POWER PLAY
Beyond Cemaes we found hillsides with beautiful colours, soft under the sun dipping towards The Skerries, Holyhead Bay and the Irish Sea.
Under the purple heather and yellow gorse, the blue-green earth is a reminder of the hugely rich copper mines that used to dot Parys Mountain – and nearby you’ll find Port Amlwch, a tiny cove that can’t have changed much since Amlwch was a boomtown, with a population bigger than Cardiff’s, from where the copper was shipped, and where a wooden-hulled three-masted sailing ship is now pulled up tight under the harbour wall on the low tide.
Down the coast from Amlwch driving back towards Beaumaris, Moelfre is another pretty seaside village on a notorious coast.
In 1859 the Royal Charter became just one of the many shipwrecks near here, lost while returning from Australia to Liverpool heavily laden with gold, with only 45 saved from the crew of 490 and a big enough story at the time that Charles Dickens visited the scene.
There’s been a lifeboat at Moelfre since 1830 and there’s a statue to Coxswain Dic Evans who died in 2001 and who was one of many heroic Moelfre lifeboat men. It’s a wonderful bronze, by Sam Holland, and unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 2004. You could easily drive the whole island in a day, but with three, there’s time to enjoy another quiet supper in Beaumaris’s Olde Bull’s Head.
One must-do en route to Holyhead is a stop at a little railway station just outside Menai Bridge, on the old A5 past Anglesey’s statue of Lord Nelson. The station is famous simply for its name – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn
drobwlllantysiliogogogoch (what the locals call Llanfair PG) – invented by a local tailor in 1880 to attract visitors as the longest place name in Britain! And if you’re wondering, it means ‘the church of St Mary’s in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of St Tsillio’s church by the red cave’. It’s a tiny place…
The A55 dual-carriageway runs to Holyhead now, but the old A5 is more interesting if you don’t have a boat to catch. That’s still the main reason for going to Caergybi, but go beyond and there’s the Breakwater Country Park with its old brickworks, and Holyhead Mountain.
The breakwater itself is astonishing – the longest in the world when it was completed, after 28 years work, in 1873. It’s now a magnet for fishermen and power-walkers by the vast harbour that could once shelter more than a hundred ships at a time during a storm.
That’s the power of Victorian engineering.
The power of Anglesey.