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More About Holiday Cottages in Beaumaris

Walk the green early, before the day visitors arrive. The coast road east runs out to Penmon, where the priory church, the standing cross, St Seiriol’s holy well and the domed dovecote of about 1600 are free to walk into and open daily. A toll lane carries on past them to the point and the lighthouse.

West along the shore, Menai Bridge sits four miles off under Telford’s suspension bridge of 1826. The fields behind the town run up to Llanfairpwll, whose station sign carries a place name of fifty-eight letters. North, the sand at Llanddona is about twenty minutes by car.

Nearly everything Beaumaris is made of came from within a mile or two of the town. Lime was burnt on the site of the present green. Clay was dug along what is still called Clay Pit Lane, and there were brickfields out west of Wexham Street. The roofs went on in local slate, the older ones in smaller slates than you would see used now.

A good deal of it was second-hand. The timber houses of Llanfaes were taken down and carted over when the town was founded, and surplus stone from the castle works was sold off to the townspeople. When the walls were repaired, the accounts record building stone brought from Penmon and cartloads of lime from Llangoed — the two villages a good many of these cottages now sit in.

The best stone came from Penmon. The limestone quarried along that headland is good enough to be called Penmon marble, and it left the island in quantity: into Caernarfon Castle, into Birmingham Town Hall, and later into the rebuilding of Liverpool and Manchester after the Second World War. The largest of the quarries, at Dinmor Park, worked from about 1898 until the 1970s.

Which is why the houses here are worth looking at properly. A Beaumaris cottage that reads as Georgian is very often older underneath: the medieval structures in the middle of the town were mostly refaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather than replaced. The pastel colours along Wexham Street and the seafront are a modern habit — those cottages would originally have been whitewashed.

They stopped being estate property within living memory. The Bulkeleys of Baron Hill held seventeen thousand acres across thirty-six parishes in the 1830s, and much of Beaumaris with it; in 1920 and 1921 the estate put nearly two hundred and fifty of its properties up for auction, most of them here and at Llangefni. A fair number of the cottages you can book this week changed hands in that sale.

The stone is still coming out, too, though only just: Aber Quarry is the last one on the island still working. And Penmon itself is free to walk into — the priory church, the standing cross and St Seiriol’s well are open daily, with the great domed dovecote of about 1600 a few steps away.