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More About Cottages on the Llŷn Peninsula

You can be on either coast within twenty minutes. Yr Eifl rises to 564 metres straight above the north shore, and it is the highest ground on the peninsula. The south side is flatter, and that is where the long beaches and the sailing are.

Abersoch and Pwllheli are the lively end. Aberdaron sits right out at the tip, and along the north coast the lanes drop through the villages to coves you will largely have to yourself.

The north coast of the Llŷn is granite country, not slate. The mountains at Yr Eifl were quarried for setts, the small square blocks that paved the streets of Manchester and Liverpool. Whole villages of stone terraces went up for the men who cut them.

One was Porth y Nant, in the valley of Nant Gwrtheyrn. By 1959 the last family had gone and the village stood empty. Then in 1978 a local doctor and his wife bought the whole place for £25,000, and the quarrymen’s terraces were rebuilt.

A single steep lane drops into the valley. Go down it today and you find a heritage centre, a beach at the bottom and a café called Caffi Meinir. Adults still come to Nant Gwrtheyrn to learn Welsh, staying in those same terraces.

The café is named after the valley’s own love story. Meinir was to marry Rhys, and by local custom the bride hid on the morning of the wedding for the groom’s party to find. She hid, and she was never found.

Years later, so the story goes, lightning split an old oak above the valley. Meinir’s skeleton was standing inside it, still in her wedding dress. Folklore rather than record, but Nant Gwrtheyrn has told it for two hundred years.

Up on the ridge above sits Tre’r Ceiri, the town of the giants. It is an Iron Age hill town, and around 150 stone houses still stand inside walls several metres high. You walk in through the original gateways.

It is a stiff climb from the village of Llithfaen and worth every step. The whole peninsula lies below you, with the sea on both sides. Keep to the marked paths, because the walls are dry stone and they wear.

The same rock still shows up along the coast beneath. Porthor, round on the west-facing shore, has sand so round and even that it squeaks underfoot in dry weather, which is how it got its English name of Whistling Sands.