Trearddur Bay Accommodation

More About Trearddur Bay

The main beach is the centre of village life in summer, with an active RNLI lifeboat station and a sailing club, while the Anglesey Coastal Path leads off along the cliffs to hidden coves and on towards the seabird colonies and lighthouse at South Stack. Porth Dafarch, Ravenspoint and the little bays around the headland reward anyone who likes to explore on foot.

It is a short run to almost everything on this side. Holyhead and the ferry are a few minutes north, South Stack and the mountain are beyond that, and the A55 puts you back on the mainland quickly if you want the mountains for a day.

The bay had a different name once. It was Porth y Capel, the bay of the chapel, and the dunes behind it are still Towyn y Capel, the dune of the chapel. There is an old burial ground in the middle of the beach, excavated in 2003.

This is a hard coast for shipping, and it has the record to prove it. In December 1889 the barque Tenby Castle was lost here, and the response was a lifeboat station at Porth Ruffydd, opened in 1891. The boathouse cost one thousand three hundred and twenty pounds and was called the finest on the coast. In thirteen years it launched fourteen times and saved nobody at all. It closed in 1904, was demolished in 1997, and only the access steps are left.

The wreck people remember is a little further up. On the 1st of March 1886 the steamship Missouri, running from Boston to Liverpool with cattle, hides, cotton and palm oil aboard, was driven ashore at Porth Dafarch between here and Holyhead. The Holyhead cliff rescue team rigged a breeches buoy and brought off eighteen cattlemen, three stowaways and the ship's doctor. Her bow still stands about three metres proud of the seabed with the boilers in place, and divers go down to her.

The Second World War left its own marks. Around a dozen pillboxes were built along this shore after May 1940 against the risk of landings from the west, and they were built castellated, like miniature castles — a design thought to be unique to Anglesey. One of them was conserved in 2023.

The rock underneath all this is worth a word, because most accounts get it wrong. It is Cambrian, about five hundred million years old. Guidebooks call it Precambrian, and Anglesey does have a great deal of that — just not on this stretch of coast. The folds in the cliffs at South Stack are good enough that the Geological Society lists them among the hundred most important geological sites in the United Kingdom.

The bay today does what it has done for a century. Trearddur Bay Sailing Club was founded in 1919 and has over a thousand members, though its clubhouse only opens to the public through August. The lifeboat is still here, and the current Atlantic 85 was named in February 2011 by Prince William and Kate Middleton, one of their first engagements together. One thing worth knowing before you swim: this beach is not patrolled by lifeguards — nowhere on Anglesey is — so keep an eye on the tide and on children in the sea.