Book Direct | Self Catering & Holiday Cottages on Anglesey

More About Holiday Cottages on Anglesey

Wake up and pick the day you fancy. Most of the island's beaches are within twenty minutes: Rhosneigr and Trearddur Bay on the west, Benllech and Lligwy on the east, Church Bay and Cemaes to the north.

Inland is quiet farm country dotted with windmills and standing stones. South Stack lighthouse sits off the western tip, where thousands of seabirds nest on the cliffs each spring, and the whole island is easy to cross in half an hour.

Anglesey is flat, fertile and windy, and its streams could never be relied on in a dry year. Corn still had to be ground, so the island ground it with wind. Mills driven by streams were the rarity here and windmills the rule — close to fifty of them went up, most in the boom years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when drought exposed how little the streams could be trusted and the price of grain made the investment worth making.

The trade did not survive the twentieth century. The last mill to work commercially on the island, Melin y Gof, stopped in 1936. But a stone tower four storeys high is a great deal of work to knock down and quite a good shell to live in, so the towers stayed. When Rex Wailes, an engineer who spent his life recording British windmills, came round at Easter 1929 he counted thirty-five towers still standing. Fifteen have since been turned into houses, and Anglesey now holds twenty-five of the forty-one listed windmills in Wales.

Which is why you can rent one. Melin Newydd, near Rhosneigr, was built in 1833, wrecked by a storm in the 1920s, and then spent decades as a cattle shelter before a restoration finally finished the job in 2009. Melin y Bont, a few miles off at Bryn Du, still has its original workings in the basement — and when it went up around 1825 it was built to work either way, with sails on top and a wheel driven by the stream below, both geared to the same set of stones.

Most Anglesey cottages are not windmills, of course. They are farmhouses, estate cottages and the small stone houses that sit behind the beaches. The Bodorgan Estate, down towards Aberffraw, lets around twenty-one of its own buildings; and out on the north-east tip the lighthouse keepers’ cottages at Point Lynas take guests, inside the castellated wall, alongside a tower that is still working.

If the story interests you, Melin Llynon at Llanddeusant is the only working windmill left in Wales. It was restored again in 2024 and opens from April to September — though the people who run it are honest enough to say they cannot promise the sails will be turning on the day you turn up.

Self-catering suits Anglesey because the island is small. It is small enough that you can reach any stretch of coast from any base, so a cottage lets you settle in one spot for the week instead of shifting about. There is plenty to fill it, too: beaches like Lligwy that keep their space even in August, and a path that circles the entire island.