Amlwch Accommodation

More About Amlwch

The story is best told at Amlwch Port, a remarkable little harbour hacked out of the solid rock to ship the ore, where the GeoMôn geopark centre in the old Watch House — built in 1853 for the men who rowed out to guide ships in — tells the story. Above the town, the bare, ochre-and-orange moonscape of Parys Mountain can be walked on marked trails, while the Anglesey Coastal Path threads along the cliffs to hidden coves such as Porth Llechog (Bull Bay).

It is a good base for the north of the island. Bull Bay is a mile along the coast, Cemaes and the northern tip are west, Benllech and Moelfre are down the east coast, and the middle of Anglesey is a short run inland.

Before the copper, Amlwch harbour was barely a harbour at all. A description from 1748 calls it no more than a cove between two steep rocks. By the 1750s vessels using it were tying up to gorse bushes on the bank, and the fee for doing so was paid in beer to the man who owned the land. Iron mooring rings replaced the gorse in 1766, at sixpence a rope.

Then the money arrived. The Parys Mining Company built the first small pier in 1782 for seven thousand pounds, and in 1793 an Act of Parliament was obtained to enlarge, deepen, cleanse, improve and regulate the harbour, put in the hands of twenty-eight trustees. Something like twenty thousand tons of rock were blasted out to make a quay floor roughly four hundred feet by sixty, and the spoil went straight back into the pier, the walls and the ore kilns.

At its height it was extraordinary for a place this size. In the mid-1850s five hundred and sixteen ships used the harbour in a single year, seventy-eight vessels were owned locally and trading worldwide, and there was room for thirty ships of a hundred tons and over. They built them here too: more than seventy vessels came off the yards, from seven-ton sloops up to a three-hundred-and-fifty-five-ton screw steamer.

The town that grew around it drank and smoked accordingly. A directory of 1844 lists ten taverns and fourteen beer houses; by 1883 there were forty-three public houses. There were tobacco works as well, one of them turning out cigarettes rather than pipe tobacco, and the local product had its own name: Amlwch Shag.

Then it went. Railway competition from 1865 had cut the harbour dues by thirty per cent within five years, and the trustees were dissolved in August 1913. The twentieth century brought two more industries and took them away again: bromine extracted from seawater from about 1950 until 2004, and an oil terminal offshore from 1972 that was gone by 1990.

What is left is worth seeing. The GeoMôn geopark centre occupies the old Watch House at the port, built in 1853 for the men who rowed out to meet incoming ships and guide them in, and its lighthouse was restored in 2020 and works again. Up in the town, Our Lady Star of the Sea was built between 1932 and 1937 by an Italian engineer, Giuseppe Rinvolucri, in the shape of an upturned boat; it was closed in 2004 with the concrete failing, nearly demolished, and reopened after a restoration appeal in 2011.