New Quay Accommodation

More About New Quay

The dolphins are the draw. Cardigan Bay holds the largest resident population of bottlenose dolphins in Britain, and New Quay is the best place to see them. People watch from the harbour wall itself, without a boat.

The poet Dylan Thomas lived here from September 1944 until the following July, in a cliff-top bungalow called Majoda, and those ten months were among the most productive of his life. The coast path runs south from the harbour to the cove at Cwmtydu and on to Llangrannog.

The name is literal. A Harbour Act of 1835 paid for the stone quay, and it was finished two years later.

That quay turned a cluster of cottages into a shipbuilding town. By the 1840s more than three hundred men were building boats here and at Traethgwyn and Cei-bach next door.

They built smacks and schooners for the coastal runs, and bigger vessels for the crossings to America and Australia. Then the herring failed, the harbour silted up, and New Quay did what the whole coast did and took in visitors instead.

The poet Dylan Thomas was one of them. He rented the cliff-top bungalow Majoda from September 1944, and the ten months he spent here were among the most productive of his life.

Today the town still runs down the hill in terraces to the harbour wall, and the beach sits right below it. Bottlenose dolphins come into the harbour itself, which is why people stand on the wall for hours.

The Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre on the quay is the place to start. Volunteers there record what has been seen that week, and boat trips go out from beside it through the season.

New Quay sits on the A486 off the coast road, halfway between Aberaeron and Cardigan. There is no station; the nearest is Aberystwyth, forty minutes north. Cwmtydu is a small cove two miles south down the coast path, and Llangrannog sits under its rock stack beyond it.