Morfa Nefyn Accommodation

More About Morfa Nefyn

The pub is called Tŷ Coch, Welsh for the red house. It went up as a vicarage in 1823 and started serving in 1842. In 2013 the travel site Lonely Planet put it third in a list of the world’s best beach bars. The honest draw is simpler: you can only get there on foot.

Nefyn is the next village along, and that is where the shops and the school are. Behind both villages Garn Boduan rises to 279 metres, with an Iron Age fort on the top and a path up to it from the road. Pwllheli is eight miles south.

Porthdinllaen came very close to being somewhere else entirely. An Act of Parliament in 1806 allowed a harbour to be built here, and a company was formed to do it in 1808. The plan was to make this the mail port for Ireland.

Parliament then chose Holyhead instead, in 1810, because Telford’s new road ran that way. Local tradition insists it came down to a single vote; that part has never been proved. Either way the ferries went elsewhere, and Porthdinllaen stayed as it is.

The National Trust looks after the hamlet and the beach now. Watch the tide before you set off. Walking out along the sand is easy enough, but a family that finds it in on the way back has a long way round over the golf course.

Nefyn next door lived on herring rather than mail. The town’s coat of arms still carries three of them, and by 1910 there were forty boats working off the beach. Nefyn’s old church is the Llŷn Maritime Museum now, and it costs nothing to go in.

The lifeboat station was founded in 1864, after a night the previous December when eighteen ships sheltering in the bay were driven ashore. Robert Rees of Morfa Nefyn tied a rope round his waist and, with four other men, saved twenty-eight lives. The station welcomes visitors through the summer.