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More About Cottages in Porthmadog

Borth-y-Gest is a mile west round the shore: a curve of Victorian houses above a small beach, with a café on the front and paths running out along the estuary. It was a shipbuilding village for most of a century.

Follow the path on and it reaches Ynys Cyngar, which used to be a tidal island. Beyond that lies Black Rock Sands at Morfa Bychan, two miles of beach you can drive a car straight onto. Portmeirion is about the same distance the other way.

Between 1825 and 1913 something close to three hundred ships were launched at Porthmadog and at Borth-y-Gest, the village a mile round the shore. For most of a century this was a shipbuilding coast as much as a slate one.

The last and best of them were the Western Ocean Yachts, three-masted schooners designed here for the salt-cod run to Newfoundland. Thirty-two went down the slipways between 1891 and 1913.

Each had to be big enough to cross the Atlantic and small enough to work in and out of a shallow Welsh estuary. That is a hard thing to ask of one hull, and the men who drew them had no formal training at all.

Before any of that, Borth-y-Gest was simply where you crossed. The wide sands of Traeth Mawr lay between here and Harlech, and local men made a living guiding travellers over them. It was dangerous work and occasionally fatal.

Borth-y-Gest is still a curve of Victorian houses above a small beach, with a café on the front and not much else. The yards have gone and the bay is quiet, which is now the reason to walk round to it.

Paths run on from there along the estuary to Ynys Cyngar, a headland that used to be a tidal island. Carry on and you reach Black Rock Sands at Morfa Bychan, about two miles from Borth-y-Gest. The beach itself then runs two miles more.

Black Rock is still one of the few beaches in Wales you can drive a car onto. There is a charge in season, and it saves carrying chairs, boards and a picnic from a car park.

Borth-y-Gest still has a shop and a café and no through road, so the traffic that fills Porthmadog in August never reaches it. You can walk there from the harbour in twenty minutes.

The estuary itself is worth an hour at low tide. Curlew and oystercatcher work the mud, the Rhinogydd stand across the far side, and the Ffestiniog trains cross the Cob above it every hour or so in summer.