Holyhead Accommodation

More About Holyhead

The great draw is South Stack, where a lighthouse stands on a rocky island reached by four hundred steps cut into the cliff, and the sea cliffs are alive with puffins, guillemots and choughs in spring and summer. The tower opens seasonally and shuts when the wind tops thirty miles an hour, so ring first. Climb Holyhead Mountain (Mynydd Twr), the highest point on Holy Island, for views across to Eryri (Snowdonia) and Ireland, walk the Breakwater Country Park beside Britain’s longest breakwater, and explore the Iron Age hut circles at Ty Mawr.

It is the easiest place on the island to reach and to leave from. The A55 and the railway both end here, the ferries go to Dublin, and Trearddur Bay and its beaches are a few minutes down the road. For the rest of Anglesey you are looking at a drive east.

Holyhead began as a Roman fort. The walls of Caer Gybi still stand, and they still enclose St Cybi's church, founded by the saint in the sixth century — it is an odd and rather good thing to walk into, a small Welsh churchyard inside a Roman rectangle.

Its modern history is about the crossing to Ireland, and it did not go smoothly upward. The Irish mail had funnelled through Holyhead for generations; by 1814 something like fourteen thousand passengers a year were going through. Telford drove his new London-to-Holyhead road here in the 1820s to speed them on their way. Then in 1839 Holyhead lost the mail contract to Liverpool, whose railway had arrived first. It took the Chester and Holyhead Railway, finished in 1850, to win it back.

Out beyond the harbour are the Skerries, and their light has the best story on this coast. It was first lit in November 1717 under a patent granted by Queen Anne to William Trench, who then went bankrupt because passing traders simply refused to pay the dues. It stayed in private hands longer than any other lighthouse in the British Isles, and when Trinity House finally bought it out in 1841 the price was close to four hundred and forty-five thousand pounds — a fortune, for a rock.

Behind the town, Holyhead Mountain rises to 220 metres — the highest ground on Holy Island, and higher than anything on the main island of Anglesey. On its eastern side the ramparts of the Caer y Twr hillfort still stand three metres high around some seventeen acres, with a late Roman watchtower inside them — built to watch the same sea the ferries cross now. Below it are the hut circles at Tŷ Mawr, lived in from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age.

There was heavy industry here within living memory. The aluminium smelter opened in 1971 and employed hundreds; smelting stopped in 2009, the last of the works closed in 2013, and the 450-foot chimney that dominated the skyline came down in March 2024. If you have an old photograph of Holyhead, that is what is missing from the view now.

The port is still working, and the town has more to it than people passing through tend to notice. The Maritime Museum on Newry Beach opens from Easter to the end of October, the Ucheldre Centre in a former convent chapel runs a full programme of art and film, and Breakwater Country Park — laid out on an old quarry — gives you the walk up onto the mountain.