Qualla: Porth Ruffydd Lifeboat Station

Porth Ruffydd Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 17 December 1889, the barque Tenby Castle came apart on the rocks at Penrhos Point in the kind of weather that turned the western cliffs of Holy Island into a graveyard. Eleven of her fourteen crew drowned within sight of land. The Holyhead lifeboat, summoned from the far side of the island, arrived too late; the Holyhead Volunteer Life Brigade, hauling their gear three miles overland from town, could only ferry three men back in a small boat through breaking surf, one trip at a time. Five members of that brigade would eventually receive the RNLI Silver Medal. Three weeks later, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution made a decision in London: never again should rescuers have to travel that far. A new station would be built at the head of the next cove south, at Porth Ruffydd.

Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porth Ruffydd Lifeboat Station: A Cove Chosen in Anger

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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, raisi...

Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porth Ruffydd Lifeboat Station: Fourteen Launches, No Lives

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 l...

Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porth Ruffydd Lifeboat Station: What the Steps Remember

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 remai...

Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0