The hut row on the sand
A single painted line of beach huts runs the length of the sand, the first thing you pick out from the headland.
03Story
One businessman’s idea, and what outlasted it
Almost everything a visitor comes to Llanbedrog for was assembled by a single Cardiff entrepreneur in the space of four years, and the village has been keeping, losing and rebuilding the pieces ever since.
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A church, and the saint behind the name
St Pedrog’s is first recorded in the Norwich taxation of 1254, and the village takes its name from Pedrog, a 6th-century Celtic saint. The Madryn family — the Love Parrys — held the patronage from the 17th century.
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A widow’s house in the trees, the late 1850s
Plas Glyn-y-Weddw was built for Elizabeth Love Jones-Parry of Madryn: a dower house designed around the art collection she already owned, rather than a house that later happened to acquire one.
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Solomon Andrews arrives, 1894–1897
A Cardiff businessman opened a horse tramway from Pwllheli in 1894, at first to carry quarried stone from Carreg y Defaid for the town’s sea wall. He bought the Plas in September 1896 and opened it as a public gallery, extended the line to Llanbedrog in July 1897, and set a wooden ship’s figurehead on the headland above the beach.
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Granite, until 1949
Three quarries worked the cliff face of Mynydd Tir-y-Cwmwd. Setts cut at the quarry were held in a hopper building on the shore and shipped from a jetty whose remains still show at low tide. The quarry closed in 1949.
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What was lost, and what was put back
The storm of 28 October 1927 destroyed the tramway and it was never rebuilt. The Plas became flats and was decaying by the late 1970s until the artist Gwyneth ap Tomos and her husband Dafydd bought it in 1979; a charitable trust took it on in the mid-1990s, the Winllan woodland was bought back in 2008, and it has been an accredited museum since 2013.
The tramway that made Llanbedrog a resort is the same tramway that carried its stone away.
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