments captured in the spy hole tableaux.

The Trail is enhanced by restoring some of the avenue of trees in Market Street, and trees feature in other parts of the Trail. You will be able to identify the trees by the distinctive tree guards. There is also a shelter in Market Street, with a new hornbeam hedge behind it and 6 benches along the route of the Trail to have a rest. There are also red markers in the pavement at key points in the Trail, including by each of the 10 spy holes.

The objects designed by Fred Baier and Lucy Strachan have a common language created through the materials and the construction process, and all the metal in the Trail has been cut from two dimensions and bent into three dimensions.

Cultural Gateway

On-site

The Ruthin Craft Centre Cultural Gateway provides visitors with information leaflets about Denbighshire and North Wales. In addition, the Gateway also presents the culture of Wales through three short films by Welsh artists Christine Mills and Stefan Gant.

Frequency Wales by Stefan Gant, was specially commissioned for the opening of the new Ruthin Craft Centre and shows the importance of design in the built culture of North Wales.