The cost was £1,320 for a boathouse described in the records as the finest on that coast. The lifeboat itself came from a different sort of fund altogether. Mr and Mrs Norbury of Bowdon, near Altrincham, ran a small charitable engine of their own, the Norbury Lifeboat Fund, raising money through collections, sales of work, and amateur theatricals in the parish halls of Cheshire. For Porth Ruffydd they had also received an anonymous gift of £700, which covered most of the bill. Watkins & Co. built the boat to a standard 34-foot pulling-and-sailing self-righting pattern: ten oars, two masts, room for the crew that would mostly be carried down from Holyhead when the rocket went up. On 6 August 1891, Mrs Norbury named her Norbury (ON 297) at a Holyhead ceremony, watched her capsized twice in the inner harbour to prove she would right herself, and the boat sailed for her new station.

The first call came on 19 November 1893, to the steamship SS Theresa. The lifeboat was not required. The second, on 12 October 1894, was to a Norwegian vessel called Eugenie, aground on Ramon Rocks; she was helped clear and refloated. So it went, for thirteen years. The Norbury launched fourteen times. She rescued the dignity of one or two refloated cargoes. She never saved a single life. The geography that had made the new station necessary made it almost useless in the same breath. By the time the alarm reached Holyhead and the off-station crew could be brought down to Porth Ruffydd, most casualties in those waters were already past saving. In 1904, after a quiet review of service figures, the RNLI committee closed the station. The Norbury was broken up. Her crew, never permanent residents of the cove, dispersed back to Holyhead.

The boathouse stood empty above the small beach for another ninety-three years. Photographs from the 1920s show it intact, slate-roofed, the slipway still leading down into the kelp. By the 1990s the slates were gone and the walls were going. In 1997 it was demolished. What remains today is the flight of stone steps that once ran from the cliff path down to the boathouse door, ending now at nothing. Walkers on the Anglesey Coastal Path pass them without always knowing what they were for. The cove faces southwest into the prevailing weather; on a winter day the swell still hammers against Penrhos Point exactly as it did in 1889. The station was a monument as much as a rescue post: built in grief, paid for by strangers in Cheshire, manned with the best equipment of the age, and quietly defeated by distance and tide.