About Ramsey
A guide to staying in Ramsey
Ramsey sits at the north end of the Isle of Man, on a wide bay at the point where the mountains give out and the flat northern plain begins. It is the largest town in the north of the island and it feels like a working town rather than a resort — a harbour with boats sitting on the mud at low water, a compact centre of small shops that are open year round, and a long beach running north towards the Point of Ayre.
Mooragh Park is the town's set piece: a Victorian park laid out in the 1880s on reclaimed land, with a large boating lake at its centre and the promenade along its seaward edge. South of the harbour, the iron Queen's Pier reaches out across the sands — built in 1886, when steamers landed passengers directly onto it rather than into the harbour.
The town is on the TT Mountain Course. Riders come down through Ramsey, turn at Parliament Square and begin the climb onto the mountain from the edge of town, which makes it one of the better places on the island to watch and one of the busiest during race fortnight. The rest of the year the mountain road out of Ramsey is simply the fastest way to Douglas, and one of the more spectacular drives in the British Isles.
Accommodation here is smaller in scale than the capital and leans self-catering: whole holiday homes in the town and in the farmland and coast around it, and a handful of apartments, several of them on or near the promenade by Mooragh Park. There is also a hotel and a guest house. It suits visitors who want a real town, walkers heading for the northern coast, and anyone happy to drive.