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More About B&Bs and Guest Houses on the North Wales Coast

Start on the sand and let the weather decide the rest. If it turns there is the Welsh Mountain Zoo behind Colwyn Bay, or the water park at Rhyl, both open all year. Past Prestatyn at the far eastern end, the Talacre dunes run down to the Point of Ayr lighthouse. It has stood on the beach since 1776, cut off by every high tide.

Behind the resorts the Vale of Clwyd opens out, with the castles at Rhuddlan and Denbigh and quiet market towns the coast crowds never reach. Turn south instead and the ground rises into the mountains within half an hour. Both the A55 and the coast railway run its full length, so one town is only minutes from the next.

For years the Weekly News, the local paper for Colwyn Bay and the towns either side of it, printed a list every week of who was staying and where. Not just the hotels — the houses. Street by street: the name of the house, then the name of the woman keeping it, then that week’s guests and the towns they had travelled from.

The issue of 19 July 1901 runs to something like two hundred households, all taking paying visitors in the same week. They span Colwyn Bay, Old Colwyn, Rhos-on-Sea and Penmaenmawr. Most are entered as Mrs or Miss and a house name, not as any sort of hotel.

The guests came from Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and the Potteries, often with a maid or a nurse in the party. The householders sent their lists in for nothing: anything left at the Central Library in Colwyn Bay by noon on the Wednesday went into that week’s paper. A small advert in the Apartments column cost sixpence for sixteen words.

The trade those women built is still where they built it, and the coast has got easier to reach since. The North Wales Coast line put on about half as many trains again in the May 2026 timetable, and now runs roughly hourly, stopping at nearly every town along the way.

The sea is in reasonable order too. Colwyn Bay and Penmaenmawr were both classed Excellent for bathing water quality in 2025, and both of Llandudno’s shores Good.

The Wales Coast Path runs the whole length of it, eighty-one miles from the Dee estuary round to Bangor. At Gronant, between Prestatyn and Talacre, it passes the only regular colony of little terns in Wales, a small seabird that nests on open shingle.

The birds are in from late April and gone by the end of August. It is the colony that is fenced, not the beach, so the path takes you straight past it, with wardens on site daily.

For a day off the sand, Bodnant Garden is about twenty minutes up the Conwy valley. The RSPB reserve at Llandudno Junction is free to members and carers, and to anyone between sixteen and twenty-four.