Abergele

From Tavern Tables to Market Street

At the Harp Inn on Market Street, dogs are given treats when they arrive, and on Sundays there's a free doggie dinner. The humans do well too: roast beef and turkey, lamb shank, a homemade steak and ale pie that doubles as the pie of the day, fish and chips, and a Sunday lunch that reviewers single out above the rest. There's a good range of ales and bitters, plenty for vegetarians, and prices people describe as excellent value. The Harp is one of the town's older taverns — it turns up in the pub records of 1859 and 1862 at an £18 rateable value, and its frontage reportedly didn't change between 1861 and 1911.

It was not always this quiet a scene. The 1859 rate book listed fourteen taverns, and an 1862 plan showed sixteen hotels and inns — the Gwindy, the Mona Vaults, the Bull, the Cross Keys run by a joiner who was also a Baptist, a Crown kept by a Wesleyan. The Crown later became Gwalia House, which is now the butcher. A pub becoming a butcher's is one way for a town to sober up.

The River, the Sea and St Michael's

Abergele sits on the North Wales coast between Colwyn Bay and Rhyl, a market town of eight or nine thousand people. The name means "mouth of the Gele," after the river that runs through it. There's a long-standing local belief that the original town lay further north and was overwhelmed by the sea, a story people still repair to at low water, where a submerged tract of loam holds preserved oak trees.

St Michael's on Church Street is the reason to slow down. It has two naves side by side, a west tower, and two chancels of similar length, separated by a six-bay arcade — a double church, essentially, listed II* for its medieval fabric and its monuments. In the vestry there are nine quarries of yellow-stained glass from around 1500, still there. The site has held a church since the eighth century, and before the Conquest this was the most important mother church in the region.

Remembering the Railway Disaster

The churchyard also holds the dead of the Abergele rail disaster. On 20 August 1868, runaway wagons of paraffin rolled down the gradient from Llanddulas into the path of the Irish Mail; the bursting casks caught fire and thirty-three people died, some burned beyond recognition. It was Britain's worst railway accident to that date. A memorial stands where they were buried.

Coast Paths and Castle Hills

The walking pulls you out of all this. The Wales Coast Path and the North Wales Path both run along the seafront and Pensarn beach, a long quiet shingle strand right by the station. Head west and you reach Llanddulas, or climb through woodland past the Northern Towers of Gwrych Castle — the Gothic Revival pile that housed I'm a Celebrity in 2020 and 2021. Above the town is Castell Cawr, an Iron Age hillfort locally nicknamed Lover's Lane.

Arriving beside the Beach

The station, Abergele & Pensarn, is an unstaffed request stop on the Chester–Holyhead line with six free parking spaces and a machine for tickets. It sits, appropriately, right on the beach.