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More About Holiday Cottages in Benllech

A Spar, a bakery, a chip shop and a couple of cafés are all a few minutes from the sand, so a wet morning need not mean getting the car out.

The Anglesey Coastal Path runs through the village. Follow it south and it rounds Red Wharf Bay, a huge tidal bay that empties right back to firm sand at low tide, and fills again quickly, so look up the times before you walk out on it.

The houses round Benllech were not built for holidays. This was farming country with some quarrying and a bit of fishing in it, and the families were often very poor — the poet Goronwy Owen, born a short way from here in 1723, came from a household with almost nothing and got out of it through the church.

You can still see what that housing was like. The Ship Inn down on Red Wharf Bay is a row of cottages put up in the eighteenth century or earlier: the pub began in the end one and spread into the rest over time, and behind a door still marked Pump Room there is a well. It is a pub now, and the obvious walk from the village for a lunch you have not had to cook.

Most people here did not own the roof over their heads. The land round the bay belonged to the Williams family at Tan-y-Graig, and when their daughter Anne Jane came of age in 1864 the tenants marched up to the house behind a brass band and marched back again afterwards.

One thing worth knowing when you are choosing where to sit: this beach faces north-east, so it takes the morning sun rather than the evening. A fair amount of what is written about the east coast of Anglesey calls it south-facing. It is not. The sand itself was rated Good for water quality in the most recent, 2024 classifications.