Cemaes Bay Accommodation

More About Cemaes Bay

Walk out along the coast path to Llanbadrig, the clifftop church said to have been founded by St Patrick after he was wrecked on the island offshore. Come back for the beach, and listen for the Time and Tide Bell on the shore, which rings itself when the tide comes up to it.

This is the quiet end of Anglesey. Amlwch is along the coast to the east, Church Bay and Holyhead are west, and the middle of the island is twenty minutes away — but nobody comes to Cemaes to be near things.

Cemaes made its living out of the harbour, and the harbour took some making. Local accounts record that after a storm wrecked it in 1828 a new pier was designed by Ishmael Jones, a sea captain, and finished in 1835 — reportedly paid for out of his own pocket when the money promised by farmers and Liverpool merchants failed to appear. The great storm of 1889 demolished most of it again. It was repaired in 1900 for about fifteen hundred pounds.

What went out through it was limestone, corn, marble, bricks, lime and ochre; what came in was coal and flour. The village was known for salted herring from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and there was a woollen mill weaving Welsh blankets here as far back as 1698.

There was heavy industry along this coast too, which is easy to forget now. Brickworks operated in the valley and out at Porth Wen, with a railway running the bricks down to the pier, and at Porth Llanlleiana a porcelain works dug its own china clay out of the hillside behind. That one stopped abruptly when fire broke out in 1920, and never reopened.

The village kept its shape better than most, and it is one of only twelve conservation areas on Anglesey — which is the official way of saying it still looks like itself.

The rock here is worth knowing about even if geology is not your thing. Cemaes Bay is the type section for the Gwna Mélange, and reckoned the best place in Britain to see it: the fossilised wreckage of an enormous undersea landslide, with blocks of older rock, some of them more than a kilometre across, jumbled into it.

The fishing has not stopped either, though it has changed. The boats working out of the harbour now go for lobster, crab and whelk. The National Trust owns the coast from here round to Llanbadrig, and seals and porpoises are both regular off the point.