Benllech

From carvery to the sand

The Breeze Hill does a Sunday carvery with unlimited top-ups, which is the kind of thing you find out about halfway through your first plate. Beef, turkey and pork, small or large, and you go back as often as you like. It's a Robinsons house on Bangor Road, over a hundred years old, looking down over Benllech Bay from a raised deck they call the Bay area. David and Maureen took it over in late 2022 and did up the kitchen, the bar and the B&B rooms. Reviewers have settled on calling it the best pub in Benllech, and the carvery keeps coming up when they do.

The beach is what you're really here for. Benllech Bay is a long stretch of golden sand backed by low grassy headland, with rock pools full of crabs, starfish and shrimp when the tide goes out. It has held a Blue Flag for years, there's a seasonal lifeguard, and Sykes Cottages once voted it the third-best beach in the UK for dogs. Dogs are kept off the main section between May and September. Parking is at the Lower and Upper Wendon car parks, £3.50 for up to four hours.

Beach Road and The Square

Beach Road is where the day ends. Cafés, fish-and-chip shops and beach shops line it, and the second pub, The Benllech, sits near the sand as the default for families walking up from the water with cold feet. Free parking, wheelchair access, a garden with sea views. The Bay Café and the Wendover — which is also a seaside shop — handle the post-swim coffee.

Away from the front, Indian Rasoi on The Square has built a quietly serious reputation, with a proper vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free menu rather than the usual afterthought. For something smaller there's Crempog Môn, doing Welsh pancakes and crêpes.

Coast walks and ancient stones

The walking is straightforward and long. The Anglesey Coastal Path runs along the back of the beach; gain a little height and you get the whole bay and headland. At low tide you can walk south past St David's beach, round the headland and across the sands of Red Wharf Bay to Pentraeth — miles of continuous shoreline while the water's out. North, the path links to the old fishing village of Moelfre.

The history here is deep and slightly unsettling. In 1945, children playing on the beach uncovered the grave of a woman buried in a wooden coffin more than a thousand years earlier, with a double-sided antler comb among the goods; a bone sample later dated to somewhere between 660 and 880 AD. Just outside the village is Pant-y-Saer, a collapsed Neolithic tomb with a capstone three metres across, under which the bones of about fifty-four people were found, including nine newborns. The name Benllech itself is read as "head slab," probably a nod to those stones.

The railway makes a resort

Benllech was a fishing and limestone-quarrying village until the railway arrived in 1909 and turned it into a resort. The line closed in 1930 after twenty-one years.

Lemmy's Benllech years

Lemmy Kilmister grew up here, the only English boy, he said, among seven hundred Welsh ones.