Rhosneigr Accommodation

More About Rhosneigr

Take a lesson or hire a board — windsurfing, kitesurfing and paddleboarding all work here, and there are three or four outfits in the village that will sort you out. When you have had enough of the wind, the path round Llyn Maelog behind the dunes is flat, quiet and full of birds.

It is on the west coast, which is the exposed side, so it feels different from the sheltered east. Holyhead and South Stack are up the road, Newborough and its forest are down it, and the station in the village puts you on the main line.

The stories about this coast start badly. Crigyll had a reputation in the eighteenth century for wreckers who lured ships onto the rocks and stripped them, and when several men were finally brought to trial they walked free — the jury, it was said, had been got at, and the judge was drunk. The poet Lewis Morris is supposed to have written a satire on them. It is a good tale, but it is a tale: the local account everyone quotes has since disappeared, and none of it can now be checked properly.

What is certain is that Rhosneigr is a much younger place than it looks. Samuel Lewis's topographical dictionary of 1833 describes this parish in detail and never mentions the village at all. Nor does the national gazetteer of 1868. There was something here — a chapel went up in 1828 — but not enough of a settlement to be worth naming.

The railway changed that. The village was already growing before Rhosneigr got its own station in May 1907, much later than the other Anglesey stations. You can date the growth by its chapels: 1898, 1904 and 1918. A visitor writing in 1914 put it sharply, complaining that greed had overtaken the community and each man had built out his neighbour. The county council's own landscape survey still files Rhosneigr, flatly, as a twentieth-century holiday settlement.

One building from that boom is worth looking out for. Surf Point, above Traeth Crigyll, was built between 1906 and 1908 for a sausage manufacturer from Tipton, and looks like a sandcastle — square block, octagonal towers, mock arrow slits, battlements all round. Locally it is the Sausage Castle. It is a private house, so admire it from the road and no further.

The other thing you will notice is the noise. RAF Valley is next door, and has been since February 1941. It trains fast-jet pilots, so a week here comes with Hawks overhead. Worth knowing before you book rather than after.

Behind the dunes, Llyn Maelog is a sixty-five acre lake with a public footpath the whole way round it, and in 2011 it became the first lake in Wales to be classified as a village green. It is the best hour on a windy day, when the beach is hard work and you want somewhere flat and sheltered to walk.