Benllech Accommodation

More About Benllech

The beach is the reason to come, and the Anglesey Coastal Path runs straight along the front. Head north and it takes you round to Traeth Bychan and on to Moelfre, the old fishing village with the lifeboat station. Head south and you reach Red Wharf Bay, where the sea goes out for miles and the Ship Inn sits at the water’s edge.

It is a good spot for reaching the rest of the island. Moelfre is just up the coast and Red Wharf Bay just down it, Beaumaris and the Menai Strait are an easy run south, and Amlwch and the quieter north coast are the other way.

People have been living on this stretch of coast a very long time. Pant-y-Saer, the burial chamber on the limestone above Tyn-y-Gongl, is Neolithic — a capstone about ten feet across, propped at one end and collapsed at the other. When it was excavated in the early 1930s it held the remains of fifty-four men, women and children.

The village later made its living out of the rock underneath it. Limestone was cut at Benllech itself, at Traeth Bychan, and at Castell Mawr on Red Wharf Bay — the great outcrop that looks like a castle and never was one. Some of it was polished up and sold as black marble, and stone from Red Wharf Bay went into the triumphal arch at Holyhead, put up in 1824.

There was a quay here too. In 1821 they held a banquet at the inn on Red Wharf Bay to celebrate the launch of the Lady Robert Williams, a brig of a hundred and fifty-six tons built on the shore below it. The sea trade dwindled through the early 1900s until the last of it was one ship each spring, bringing fertiliser for the farms.

The quarrying never actually stopped. There are still two working limestone quarries just inland at Brynteg, which is worth knowing if you read anywhere that Benllech’s quarrying days are over. They are not.

The lime kiln above the shore at Traeth Bychan is still standing, conserved inside the sailing club that now occupies the site. The coastal path runs through the village and out along the cliffs to Moelfre one way and round the edge of Red Wharf Bay the other.

One practical thing worth knowing: dogs are restricted on the beach from the first of May to the end of September. It is not a whole-beach ban — they are kept off a marked stretch opposite the main car park and on leads along the promenade. Beach wheelchairs can be booked through the café on the front, but ring ahead.