Anglesey (Ynys Môn)

Why we keep coming back

Anglesey is where we got married, so we're not going to pretend to be neutral about it. What keeps pulling us back is how much the island fits into a short drive: you can be on a two-mile beach, in a Neolithic tomb and up a seabird cliff inside a day, and still be somewhere quieter than anything on the mainland side of the bridges.

The corner we know best by a distance is Newborough Beach and Ynys Llanddwyn — a pine forest that opens onto a huge beach, with a tidal island of lighthouses, stone crosses and a saint's ruined chapel on the end of it. We've walked it in high summer and on New Year's Day, low sun and wild swimmers offshore, and the winter version is the one we'd send you to. That guide carries the current parking mechanics, which changed recently and which most write-ups still have wrong.

The other thing we'd tell a friend: eat in the villages, not the car parks. Our list of places we actually eat on Anglesey is short on purpose — it starts with a tapas bar in Newborough with fewer than ten tables, which we went to the evening after the wedding and have been recommending ever since.

Getting your bearings

Two bridges cross the Menai Strait — Telford's Menai Suspension Bridge of 1826 and the Britannia Bridge carrying the A55 — and both are free; the suspension bridge's tolls went in 1941. Once you're over, the island is flat, quick to drive and often noticeably drier and sunnier than the mountains it faces, which makes it the standard rescue plan when Eryri is under cloud.

Roughly: the south-west is beaches and forest (Newborough, Rhosneigr, Malltraeth); Holy Island in the west is the wild end (South Stack, Holyhead Mountain, Trearddur); the east is genteel and sheltered (Beaumaris, Red Wharf Bay, Benllech); and the north is the empty bit most visitors never reach (Cemlyn, Porth Wen, Amlwch). An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty covers about 95% of the coastline, which tells you where to point the car.

The Isle of Anglesey Coastal Path rings the whole island for about 130 miles, starting at St Cybi's church in Holyhead and taking most walkers around twelve days. You don't have to do the lot — almost every place on this page sits on a stretch of it, and the best half-days here are simply a section of coast path with a car park at each end.

Britain's best prehistory, and most of it is free

Anglesey was the heartland of the druids and it is thick with what came before them. Bryn Celli Ddu is the star: a Neolithic passage tomb aligned so that the midsummer sunrise runs straight down the passage and lights the chamber. Barclodiad y Gawres, on the west coast, hides carved spiral stones under its mound — one of only a handful of decorated tombs in Britain.

There's more, and it's quieter. Din Lligwy is a late-Roman-era village of stone huts standing waist-high in a wood, with the Lligwy burial chamber and its enormous 25-tonne capstone a field away; the Penrhos Feilw standing stones face each other in a field on Holy Island. Nearly all of these are free, open and unstaffed — bring the grid reference rather than trusting the postcode, and see all our ancient sites for the wider picture.

The wild coast: seabirds, cliffs and an industrial ruin

South Stack is the set-piece — an RSPB reserve on Holy Island where puffins, razorbills and guillemots pack the cliff ledges from roughly May to July, with a lighthouse reached down some 400 steps and back up again. Holyhead Mountain rises behind it: the island's highest point at 220m, an easy hour's climb, with hut circles on its flank and Ireland visible on a clear day.

North of there it empties out. Cemlyn Bay has a shingle ridge, a brackish lagoon and a tern colony (the ridge is closed to protect the birds in the breeding season); Porth Wen is an abandoned Victorian brickworks slumped into a cove, reached on foot and quite unlike anything else in Wales. Neither has facilities, and both are the better for it.

For wildlife with none of the effort, go inland instead. The Dingle at Llangefni is a wooded valley in the middle of the market town with a flat boardwalk running through it, and it is the most reliable place on Anglesey to actually see a red squirrel — they run the handrails. It's free, it's step-free, and it works in the rain, which makes it the answer to two of the questions people ask most about the island.

Three days out we'd actually plan

• The big beach day (south-west). Newborough and Ynys Llanddwyn for the morning — forest, beach and the tidal island — then back into the village for tapas at the Red Squirrel. Get there early in summer; the queue builds in the village, not at the car park.
• The wild west (Holy Island). South Stack for the seabirds first thing, up Holyhead Mountain for the view over to Ireland, then down to Trearddur Bay to swim or paddle. Holyhead is the base.
• Stones and a castle (east). Bryn Celli Ddu early, on to Beaumaris Castle — the most technically perfect of Edward I's ring — and finish with the tide out over the ten square miles of sand at Red Wharf Bay. Beaumaris is the prettiest base on the island.

Practical Anglesey

Parking has changed at the honeypots. Newborough now runs on ANPR — a camera reads your plate and you pay before you leave, by card or app, with no cash accepted and no overnight parking. Assume card-only at the big NRW and council car parks and don't count on a machine taking coins.

Tides decide more here than anywhere else in North Wales. Ynys Llanddwyn cuts off around high springs, Red Wharf Bay floods fast across flat sand, and the Menai Strait runs hard enough through the Swellies to matter to paddlers. Check a tide table for the specific spot, not the region.

Dog rules are seasonal and vary beach by beach. Most bans run 1 May to 30 September and cover only part of a beach — at Newborough, turning left rather than right onto the sand is the difference between banned and welcome. The signs at the slipway are the authority; our place pages carry what we found on the day.

When to come. May to July for the seabirds, June to September for swimmable water, and autumn and winter for the island at its best and emptiest — shorter days, but no queues, and the low sun does more for the beaches than August manages.

Anglesey beaches and coast, at a glance

Every figure here is read straight from the same dataset that powers the individual place pages and the offline app, so it can't drift out of step with them. Dog rules on Anglesey are seasonal — most beach bans run 1 May to 30 September — and a "seasonal ban" below almost always means one end of the beach is still fine. Check the sign at the top of the slipway.