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More About Holiday Cottages in Moelfre

The coast path north leads to the wide sands at Lligwy, a mile up the shore, past the little cove at Traeth yr Ora on the way. There is not a great deal to do here in the organised sense, which is the point of the place.

Lligwy, up the coast path, is the other name to know here: the village end is closer to the boats, Lligwy closer to the sand.

The people who lived in these cottages worked the sea, and the records say so plainly. Through the 1800s the village was full of fishermen, seamen, mariners and, here and there, ship owners. The old rows have their own names — Y Swnt down by the beach, Pen Stryd behind it — and they were built as working houses: small, solid, and turned away from the weather.

Herring paid for a good deal of it. The autumn fishery drew boats and hands from well beyond the village, and the salting, packing, carrying and selling fell largely to the women and children. By the early twentieth century steam trains were being laid on specially to run Anglesey herring across to Liverpool.

Cod was the other one, and it is worth knowing how much of it there was. The fishery off this coast was big enough that at Moelfre they used cod heads to manure the fields. That fishery is gone now, and the sea off Moelfre lies quiet where the boats once crowded in.

What you are renting, then, is mostly nineteenth-century working stock. Anglesey cottages of that date were often built with earth walls rather than stone, and thatched rather than slated — slate only took over once the quarries and the railways made it cheap.

Small boats still go out from the cove for lobster and crab, which is more than can be said for most villages this size. Ann's Pantry, the café above the slip, reaches its hundredth year in 2026, and the RNLI Seawatch Centre by the shore reopens each spring with a retired lifeboat inside. If you want to see what the place was, walk down at the right hour and watch them come in.