Y Traeth

The pitch at Y Traeth sits on ground that was not there in 1810. The land was taken from the sea in 1811, when the embankment known as the Cob was built across the estuary, and the Welsh name the ground carries — "the beach", or the sand spit — is a plain description of what the site used to be.

Football arrived on it later, but not much later by the standards of the sport. Porthmadog F.C., founded in 1872 and among the oldest clubs in Britain, was playing on the site from the end of the nineteenth century. For decades it did so as a tenant: the ground belonged to the Tremadog Estate. That changed in the 1952–53 season, when the club bought the land outright, and the name Y Traeth became the official one. It has had no other name since.

The ground holds 3,000 and has always been a grass pitch. The address, Snowdon Street, points to what the setting does to the football played here — the ground lies low, open, on reclaimed flats between the mountains of Gwynedd and the water, and sides visiting from further inland tend to find that out early. Teams have played in driving rain here more often than most.

Porthmadog now compete in the Ardal North West, and Y Traeth remains the club's home, the same enclosure it has occupied for more than seventy years as owner and longer still as occupant.