Starling Cloud

An Indoor Play Area, and Why That Changes Everything

If you are travelling to the Welsh coast with small children, you already know the arithmetic of a wet afternoon. The Starling Cloud has an indoor children’s play area on the premises, and for a certain kind of family holiday that single fact outranks sea views, star ratings and everything else on this page put together.

It stands at Parc-y-Llyn, about a mile back from the promenade, four-star graded, with 8.5 out of 10 from nearly sixteen hundred guests. Rooms open at around £109, with a free car park big enough that you will never think about it.

The rooms

Family-friendly by design: en suite bathrooms, flat-screen televisions, air conditioning, tea and coffee, and a mountain view from some of them. There are proper family rooms rather than a double with a camp bed wedged in, and there is step-free access and accessible parking for guests who need it.

The bar and the rotisserie

The restaurant’s calling card is rotisserie chicken, and the reviews suggest it is genuinely the reason people come back. Beyond that it is a broad, unfussy menu that will feed a family without argument, and in warmer weather you can eat outside in the garden. The bar keeps hand-pulled bitters and a decent range of draught ales — a real bar, in other words, rather than a token counter with three lagers on it.

Getting into town

The railway station is a fifteen-minute walk. The promenade, with its pier and its long Victorian sweep, is a mile off, and the university a half-hour stroll. That distance from the seafront is precisely what buys you the parking, the play area and the space, and for a family it is a trade worth making without a second thought.

Aberystwyth with children

The town turns out to be unusually good at this. The North Beach goes sandy at the right state of the tide and shelves gently. The castle ruins stand open on their headland, free, unfenced and eminently climbable, which is worth more to a seven-year-old than any visitor centre yet built. The pier juts out from the middle of the front with the usual amusements on it. And the paddling and rock-pooling along the south end of the bay will absorb an entire afternoon at no cost whatsoever.

The other reason people book it

Groups. Sixteen hundred reviews do not accumulate on families alone, and a good share of them come from people up for a rugby match, a graduation, a conference at the university or a weekend on the coast with friends. The bar is a proper one, the parking is free and unlimited, and nobody minds a group of adults arriving late and hungry — which, in a small seaside town where most hotels are quiet Victorian terraces with thin walls, is not something to take for granted.

The wet-afternoon question

And when the Welsh coast does what the Welsh coast periodically does, you have a play area indoors, a restaurant that will feed everyone, a bar with something decent on tap, and no need to move the car. That is the whole proposition, and it is a good one.

Parc-y-Llyn

The name means “the field by the lake”, which rather oversells what is there now — this is the modern edge of Aberystwyth, out where the retail park and the leisure centre sit, and it is not picturesque. That is worth saying plainly. What it is, though, is convenient: a supermarket for the things you forgot, a cinema for the evening nobody can agree on, a swimming pool, and a road that gets you into the middle of town in five minutes without ever joining the seafront traffic. For a family with a car, the trade is an easy one.

The practical details

Free parking, free WiFi, a restaurant, a bar, an indoor play area, family rooms, air conditioning, a garden and step-free access, from about £109 a night. The hotels down on the seafront are prettier than this one. With children in tow, this one is more useful.