North Wales (Prestatyn to Menai Suspension Bridge)

The Wales Coast Path is divided into eight sections, with what is usually described as the first stretching from the border with England near Chester along the North Wales coast to Bangor.  That takes you through parts of the counties of Flintshire (Sir y Fflint), Denbighshire (Sir Ddinbych), Conwy and Gwynedd. We decided to start our walk at Prestatyn, where the Offa's Dyke path ends, so we've omitted the section of the Wales Coast Path in Flintshire. And we have gone slightly past Bangor to the Menai Suspension Bridge.  We walked this section in a lovely holiday at the beginning of October 2025, to celebrate Richard's retirement at the end of September. We used Ordnance Survey Explorer sheets 264 (Vale of Clywd) and OL17 (Snowdon) and the first in the series of seven official guides to the Wales Coast Path (this one is "North Wales Coast: Chester to Banger" by Lorna Jenner) was useful in our planning, though less so when we were actually walking.

We'd managed to book Ty Llewelyn, a lovely holiday cottage in Conwy, for 10 days, and we travelled to and from Conwy and to the start and end point of each walk by public transport. The train journey from Norfolk took a whole day.  We caught an earlier train than necessary to Ely because I didn't want to risk missing our connection,  then we took the across country train to Birmingham, which always seems slow. After the usual frustrations at Birmingham New Street Station (where I always find it nearly impossible to know where to go and you inevitably have to go through a set of exit barriers at the "green" part of the station only to go through another set at the "red" part (or various other colours)), we caught a Transport for Wales service heading to Holyhead (Caergybi), by what felt like a rather circuitous route, via Shrewsbury then Chester and then along the North Wales coast. Although it was slow, this part of the journey reminded us of previous and ongoing walking adventures on the Shropshire Way (as we passed through Wellington and Shrewsbury) and Offa's Dyke (Chirk) as well as visits to the North Wales coast that we'd revisit later in our holiday.

We also made use of the train during the holiday, to get to Prestatyn and Rhyl (Y Rhyl) from Conwy and back from Rhyl and Colwyn Bay (Bae Colwyn), though we soon discovered that a lot more trains travel along this line than stop at Conwy, so on a couple of occasions we walked back to the cottage from Llandudno Junction (Cyffordd Llandudno), a pleasant 20 minute walk across the bridge over the Conwy Estuary . We later transferred our allegiance to buses, in particular Arriva Number 5, which runs between Llandudno and Bangor through most of the places we wanted to get to.  Irritatingly, our English bus passes weren't valid here, but if you pay be credit card and "Tap on, tap off", fares on  the Arriva buses are capped at £7 per day.

I hadn't had high expectations for this section of the walk overall, though I had looked forward to the stay in the historic town of Conwy and to revisiting several other places en route that I have happy memories of from various times in my life (mostly a long time ago...).  Generally though. I was expecting rather a lot of walking through not terribly attractive holiday resorts. However, I was agreeably surprised; yes, there were holiday resorts, with the Wales Coast Path usually following the promenade, and between the resorts the route was often shared with National Cycle Route 5. However, most of the holiday resorts had a certain charm, harking back to their Victorian past, and there were views,  to the mountains of the Clwydian Range and later to Eryri (Snowdonia). The route climbs the Little Orme (Y Gogarth Fach), which I particularly enjoyed, and while the North Wales Path goes round the Great Orme (Y Gogarth) rather than over it, this part of the walk was spectacular and the day before walking around the Great Orme, we took a break from walking and used the  120-year old tramway from Llandudno to reach the summit.

This was a holiday that was about more than just the walk, and in Conwy we enjoyed visits to the castle and Plas Mawr as well as pottering around the town, its bridges, and the town walls.  We visited Penrhyn Castle on the outskirts of Bangor, and we paid our £1 each in order to walk along Bangor Pier (Pier y Garth) to the cafe at the end. Slightly off the path, we enjoyed a walk from Abergwtngregyn to Aber Falls (Rhaeadr Fawr) and return. Mostly, we cooked our own meals and took provisions with us for lunch, but we stopped at cafes for coffee and tea when a convenient opportunity arose, and we had a lovely meal at Dylan's in Conwy. 

The weather wasn't great, and our visit to Plas Mawr was on a day when the first named storm of the season, Storm Amy, had prevented a proper walk. However, the weather over the whole period we were away was nothing like as bad as the forecast had predicted; we only actually got wet a couple of times and on neither of these were we seriously wet.  And when necessary, Ty Llewelyn provided us with a lovely, comfortable home from home. 

First leg of this section