At the base of the village, where the road runs out at a shingle beach, the Kinmel Arms looks out over Moelfre Bay. It's a Robinsons pub with original shipping lanterns on display and tables by the bay window facing the Irish Sea. The food is home-cooked and the portions are large — the fish and chips, the gammon and the chicken curry are the ones reviewers keep coming back to. Dogs get treats and a water bowl. In good weather the outside seating sits close enough to the beach to hear it.
Up the hill on the main road is the Coastal Café & Fish Bar, ranked first of Moelfre's restaurants on Tripadvisor, which cooks fish and chips to order and does gluten-free versions. It is popular enough to queue for.
Ann's Pantry is the other fixture, a family-run café doing breakfast every day and dinner on Saturdays out of season. The kitchen turns out carrot soup, Welsh rarebit with homemade chutney, ribeye, and its own cakes and scones. The afternoon tea — finger sandwiches and warm scones, £23.50 a head — is the thing to book ahead for. There's a real fire inside and a few nooks to sit in, and dogs are welcome here too.
The village is a scatter of whitewashed fishermen's cottages wrapped around a sheltered harbour, guarded by the rocky islet of Ynys Moelfre just offshore. The Welsh name means "bald hill," which is what the rise behind the village looks like from the sea. Seals and porpoises turn up in the bay; seabirds work the island. There's a small convenience shop and public toilets in the centre, and the RNLI Seawatch Centre, a free maritime museum with the retired lifeboat Bird's Eye and artefacts divers recovered from the Royal Charter.
The Royal Charter is why the museum exists. In October 1859 the iron steam clipper, homeward from Melbourne with returning gold-rush miners, was driven onto the rocks just north of the village in a hurricane and broke up with the loss of around 450 lives. Local men formed a human chain into the surf. A hundred and forty of the dead lie in the churchyard at St Gallgo's, a mile inland, where the rector wrote over a thousand letters to relatives and is thought to have worn himself into an early grave doing it. Charles Dickens came to meet him and wrote it up afterwards.
A century later, almost to the day, coxswain Richard "Dic" Evans took a lifeboat alongside a foundering coaster ten times in a Force-12 gale and brought off all eight crew. His seven-foot bronze statue stands above the harbour, looking out to sea. He saved 281 lives across fifty years and is one of only five people ever awarded the RNLI Gold Medal twice.
From the beach the coastal path runs two easy miles north to the sand and rockpools of Traeth Lligwy, past a cliff-top memorial stone and the ruined chapel and burial chamber at Lligwy. There's no station; buses reach Llanfairpwll and Bangor in under half an hour.
Dic Evans ran the whole thing in Welsh, as most of the village still does.
