Menai Bridge Accommodation

More About Menai Bridge

Walk out to Church Island. A short causeway takes you over on foot to a church that has stood there since the fifteenth century, and the shore path you reach it by — the Belgian Promenade — was built by refugees the town took in during the First World War. Coed Cyrnol woodland sits above it, and there are red squirrels in it.

It is the first town over the bridge, which makes it a useful place to be based. Bangor lies straight across the Strait, with the mountains rising just beyond, and the rest of Anglesey opens up behind you.

Long before there was a bridge, this was a crossing. Porthaethwy stands at the narrowest point of the Strait, and there was a ferry running here from at least 1292. One family, the Thomas Williamses, held the right to work it from 1630 until the bridge finally put them out of business in 1826.

Most of what crossed had four legs. Anglesey’s cattle were driven down to the shore and swum over — as many as three hundred at a time on a low tide — on their way to the markets of the Midlands and London. By the 1790s something like ten thousand head a year were going across, and not all of them made it.

The fair came with the trade. Ffair y Borth was first recorded in 1691 as a livestock and horse market, and it is still held every year on the twenty-fourth of October, with the stalls taking over the streets. The ground it was held on is now the car park behind the High Street.

The oldest thing in the town sits out in the Strait. Church Island is reached by a short causeway on foot, and the church on it dates from the fifteenth century; its roof has cruck trusses, which are a rare survival on Anglesey. St Tysilio is said to have set up a hermitage on the island around the year 630, having come here to get away from a father who wanted him to lead an army.

The path you walk out along has its own story. In October 1914 sixty-three Belgian refugees from Mechelen arrived by train and were taken in by the town; most of the men were skilled woodworkers. In thanks for the welcome they built the promenade that runs from Church Island round to Carreg yr Halen, finishing it in 1916. It was rebuilt in the 1960s, and the reopening was performed by the last surviving refugee.

It is still very much a working town. Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences is based here with its research ship tied up at the pier, and the secondary school is the largest on Anglesey. What that means for a visitor is a High Street with proper shops and restaurants on it rather than a seafront of gift shops.