Book Direct | Self Catering & Holiday Cottages in Menai Bridge

More About Holiday Cottages in Menai Bridge

Walk the shore path in the morning and watch the tide run through the Swellies, the narrow channel between the two bridges. Here it boils over hidden rocks and runs like a river. Then do what you like with the day, because you are five minutes from the mainland and the whole island is behind you.

Beaumaris is close by along the Strait, so the castle end of the island is easy from here as well.

The old houses here belonged to the sea rather than to farming. This was a ferry village first and a shipping town afterwards, and even once the bridge had killed the ferry the place went on living off imports, exports and shipbuilding. That is who the small houses were built for.

The oldest of them is still there. Ferryman’s Cottage was licensed in 1687 as a house for the ferrymen working the Anglesey shore, and it is listed for exactly that reason — a survival from the time when the ferry was the only way across. The press calls it Anglesey’s oldest and smallest house. It was restored from 2018, with the concrete stripped off the roof and hand-cut slate put back.

It has one detail worth knowing. People emigrating to America lodged in the cottage while they waited for a slate ship to come in, and when one did the ferrymen rowed them out to it. The last thing a good many families saw of Wales was this shore.

The big houses came later and for a different reason. Through the late nineteenth century Glyn Garth, along the Beaumaris road, was where Manchester and Liverpool money built its holiday houses. The grandest of them are gone — a castellated mansion put up in the 1840s was demolished after the Second World War, and the bishop’s palace came down in the early 1960s — but a good many of the large Victorian villas are still standing.

Which is why the self-catering here runs bigger than it does elsewhere on the island. A fair number of these were built as holiday houses for large Victorian families, and they are still doing the same job for large modern ones. On the edge of town, Pili Palas Nature World keeps butterflies, reptiles and meerkats and stays open through the season for a wet-day out.