On The Square, between St Mary's Church and the war memorial, the Panton Arms has been serving since the eighteenth century, when it was a coaching inn on the road to Beaumaris. The older half faces the church; the half facing the main road was tacked on in Victorian times. Inside there's a long lounge bar and a separate tap room, and the kitchen runs from light lunches up to homemade pies, fish and chips, burgers and Sunday roasts that reviewers single out for both the portions and the price. Steak night is Thursday, the quiz is Wednesday. Dogs are welcome. If you arrive by camper van, the car park takes you overnight for five pounds so long as you use the pub.
Charles Dickens stayed here in 1859, having come up from London to report on the wreck of the Royal Charter off Moelfre. In August 2016 the landlord, Ed Griffiths, briefly renamed the pub the Pokémon Arms in honour of the younger customers using the WiFi to play Pokémon Go, with the Pokéstop and Poké-Gym sitting on the war memorial and the church across the road. For a while it hosted a Sunday-night tech club, Clwb Technoleg Môn, and ITN called it "an oasis of connectivity."
About a mile and a half out, where the sand of Red Wharf Bay meets the shore, the Ship Inn does Menai mussels with chips, a seafood chowder, fresh crab sandwiches, and the Dragon Pie, which is shepherd's pie made with lamb, mint and chilli. Dogs get the snug, a room of their own, and the staff have been known to produce treats. It gets busy, so book. The setting is the draw: waterfront tables looking out over tidal flats that, at low tide, drain to expose roughly 25 square kilometres of sand. People walk across it from the Ship to Benllech when the water's out.
The village itself is small — a few hundred people — gathered around The Square with the Afon Nodwydd running through it toward the bay. The Cloth Hall, a row that started as a nineteenth-century general store, now holds a bakery, a carpet shop and a party-ware hire place. The Post Office doubles as the bus stop; Arriva's route 62 calls roughly hourly and gets you to Bangor, the nearest mainline station, in under half an hour. There's a football club, Pentraeth F.C., playing at Bryniau Field, and a gentle circular walk that loops through woodland and open country for anyone not heading to the beach.
St Mary's is mostly nineteenth century over a medieval core, rebuilt in 1882 by Henry Kennedy. In the churchyard are six small graves of Royal Charter victims washed ashore here, their headstones paid for by Lady Vivian of nearby Plas Gwyn. The central stone, put up in 1876, reads simply: "Near this stone lie buried six bodies which were washed ashore in this parish."
Part of a twelfth-century font sits in the porch, reused as a water basin. Nobody seems to have minded the demotion.
