Aberffraw

A Pub Table and a Village Biscuit

Y Goron sits on Bodorgan Square, in the middle of a village of whitewashed cottages, and does a steak and ale pie that one reviewer called one of the best meals they'd had. There is a bright lounge bar, a smaller second bar, and a separate dining room, so you can pick your level of company. The menu runs to haddock and chips, seafood linguine, a beef or chicken burger, lasagne, and homemade chips in portions that reviews describe as generous, which on inspection they are. Up to three ales are on when it's busy, usually including Purple Moose's Madog's Ale, a session bitter at 3.7%. Dogs are allowed in the bar. Out the back there's an enclosed beer garden looking over the Ffraw estuary and the dunes.

Aberffraw has its own biscuit. The teisen Berffro is a scallop-shell-shaped shortbread of flour, butter and sugar, pressed into shape from an actual scallop shell, and it is claimed to be the oldest biscuit recipe in Britain, dating to the 13th century. There are two origin stories: a Welsh king's wife who saw a shell on the beach and wanted a cake shaped like it, and the more plausible one linking the shell to Santiago de Compostela pilgrims, who wore scallop badges. The second version means the biscuits are also called James cakes.

Across the Dunes to the Church in the Sea

To reach the beach you cross Hen Bont Aberffraw, a single-span humpbacked packhorse bridge built in 1731 with money from Sir Arthur Owen of Bodowen, then walk through the dunes. The beach is Traeth Mawr, wide and sandy and rarely busy, a Blue Flag since 2005 and nicknamed the Sahara of Wales. The dune system behind it runs to 883 acres, one of the largest in the UK and an SSSI. One local writer described the beach as "where Anglesey's Sahara meets the sea."

The Wales Coast Path leaves the village square and heads eight miles to Rhosneigr, opening on a view across the estuary to the mountains of the Llŷn Peninsula and Snowdonia. The path passes St Cwyfan's, the Little Church in the Sea, which stands on a tidal island reached on foot only at low water. When erosion began sending its graves into the sea, a local architect raised money in 1893 to wall the island off. It still holds summer weddings.

Romanesque Work at St Beuno's

In the village, St Beuno's is a rare double-naved church with a reset 12th-century arch carved with chevrons and the heads of 25 rams and bulls. Pevsner reckoned it holds some of the most significant Romanesque work on the island.

The Vanished Royal Court

For roughly three centuries this was the capital of Gwynedd and the seat of its royal house. The court was partly pulled down in 1317 to supply stone for Caernarfon Castle, and what remained was buried by a sandstorm on St Nicholas's Day, 1331. A Jonah Jones sculpture on the square marks the vanished princes.

Reaching a Welsh-speaking Village

Bodorgan station is three miles off; the A4080 runs through the village. Two-thirds of the village still speaks Welsh, and the football club plays down the road at Bryn Du.