Gwynedd Archaeological Trust

Ymddiriedolaeth Archaeolegol Gwynedd

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The Menai Straits 2000 years of history

The Porthesgob ferry crossed at the northern end of the Straits, just at the point where the channel opens to the sea and sand.

The name 'Porthesgob' means 'the Bishop's Ferry', and the ferry remained in the hands of the bishop of Bangor for six hundred years and more. The earliest Anglesey Sheriff’s accounts of 1292 refer to the Bishop’s Ferry. It is very likely, however, that the Porthesgob ferry had plied a route from the headland of Garth to the Dindaethwy shoreline for a considerable time before this. The bishop had extensive interests in the commote of Dindaethwy and maintained a manor there as Treffos where the ferry was listed as one of his assets. An enquiry was made, in 1352, into various rights, freedoms and concessions claimed by the bishop in respect of his boats and many of these were upheld.

The Porthesgob ferry claimed landing places at Gorad y Git and Garth Point on the mainland and at Cadnant, Porth Philip Ddu, Borthwen and as far as Gallows Point on the Anglesey side.

Gorad y Git is the name of a large fish weir on the Straits shoreline on the north-west flank of the headland of Garth, Bangor (Gorad = fish trap). The name, and therefore the weir is attested as early as the 1580s. Nant y Porth (the ferry valley), runs down to the shore nearby. The weir is marked on Greenville Collins’ Coastal Chart of the 1680s with the legend Porthesgob above it. The fishweir is still visible at low tide although encroached upon by oyster beds in the nineteenth century.

Garth Point (Y Garth in 1531, Davies, 1942 48ff) is the northern tip of the headland that lies between Bangor, in the valley of the Adda, and the Menai Straits. The traveller and chronicler, Hyde Hall, in 1810, described the ferry, let by the Bishop of Bangor, with a cottage and half acre of land, as ‘very rough, very inconvenient and very much in need of causeways and altogether destitute of shelter’. The Bishop of Bangor built a high water stone pier in the 1830s and a stone causeway was constructed, adjacent to it with the intention of providing a timber stage at low water level. In the 1850s, the high water pier was extended in timber to provide access to the boats at low water. The construction of the late Victorian pier in the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, saw the transference of the ferry from the Bishop’s interest to the Corporation of Bangor.

Garth Point

Gorad y Git

piers at Garth Point