Llŷn Base Camp

The instinct on arriving somewhere new is to see all of it, which on a peninsula means working your way along and then working your way back. Two nights here, two nights further round, a final night near the top for the drive home. It is how most trips get sketched out, and on the Llŷn it is a way of spending your holiday reversing a van into passing places while somebody in the back asks how much further.

The peninsula is the wrong shape for touring

Llŷn is a finger of land about twenty five miles long, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty since the fifties, with a coastline on three sides and Bardsey off the end of it. Everything on it is close to everything else.

That sounds like an argument for moving around and it is the opposite. When the far end of the region is forty minutes away, relocating your entire setup to get closer to it buys you almost nothing, and costs you the morning: striking camp, the drive, finding the next place, setting up again. Two hours of the day gone to move twelve miles.

The other half of it is the roads. The lanes here are narrow, high-hedged and slow, and slow in a way that does not respond to leaving earlier. A van moving between sites on those lanes is doing the least enjoyable version of driving on the peninsula, twice, with everything packed.

So the question is not whether staying put is more relaxing in some general sense. It is that on this particular shape of land, a base gives up nothing at all in reach.

What a base actually buys

Here is the arithmetic on a short version, planned as Llŷn Peninsula Headlands.

Two nights, both at a small touring site near Nefyn on the quieter north coast. Two hundred and fifty five miles in total, of which two hundred and twenty is the drive there and the drive home. Thirty five miles of the trip is actual trip.

Day one comes in along the southern side with a stop at Criccieth, where the castle sits above the seafront, and a short one at Llanystumdwy on the river before carrying on to the site. Day two goes out to the western tip: Porth Iago, a cove you park above and walk down into, then Braich y Pwll on the headland looking across the sound to Bardsey. Back to the same pitch both evenings.

Thirty five miles for a full day on the headlands, with no packing at either end of it, is what a base is for. The same day run from a different site each night would have cost two hours of setup and gained nothing except a shorter drive to somewhere you were reaching comfortably anyway.

It scales better than it looks

Two nights is the version where a base is forced on you, since nothing else fits. The more interesting case is four or five, where touring becomes genuinely possible and is still the wrong call.

At that length the pitch stays where it is and the days fan out from it. The western tip and Aberdaron. The north coast around Nefyn and Porthdinllaen. The southern beaches. A day that does not leave the site at all, which is a real option once you have more than one full day, and one of the better things about a longer stay somewhere small.

What does not happen is a day lost to moving. Over five nights, touring the peninsula would cost you two of those mornings, which is close to half your usable days on a trip of that length. It also means two bookings rather than five, which matters more than it sounds in a busy month.

When a base is the wrong answer

Not every region works this way and it is worth being straight about which ones do not.

Long linear coasts, where the point is the driving and the places are strung out over a hundred miles, do not reward staying put. Neither does a region with two or three genuinely separate centres forty five minutes apart in different directions, where a single base means every day starts with the same commute in reverse.

The test is roughly whether you can reach the far edge of what you came for inside an hour. On the Llŷn you can reach the far edge of the whole peninsula in less than that, from almost anywhere on it. That is unusual, and it is the actual reason to stay put here rather than any general principle about slow travel. Elsewhere in Wales the answer goes the other way.

Pick the site for the side of the peninsula you want to wake up on, and then stop planning the trip and go and look at the sea.