Y Felinheli

The Inn and the Slate Dock

The Garddfon Inn stands at 1 Beach Road, directly on the bank of the Menai Strait, and has been serving drinks to people looking at the water for over two hundred years. It is a Robinsons house, with a traditional bar on one side and a brighter bistro on the other, and it does fresh lobster as a signature dish alongside the daily specials boards. Afternoon tea is served. Dogs are welcome in the bar and lounge, though not in the five bedrooms upstairs, most of which look out over the Strait. There is a beer garden, a quiz every Tuesday at nine, and live music through the summer. It comes second of eight restaurants in the village on TripAdvisor, which tells you both that people rate it and that a village of 2,300 supports eight restaurants.

The village drops down to a marina, which was until fairly recently a working slate dock. The masts you see now stand where slate schooners and steamers once crowded a basin, and the dry dock beside them built ships, including the 825-ton Ordovic, launched in 1877. The whole complex is Grade II listed. A few restaurants and cafés cluster outside the marina gate, with shops along the top road toward the harbour.

From Rural Shore to Caernarfon

Away from the waterfront it still feels rural, with fields running down to the shore and the peaks of Eryri rising inland behind the village.

The best walk here is Lôn Las Menai, a flat, traffic-free four miles along a dismantled railway through broadleaf woodland to Caernarfon, with the Strait on one side and Anglesey across the water. There are accessible toilets on Beach Road at the Felinheli end. At Caernarfon the route joins Lôn Eifion, so you can keep going inland toward Snowdonia without touching a road. The Wales Coast Path runs through the village along the shore, and a longer eight-mile loop takes in Caernarfon Castle and back in something under four hours.

Water Sports and a Slate Port

Water is the point of the place. The estate agents Dafydd Hardy put it plainly: "The focus in Y Felinheli is very much on water sports." Plas Menai, the National Outdoor Centre for Wales, sits just outside the village and runs sailing, kayaking and paddleboarding, and the Port Dinorwic Sailing Club has been racing dinghies off the Strait since 1947.

The name means "the salt-water mill" — y melin heli — and the mill it refers to was rebuilt closer to the sea in 1633. The port itself is a nineteenth-century creation: the Assheton-Smiths of the Faenol Estate built a quay here in 1793 to ship out Dinorwic slate, and for its first sixteen years the slate was rowed out to ships anchored in the Strait until the quays opened in 1809. On maps it was once Port Dinorwic; now only the Welsh name appears.

The Vanished Railway

Behind the old Halfway House pub, which closed in 2013, stands the first Carnarvon railway station building, in use only from 1852 to 1875 and now somebody's house.

A Welsh-speaking Village

This is a Welsh-speaking village — 68 per cent of residents speak it — and the primary school teaches through Welsh to 171 pupils. The annual carnival, Gŵyl Y Felinheli, still fills the streets.