Book Direct | B&Bs & Guest Houses on the Llŷn Peninsula

More About B&Bs on the Llŷn Peninsula

Get on the coast path before the car parks fill. Walk a headland, drop down to a cove, and come back up when the tide pushes you off the sand. Abersoch has the sheltered bay. Aberdaron sits at the wild end of the road, and Pwllheli has the market and the harbour.

In the far west of the peninsula three quarters of people speak Welsh, among the highest anywhere in Wales. You will hear it in the shop and on the beach. Nobody expects you to join in, and you will pick up a couple of words anyway.

In 1957 the whole peninsula was made an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a designation that limits what can be put up on it. Only the Gower coast, down near Swansea, was protected earlier. Nothing of any size has gone up on the Llŷn since.

This is Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, and the county council still compares the settlement pattern here to parts of south-west Ireland. Three quarters of the houses on the peninsula stand on their own, against about a third across the rest of the county.

What that leaves is a peninsula of old houses standing on their own. The best of them is Plas yn Rhiw, a small manor above Porth Neigwl. Three sisters called Eileen, Lorna and Honora Keating bought it derelict in 1938 and spent years putting it back together.

They handed it to the National Trust in 1952 on one unusual condition: that the bees living in the roof were to be looked after. They still are.

The garden still drops down the hillside in rooms framed by box hedges, and the view from it takes in the whole four-mile sweep of the bay below. It opens through the season, and there is a second-hand bookshop in the old stable.

Porth Ysgo, a mile further on, is a small National Trust cove reached down a flight of steps. A stream still falls onto the back of the beach. There is a car park at the top and nothing whatever at the bottom.

The lanes to places like these are single track with passing places, and most still end at a farm gate with room for a handful of cars. Go early on an August morning, or leave it until the afternoon.

Nothing here is far from anything else. Aberdaron to Porthmadog is about thirty-five miles by road, end to end, and most days you will not need to cross the whole peninsula at all.