Moelfre Accommodation

More About Moelfre

Walk the coast path round the headland to Lligwy and its wide sands, or inland to Din Lligwy, where the walls of a Romano-British settlement still stand waist-high in a wood. Come back to the village for lunch and watch whatever the sea is doing.

It is an easy place to get out from as well. Benllech and its shops are down the coast one way, Amlwch and the quiet north the other, and Beaumaris and the Menai Strait are a run south.

Moelfre's story is written in the sea. The lifeboat station opened in 1848, the sixth set up by the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, and passed to the RNLI in 1855. It has been busy ever since.

In 1859 the Royal Charter, homeward bound from Australia with gold aboard, was driven onto the rocks just north of the village in a ferocious storm. More than four hundred people died, the worst shipwreck ever to happen on the Welsh coast. Charles Dickens came to see the aftermath for himself and wrote about it in The Uncommercial Traveller.

Then there is the Excel. On the 28th of October 1927, in eighty-five mile an hour winds, second coxswain William Roberts took the lifeboat out and was carried bodily onto the stricken ship's deck. Three men were taken off her before she sank. Roberts collapsed and died of exhaustion.

The name most people know is Dic Evans. In October 1959 he went alongside the Hindlea ten times in hundred mile an hour gusts, past her churning propellers, and took off all eight of her crew; she sank thirty-five minutes later. Over sixteen years as coxswain he launched 179 times and helped save 281 lives, and he is one of only five men ever awarded the RNLI's gold medal twice. His statue stands above the bay.

The Seawatch centre by the shore tells that story properly, and it is free to go in. The lifeboat inside it is worth a second look — it is a New Quay boat brought here for display, not one of Moelfre's own.

Inland, within a short walk of each other, are three of the best ancient sites on Anglesey: Din Lligwy, a Romano-British village of the third and fourth centuries where they smelted iron; the Lligwy burial chamber, whose capstone weighs something like twenty-five tonnes and rests on only three of its eight uprights; and the ruined chapel at Capel Lligwy. And Ann's Pantry in the village has been a café under that name since at least 1926, so it has been feeding people there for a century.