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The old county of Anglesey is now represented by the new County Borough of Sir Ynys Mons
Some years ago the original writer was drawn by curiosity into an Anglesey village churchyard where a funeral had just taken place. The mourners had departed and a grave-digger was hastily shovelling in the earth on a coffin consisting of a few planks held together so crudely that an excellent view of its contents was obtainable. But the most striking and lugubrious feature of the scene was the pile of earth which had been excavated, a pile from which blackened skulls and bones projected in grim and grotesque confusion. As the man of the spade imperturbably continued with his melancholy task, the writer came away with a feeling that the scene was in one sense highly characteristic of an island which has had no history for more than six hundred years, and seems to have buried its history with its dead.
The impression was strengthened as further acquaintance with Anglesey ripened into interest and affection, and its innumerable monuments of the dimmest and most distant past – from the time when the last of the Druids made their final and despairing stand against the Roman Legions to the day when the last native prices succumbed to the all-conquering Edward I.
This side of Anglesey’s appeal no doubt escapes the attention of those who only know Anglesey from having tried to pronounce “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllchrndrobwll-lantrisiliologogoch” or “done” Beaumaris from the seaside resorts on the mainland, or watched the Holyhead Mountain recede into a purple haze as the Irish mail boat sets its nose for Dublin.
And this, perhaps, is why the guidebooks conspire to tell us that the South Stack, Beaumaris, Red Wharf Bay, the north shore of Menai Strait, and the view of Snowdonia from the Anglesey Monument are “fine”, but the rest of the island is “flat and uninteresting”. Can the holy ground of lost causes ever be really “uninteresting,” even though there is a lack of hills and trees to make a picturesque landscape, and the average visitor is not an antiquarian?
On the Anglesey side of the Menai Straits the first object of interest is Plas Newydd, the stately home of the Marquis of Angelsey, whose family will always be associated with some of the fine feats performed by the British armies in the Napoleonic Wars. The first holder of the title was Lord Paget, who commanded the cavalry in Sir John Moore’s campaign which ended at Corunna and a few years later (as Earl of Uxbridge) held the same command at Waterloo. On that glorious day he led a brilliant charge of the British centre, and in its closing moments received a very severe wound which involved the amputation of a leg. The leg itself received something approaching a public funeral.
On such incidents, both gallant and grotesque, may the visitor reflect as he manfully toils up the hundred and more steps of the Anglesey Column which commemorates the dashing cavalry officer’s exploits. From a height of more than three hundred feet above sea level, the eye then ranges over a panorama which has few rivals in the world. In the southern foreground the Strait winds its way under the wooded fringes of Anglesey itself, the silver ribbon being cut in two places by the Menai Suspension Bridge and the Britannia Tubular Bridge.
The antiquarian, architectural, and we may add, aesthetic gem of this district and indeed the whole island is the beautiful ivy-clad ruin of Beaumaris Castle. Like Conway and Caernarfon, this stronghold is a relic of Edward I’s ruthless determination to subjugate the Welsh, but as a military monument it is not quite so eloquent as its famous neighbours. But with its many towers and walls, swathed in foliage, the five windows of its great Hall, its early English chapel, and, above all, the beautiful greensward which takes the place of its ancient floors, it presents a picture of decayed splendour and mellowed mystery which it would be hard to parallel.
Continuing in north-easterly direction, the next sight in Anglesey in Penmon Priory, whose church contains much characteristic Norman work, though the priory itself was founded in pre-Norman times by St Seriol. A “coast,” in the more impressive sense of the word, only exists between Amlwch and Holy Island, where Holyhead Mountain supplies the sole real elevation in Anglesey, and the “South Stack,” a rocky islet crowned by a famous lighthouse and separated from the mainland by a yawning chasm crossed by a frail suspension bridge furnishes a real thrill. The old frail bridge has been replaced and public access to South Stack was regained in 1998 and the Lighthouse is now open to visitors too, a word of warning though as there are 400 steps down the cliff to the bridge and it seems many more on the way back!
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