Book Direct | Hotels & Inns on the Llŷn Peninsula

More About Hotels and Inns on the Llŷn Peninsula

Walk a headland in the morning, then drop down to Abersoch, where the bay faces east and the sea stays flat when the rest of the coast is rough. Porthdinllaen, over on the north side, can only be reached on foot, and the way along the sand closes on a rising tide.

Pwllheli is the market town and the harbour, and the trains come no further. Criccieth and Porthmadog sit at the neck, nearest the mountains, and Aberdaron is the last village on the road west.

Almost every grand seaside terrace in Wales was put up by a railway company, or for one. Llandudno, Rhyl and Barmouth all got their promenades because the trains arrived and somebody had to house the people getting off them. On the Llŷn the line stopped at Pwllheli and went no further.

The boat trains for Ireland ran to Holyhead, on Anglesey to the north, so no railway company ever had a reason to lay track west of the town. Nothing was ever developed out there because nothing could easily get out there.

So west of Pwllheli no seafront terrace was ever raised at all. What grew up instead was other people’s houses: country houses, old farms and coaching inns, taken on one at a time by the families who already lived in them.

The best known is Porth Tocyn, on the headland above Abersoch. It opened in 1948 and has appeared in the Good Food Guide, Britain’s long-running restaurant guide, every year since 1957. Four generations of the Fletcher-Brewer family have run it.

Ask about the bar and you can still hear the old character in it. This corner of Wales was the very last in the country to let pubs open on a Sunday, holding out until 1996. Nobody minds now, and the bars here feel like somebody’s front room.

Several of these places have been in the same hands for two and three generations, and you can still turn up and find the owner behind the bar. That is worth knowing when you want a table booked or a walk described.

Eating out means driving, and the peninsula is set up for it. Abersoch, Pwllheli and Criccieth each have somewhere worth the journey, and Nefyn has more on the north coast. Pwllheli to Abersoch is seven miles.

Twenty minutes is the useful unit here. From almost any village you can reach a beach, a headland walk and somewhere to eat inside that, which is not true of much of the Welsh coast.

The road west of Pwllheli is single track in places, so allow longer than the map suggests. Aberdaron is seventeen miles away, but you can still spend the best part of forty minutes getting there.

The views are private ones. Most of these places still look out over Cardigan Bay, the long sweep down the peninsula’s south side, or over open farmland. In the evening the loudest thing is usually the sea.