Llŷn Peninsula Accommodation

More About Llŷn Peninsula Accommodation

Drive west until the road runs out. That is Aberdaron, a village on its own beach at the end of everything, with Bardsey Island two miles offshore across a tide race. Pilgrims walked here for a thousand years to make that crossing.

Llŷn Peninsula accommodation is easiest to find around Pwllheli, the market town with the harbour and the end of the coast railway. Abersoch is where the boats are. Criccieth and Porthmadog sit at the neck, where the peninsula meets the mountains of Eryri, better known in English as Snowdonia. It is about thirty-five miles end to end, and the sea is never far off on either side.

Bardsey Island and the pilgrim road

Bardsey Island is Ynys Enlli in Welsh, and the Welsh name means the island in the currents. The sea between it and the mainland still runs hard enough to strand a boat for days. Boat trips to the island leave from Aberdaron, where accommodation on the Llŷn Peninsula puts you close to the crossing.

Around the year 516 a nobleman called Cadfan crossed from Brittany, on the north-west coast of France, and founded a monastery on Bardsey. By the Middle Ages it was held that three journeys to Enlli were worth one to Rome, and Rome was the greatest journey a Christian could make.

Pilgrims walked to Enlli along a road now called the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way. It runs about a hundred and thirty-four miles from Holywell in the north-east, marked the whole way by churches and holy wells. Its last stretch comes down the Llŷn from Clynnog Fawr, where St Beuno founded a church in the seventh century. Walkers can take it a stage at a time from accommodation on the Llŷn Peninsula.

The walking stopped at Aberdaron, and the waiting began: for the tide, for the wind, for a boatman willing to try the crossing. So many chose to be buried on the island that it was called the resting place of twenty thousand saints.

Walking the road today

You can walk that road today, and much of it is waymarked. The church at Clynnog Fawr stands right beside the main road, far bigger than the village around it needs.

The wells and the smaller churches are still strung out along the lanes west of it, and the coast path now runs the whole way round the peninsula. You can pick it up in any village, so a night in Llŷn Peninsula accommodation is easy to turn into a walk.

Bardsey has a modern claim to fame too. In 2023 it was named an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, the first in Europe. Its own mountain blocks the mainland’s glow, which is why the stars show so clearly from the island.

People still cross the sound between the island and the mainland, and these days many of them go to look up at the stars. The island’s own website has the visiting details.