Church Bay Accommodation

More About Church Bay

At low tide the beach opens out into sand and rock pools; higher up it is shingle, and a good deal of it covers when the tide is in, so it is worth checking before you carry everything down. Just above the shore stands Swtan, the last thatched dwelling on Anglesey, now a restored little museum, and the Lobster Pot has been feeding people here on locally landed crab and lobster for the best part of eighty years.

This is the quiet north-west corner, and it stays quiet. Holyhead and the ferry are down the coast one way, Cemaes and the northern tip the other, and the coast path runs off in both directions from the top of the beach.

The sea off this coast has a long and unhappy record, and one wreck changed things. On the 26th of March 1823 the packet Alert went down off Carmel Head, a few miles north of here, with the loss of a hundred and forty lives. The Rev James Williams and his wife Frances, from Llanfairynghornwy, watched it happen from the shore and could do nothing at all.

They spent the next five years raising money. In late 1828 they helped form the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, and put a lifeboat at Cemlyn — the first on the island. James served as its coxswain.

Frances went with him. She was a considerable artist, and she went out in the boat and painted the rescues as they happened. By 1855, when the RNLI took the stations over, the Association's six boats had saved more than four hundred lives between them.

The cottage above the beach is the other survivor. Swtan is the last thatched cottage left on Anglesey, of a kind once common right across the island, and it was pulled back from ruin by local volunteers and the National Trust. It opens Thursday to Sunday afternoons through the season, though it is run by volunteers, so the days can move.

The shellfish are still going too, which is rarer than it sounds. The Lobster Pot lost its kitchen roof in Storm Darragh in December 2024 and closed; it has since reopened under the family of the people who started it, and the same operation supplies live lobster and brown crab wholesale as well. What you eat here was landed near here.

A word about the beach itself. It is about three hundred metres across, sheltered and good for a low-tide afternoon, but the cliffs above it are unstable and signed as such, and there are no lifeguards on this beach — the lifeboat stations are a different thing entirely. Keep an eye on the sea and on the tide, and it is a lovely place to spend a day.