POWER PLAY
Turning north-east from Thomas Telford’s great Menai Bridge we dropped down from a narrow high street to an even narrower lane by the water’s edge under the Bridge itself – high enough above water to let fully-rigged sailing ships pass under when it was built, as the Admiralty had insisted, and still looking majestic over a shore now dotted with yachts and powerboats and overlooked by houses that remind you of the wealth of Anglesey in its heyday.
Five miles on, hugging the shore, the A545 reaches Beaumaris, where the Straits open to the sea and the great castle has World Heritage Site status. Taking more than 25 years to complete, it was the most technically perfect of the four castles Edward built to control the coast around North Wales – at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and here.
Centred on the castle, Beaumaris is a busy little tourist town. The Green overlooks the water where the castle once had its own harbour; its jetty offers fishing trips and bird-watching trips to Puffin Island, opposite big, elegant terraces of houses (some designed by Joseph Hansom, who also created the Hansom cab) and the imposing Bulkeley Hotel, named for the current owners of Beaumaris Castle.
We stayed just outside Beaumaris, in a setting that could hardly have been more stunning, and as the sun went down we drove on single-track lanes to see the lighthouse guiding ships in the narrow channel to Puffin Island. In the morning we went across country for a day’s adrenaline-pumping on the Anglesey Circuit and a gentler evening tracing the A5025 north towards Cemaes Bay past scatterings of wind turbines, quietly making eco-friendly electric power.