Introduction

When I walked this trail with my daughter Mel in spring 2013 it was still very new and, although the route was complete, a lot of improvement and development work was in progress. It is officially 125 miles long, starting and finishing at St Cybi’s church in Holyhead and following the entire coast of Anglesey as closely as possible. It is also, of course, part of the full Welsh Coastal Path although in that context it would probably start and finish at one of the bridges from the mainland over the Menai Strait.

There is an official guide book by Carl Rogers which describes the route in great detail and provides OS strip maps, lots of colour photographs and a host of interesting information about the things you see en-route. Carl breaks the route into twelve sections of varying lengths, some of them quite short. We followed his directions but divided it into ten sections instead as that suited our preferred pace and available annual leave better. We mostly camped as usual but had to head off-route a fair bit to find campsites and places to eat so our total mileage was just short of 140 in the end with a bit more on top some evenings (without packs) to get to the nearest pub or shop for food. Note that the distances given for each day in this account include the extra off-route bits to where we stayed so often won’t match the official section distances given in the guidebooks even when the endpoints supposedly coincide.

The main aim of this account is to try to give a first hand report of what it is like to walk the trail. I particularly hope that anyone considering walking it themselves will find it useful. I always find reading about other peoples’ walks helps enormously with planning but I wasn’t able to find very much information online for this one, presumably because it’s so new. If you do decide to do the walk (or have already done it) please do think about publishing your experiences online somewhere – it may well help and encourage others to have a go.

Day 1 Holyhead to Trearddur
Day 2 Trearddur to Rhosneigr
Day 3 Rhosneigr to Newborough
Day 4 Newborough to Brynsiencyn
Day 5 Brynsiencyn to Beaumaris
Day 6 Beaumaris to Benllech
Day 7 Benllech to Amlwch
Day 8 Amlwch to Cemaes Bay
Day 9 Cemaes Bay to Porth Tywyn-Mawr
Day 10 Porth Tywyn-Mawr to Holyhead
Conclusions and tips