The old Liverpool Dock Trustees station at Gronant had been on the wrong side of the Point of Ayr since 1826. The Trustees had chosen Gronant because the Prestatyn Gulley offered deep water for the launching carriage, but the boathouse had sat in the dunes and taken regular damage from storm tides. When the RNLI took over all the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board lifeboat stations on 1 July 1894, the surveyors took one look at the Gronant boathouse and recommended relocation. Two miles east lay Talacre Beach, beside the Point of Ayr lighthouse - the headland that gave the station its name, even though it had not actually been at the point itself for the previous sixty-eight years. The old station closed on 30 September 1894. The No. 1 lifeboat was kept for alterations; the No. 2 boat was sold from service.

The land for the new station came from Sir Pyers William Mostyn, 9th Baronet, whose family had held estates across north Flintshire for centuries. He offered a site near the lighthouse keepers' cottages, and the RNLI built two further cottages there to house the coxswain, second coxswain, and their families, at a cost of £970. The new boathouse, slipway, and launching arrangements ran the total bill up to £1,586-7s-2d - precise to the shilling and tuppence in the formal RNLI ledger - and the station opened formally in April 1895. The lifeboatmen's cottages still stand on the dunes among the holiday caravans, recognisable by their stone walls and the small RNLI cipher above the doors. The boathouse itself was extensively modified in later twentieth-century use after the station's closure.

Three lifeboats served the station across its twenty-nine years. The Rochdale (ON 126), a thirty-four-foot self-righting boat funded by the Rochdale Lifeboat Fund and previously stationed elsewhere, served briefly from 1894 to 1895 while the new boathouse was completed. The H. G. Powell (ON 380), christened by Miss Powell with that champagne bottle, was a thirty-five-foot non-self-righting Liverpool-class pulling and sailing boat that served from 1895 to 1916. The John Groome (ON 460), of the same Liverpool design, took over from 1916 to 1923. All three were pulled by oar and sailed under canvas - no engines, no propellers. The station never received a motor lifeboat. By the time motor power was the standard, the case for keeping Point of Ayr open had been overtaken by events.

The reason for the 1923 closure was simply that there was less work. The shipping that had filled the Liverpool approaches in the nineteenth century had been mostly wooden sailing vessels - schooners, brigs, and barques - all dependent on wind and tide and frequently driven aground on the sandbanks when conditions turned. By the 1920s those vessels had been largely replaced by steam-powered iron ships that could make headway against the same gales that would have wrecked their predecessors. The number of strandings dropped. The RNLI reviewed its station coverage along the north Wales coast and decided that the lifeboats at Hoylake, New Brighton, and Rhyl could now cover the area without a dedicated station at the Point. Point of Ayr Lifeboat Station closed in 1923.

Today the lighthouse keeper's cottages and the lifeboat cottages survive together in the dunes at Talacre, a short walk inland from the iron sentry figure that an artist installed in the surf in front of the disused 1776 Point of Ayr lighthouse. The former boathouse has been adapted to other uses across the intervening century. The Mostyn Arms - where Miss Powell took her tea in 1895 - still operates as a country pub in Mostyn village inland. Nothing dramatic survived of the station's working life. There were no famous rescues, no medals, no memorial of disaster. Just twenty-nine years of quiet duty by the lighthouse, twenty-nine years of crew turnouts in the wind, and then the obsolescence that came when ships stopped piling onto the sands.