Book Direct | Self Catering & Holiday Cottages in Llandudno

More About Holiday Cottages and Self-Catering in Llandudno

Give the first morning to the Great Orme. The cable tramway has run to the summit since 1902, and the toll road round its foot is free on a bicycle. The ticket covers the summit car park. Come down through Happy Valley, which costs nothing, and do the shopping on Mostyn Street on the way back.

A single seafront path links one end of the bay round to the West Shore on the far side of the headland, which is quieter and faces the sunset. Conwy is ten minutes along the coast and Betws-y-Coed about three quarters of an hour up the valley.

Most of Llandudno was laid out under one estate and let on leases. Craig-y-Don, out towards the Little Orme, was not — and that one difference is why the self-catering here looks the way it does.

In June 1884 the land at Craig-y-Don was sold off as freehold rather than leasehold. It went fast: the whole of it was sold off in three days.

What went up on it was a terrace of seventeen tall houses along Graig-y-Don Parade, facing the sea. All were finished by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the town in 1888, and sixteen of the seventeen are listed today.

They were built as boarding houses and the plan tells you so. The record for number two describes it exactly: the proprietor and the kitchen in the basement, the reception rooms on the ground floor, and bedrooms on every storey above.

A building like that divides into flats without much argument, which is what happened. A seafront apartment let here for a week is very often one floor of an old boarding house. It is doing the same job it did a hundred and forty years ago, under new management.

What that buys a family now is space and a front door. The promenade runs the length of Craig-y-Don and on into the town, so children can be let out towards the sea. The shops on Mostyn Street are a walk rather than a drive.

For a day out of the kitchen you are well placed. The Little Orme rises at one end of Craig-y-Don and the Great Orme at the other, both walkable from the door. St Tudno’s Church sits up on the Orme, and the Conwy valley opens twenty minutes inland.