The White Lion has a doggy shower. It's round the back, for washing the sand off dogs after the beach and forest, and a cool bowl of water is always out. This is the only pub in Newborough, over two hundred years old, hung inside with an extensive collection of guitars and memorabilia. Alyson and Sam Pritchard bought it in 2010. One TripAdvisor review titled itself "Friendliest Pub in Anglesey," and the food — scampi and chips, veggie chilli, a kids' menu that ends in fudge cake and ice cream — comes piping hot. There's a large beer garden at the back with water features and songbirds, and the kitchen serves through summer.
In 2013 a visitor found the pub unexpectedly closed; Sam Pritchard explained it had shut for restocking and cleaning after a community funeral.
The rest of the village runs to a general store carrying more than its size would suggest, a post office, and a fish and chip shop that people mention mostly for its architecture.
Then the sand starts. Newborough sits at the south-west corner of Anglesey behind an enormous hinterland of dune and forest. You arrive through Newborough Forest — around 2,000 acres of pine planted between 1947 and 1965 to pin down the moving dunes — which opens onto Newborough Warren, one of the largest dune systems in Britain, and the wide Blue Flag sweep of Newborough Beach. The car parks sit at the forest edge and charge.
From the beach you can walk across the sands to Ynys Llanddwyn, a low tidal island of rocky knolls, crossable except at high tide. It carries the ruins of St Dwynwen's church, two crosses and the Tŵr Mawr lighthouse, and it looks straight across at the mountains of Eryri. Dwynwen was a fifth-century princess who prayed to be freed of a love she wasn't allowed to marry into; she became the patron saint of Welsh lovers, and her feast on 25 January is the Welsh answer to Valentine's Day.
Red squirrels were reintroduced to the forest in 2004 and now range through it; there's a hide at the Llyn Parc Mawr community woodland, and a fair chance of seeing one. The forest, warren and island have stood in for other places on screen, from Clash of the Titans to House of the Dragon.
The village is younger than it looks. Edward I founded it in 1294 after evicting the people of Llanfaes to clear ground for Beaumaris and its castle. On its edge sits Llys Rhosyr, a royal court of the Princes of Gwynedd, lost under the sand until it was dug up again in 1992.
For a couple of centuries the warren supported a marram-grass industry, the grass cut in August and plaited into mats and baskets, worked mostly by the women — Ellen Williams, Margaret Pritchard and Mari Pant among them — whose skill, it was said, nobody elsewhere could match. St Peter's is said to be the longest church on Anglesey.
Bodorgan station is a short drive north, and the 42 bus runs the A4080 straight through the village.
Newborough Forest once held the second-largest raven roost in the world. The roost has gone, but the ravens are still up there, and you tend to hear them before you see them.
