At the bottom of Beach Road, the Funsport surf shop hires out boards and runs windsurfing and kitesurfing lessons, which is the reason a lot of people come to Rhosneigr in the first place. The village sits on the south-west corner of Anglesey, facing the Irish Sea across wide golden sand, and it has spent the last century as a watersports resort. Broad Beach — Traeth Llydan on the signs, and the signs are in Welsh here — regularly wins a Green Coast Award.
The Oystercatcher stands over Llyn Maelog, the lake behind the village, in a glass-fronted building that markets itself as an iconic Anglesey landmark. The kitchen sources from local farms and serves oysters caught in the Menai Strait. There are several places to sit — the main restaurant, Will's Bar, and two outdoor spots, Pat's Shack and the Dune Bar, which open, in the words of the pub itself, "as and when the Welsh weather allows."
Sandy Mount House is the old Sandymount pub, reinvented as a beach-house restaurant with seven rooms upstairs. The menu runs to hand-stretched stone-baked pizzas, belly pork, fish and chips, and lamb with linguine, with a separate vegan menu and a kids' menu. Reviews are good; the one recurring complaint is that the chips can be frozen for the price. Both pubs take dogs, and both have gardens.
Mojo's, on Marine Terrace, has been a creperie and café since 2005 and calls itself an eating institution, which after twenty years is fair enough. For the rest, there is Scarlett's for fish and chips and ice cream, Aydin's for pizza near the beach, and a Post Office and One Stop on the square that sells papers, coffee, groceries and coal. Janet Bell's gallery sells homewares and prints by the Anglesey artist whose name is over the door.
Llyn Maelog is a 59-acre lake, an SSSI, full of birds — oystercatchers, plover, greylag geese. In 2011 it became the first lake in Wales to be classified as a village green. A path loops its shore and returns along Broad Beach, about 45 minutes, easy enough for children but not for prams. The Anglesey Coastal Path runs through the village; head south and it reaches Barclodiad y Gawres, a Neolithic passage grave, and St Cwyfan's, the twelfth-century church that sits on a tidal islet and is only reachable at low tide.
The history here is largely about wrecking. In the eighteenth century the men of Crigyll had a reputation for luring ships onto the reefs at the river mouth with lamps meant to look like Holyhead harbour. When some of them were tried at Beaumaris around 1741 the case collapsed — the judge, by most accounts, was drunk — and the poet Lewis Morris wrote a satirical ballad about the acquittal.
The railway arrived in 1907 and turned the fishing village into a resort; trains still run, two-hourly on weekdays, east toward Shrewsbury and Birmingham. RAF Valley is next door, so fast jets pass overhead all day.
Admiral Sir Max Horton, the submarine commander, was born here. In 2019 the village clubbed together and put up a full-size statue of him.
