Y Llong/The Ship, Porthmadog

Facebook page of Y Llong/The Ship - www.facebook.com

Facebook page of Y Llong/The Ship - www.facebook.com

As mentioned below The Ship (or Y Llong to give its Welsh name) is a pleasant looking stone fronted pub set into a small row of shops just off the harbour, in the small town of Porthmadog, which was made a Grade II listed building in September 2005. It has both the Welsh and English pub names on the front of the pub and for those that can’t read at all, the pub sign is a model ship above the front door. I guess this may have been for the benefit of the sailors as this pub and the sign date back to when the port used to export Welsh slate all over the world. However these days most, if not all boats in the harbours are privately owned pleasure vessels. Internally it is has two main rooms, a Snug room to the left, the main lounge room with bar to the right and then a separate dining room behind the main bar on the right. It has a focus on food and we utilised it both at lunchtime and in the evening for this purpose and the meals were good and reasonably priced on both occasions. But the benefit for me was also a decent range of Ales available on four hand pumps in this independent freehouse. For our visits these were Sharps Doombar, St Austels Tribute, Moorhouse Pride of Pendle and an excellent Castle Rock Harvest Pale. For a visitor it was a bit of a disappointment that the range did not include any local ales, especially anything from the excellent Purple Moose brewery down the road. But the gentlemen who I assumed to be the Landlord explained that his policy was to have a range of regularly changing regional ales that locals don’t find regularly, so in that respect fair enough. I’m not sure if this is the same gentleman referred to below, but this one was a very self-opinionated Lancastrian from whom you would get the impression from his conversation with another customer who was an Australian visitor that the current English Cricket team is a one man Jimmy Anderson team with no contribution from any Yorkshiremen. But he runs a decent pub with good Ales and food and I wouldn’t hesitate to utilise it again when next in the area.