Llanfairpwll Accommodation

More About Llanfairpwll

Everyone knows the name, and most of what everyone knows about it is wrong. The story goes that a local tailor invented it in 1869 as a stunt to make the trains stop. No version of that tale ever names the man, there is no primary source for the date, and the full fifty-eight-letter string does not appear in print anywhere until 1899. The short form is genuinely old — Llanfairpwllgwyngyll turns up as a routine postal address in 1823 — but the name grew in stages, and the whirlpool element is missing from every version printed before the 1890s.

Some of it describes real places and some of it does not. The church of St Mary is here, down a lane off the A5 with a car park at the end and a path through the churchyard to the bank of the Menai Strait. The hollow of white hazels is the original township name. The fierce whirlpool is the Swellies, the tidal race between the two bridges — look at it from the shore, because it is a recognised hazard to shipping. St Tysilio’s church is real too, though it stands two miles away at Menai Bridge. The red cave at the end appears to have been borrowed from a parish in Ceredigion, and has never existed here at all.

The village’s other claim is a solid one. The first Women’s Institute in Britain was founded here on the 16th of September 1915, addressed by Madge Watt, a Canadian who had joined a WI in British Columbia six years earlier. Its first president was Mrs Jane Stapleton-Cotton, who held the post until she died in 1924. The first meeting was not held in the WI hall by the toll house, whatever you may read, but in the summerhouse of a private house called Y Graig.

It never stopped. The Llanfairpwll WI still meets on the first Thursday of the month at two o’clock, in the hall on the Holyhead road, and the Anglesey federation keeps its offices in the same building. The toll house next door is Telford’s, listed since 1952, and it still has its original toll boards fixed to the wall.

The Marquess of Anglesey’s Column went up in 1817, and the bronze figure on top was added in 1860, after the man it commemorates was dead. Its wooden stairs rotted and it stood shut for more than a decade before reopening in March 2024, run now by a local trust. There are 115 steps to the platform at the top. In July and August it opens Thursday to Sunday, ten until three, at £6.50 for an adult, £4 for a child and £18 for a family. Parking is free, there is a café at the bottom, and you pay at the door — there is no booking online. The trust publishes its hours a season at a time, so ring before you go at any other time of year.

The village keeps a Co-op, a chip shop, a couple of cafés and the Penrhos Arms, which reopened in September 2025 after a refurbishment. Plas Newydd is under two miles along the shore, with Rex Whistler’s dining-room mural of the 1930s and the artificial leg made for the first Marquess after Waterloo. And the walk to do from the door is the coast path stretch to Menai Bridge: three miles, passing underneath both crossings — Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1850 and Telford’s suspension bridge of 1826 — with a bus back, so you need not walk it twice.