The Ship Inn has beach huts in its beer garden, arranged along the edge so you can sit inside one with a pint and look straight out across the sand to North Wales. It is an 18th-century coastal inn that began as a single cottage around 1740 and gradually ate the ones next to it. The kitchen leans on people it can name: Conwy Brewery for the beer, Aber Falls for whisky, Parisella's for ice cream, and M Hughes & Sons, who have supplied the butchery since 1956. The menu runs to Welsh Dragon Pie, seafood chowder, a fresh crab sandwich, whitebait, and lobster specials when they have them, mostly £10 to £20, which reviewers keep describing as extremely reasonable. Book, because the waits can be long.
Dogs are welcome inside and out, though there is a recurring grumble that dog owners occasionally end up in a windowless back room. The front door carries CAMRA Good Beer Guide stickers. The Kenneally family ran the place from 1971 to 2025.
There are two more options on the bay, which is a lot for a village that once had a single quayside inn. The Tavern on the Bay does fish and chips, burgers, pizza and a properly labelled set of vegan dishes, including a sweet potato roulade and a beetroot and bean burger. The Boathouse is a seafood restaurant open ten till ten, with an ice-cream kiosk on the beach. For anything else you go to Benllech, two miles along the coast, and for fuel to Pentraeth.
The tide is the thing to understand before you walk anywhere. Red Wharf Bay has one of the fastest incoming tides in Britain, and the local motto is simply "Be fleet of foot." At low water the sand goes out for what feels like a mile. There are only ever two states here, tide in or tide out.
The Anglesey Coastal Path runs straight through, along the sands to Benllech in one direction and round toward Llanddona and Penmon in the other. The Llanddona Circular starts at the beach car park and climbs across fields to Bwrdd Arthur, an Iron Age hillfort the locals call Arthur's Table. Inland the wooded ridge of Mynydd Llwydiarth was, until recent reintroductions elsewhere, the last stronghold of Anglesey's red squirrels; you can still see them there.
The name means red beach, Traeth Coch. In 1170 Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, a poet and heir to the throne of Gwynedd, was killed near here fighting his half-brothers, and legend says the beach ran red. Rather more solidly, a hoard of five Viking silver arm-rings turned up on the sand in the 1890s, and a fortified Viking trading settlement was later excavated at Llanbedrgoch, a mile or two inland, complete with a fragment of an Islamic silver coin.
The Red Wharf Bay Sailing Club was founded in 1952 at a meeting in the Ship Inn, then promptly moved down the coast to Traeth Bychan on the grounds that the water there was better for sailing. It still races from there.
