craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, and Driving to Wales.

If on Day Three of our trip we had to cut a lot of planned stops due to unrealistic timing, Day Four was just the opposite. Our ferry would be taking us to Ireland at 2 p.m., but we managed to get a lot out of the morning and lunchtime to visit Wales, and ended up getting a bunch packed into that short time.

We left our hotel in Bangor bright and early and in no time were crossing over the Britannia bridge which connects the island of Great Britain to the isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn). Our first stop was the town with the longest name in Britain, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, for some photos and to stop by the visitors' centre. I was a little worried that the town would be a disappointing, touristy stop (some of the guide books actually said as much), but I thought that the chance to get photos in front of the train station was too tempting to pass up. As it happened, I was very glad we did. Yes, the improbably long name was a 19th century attempt to get the town noticed by tourists, but actual name the locals do use, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, is also pretty long and unpronounceable for English speakers. And while the visitors centre is obviously aimed at tourists (why wouldn't it be?), it was actually a large store that was also the locals' general store for buying all sorts of non-tourism related things. But their selection of Welsh souvenirs was great, and I thought it was a great place to stop—practical for tourists without seeming crassly 'touristy'.

Besides, how can you accuse it of seeming like a tourist trap when you see a notice like this taped on the door? 80% of the population in Anglesey speak Welsh, and the fact that a flyer is being posted in Welsh only means that (1) you're about as deep into authentic Wales as you can get without settling here, and (2), the store is visited by locals as much as it is by tourists, or else they wouldn't bother putting a Welsh flyer here.

The Isle of Anglesey is a great place to visit. Like the north coast of Wales we'd seen the day before, it is a gorgeous combination of sea, mountains, and a ridiculous number of castles. I snapped a photo of the tourist brochures in our hotel: six castles to visit in the area, with their brochures all in a row! The UK generally has a lot of castles, something I was fairly surprised by, because I don't see why the UK should be chock full of castles when in France there aren't nearly so many. It seems paradoxical (Britain being an island and all). In any event, we left Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch for Beaumarais castle, also on Anglesey. We would have liked to have seen the even more impressive Caernarfon Castle if we could have, but we didn't want to get too daring with our schedule as we did have a boat to catch. But already I was becoming convinced that we would take another vacation in Wales some day in the future, so impressed I was at how beautiful a place it is.

After Beaumarais, we began heading towards Holyhead (Caergybi), on the Irish sea (Môr Iwerddon), where our ferry would leave from. The drive around the rural roads of Anglesey was pretty unforgettable, and we saw literally thousands of sheep—but the roads were so hilly and winding that any time we'd see something we wanted a picture of, it would be gone before we could get the camera ready (and the roads were too narrow to dare stopping on). So although we got some of our most beautiful photos in Anglesey, they really don't do the place justice either.

At Holyhead we ate lunch in a bed & breakfast that was also a pub. This was very much a sailors' town, dotted with tattoo parlours and bars, but as our photo from the ship shows (above), it is also very beautiful. We got there plenty early since we didn't want to miss our ship, and so in wandering around we stopped in this old church, which was open to visitors. Even more memorable than the church, though, was the fact that two elderly parishioners were there as volunteers to welcome tourists like us, so they showed us around and chatted a bit.

A trip like ours has the advantage of fitting in an awful lot of sights into a short period of time, but one of the biggest downsides to it is that there is really never any time to talk with people: it's one town to the next, visit, go, visit, go. And we stayed in chain hotels rather than B&Bs because we needed things standardised, easy to reserve, and uniform in order to meet our demanding schedule. So actually getting the chance to talk with ordinary local people, as we did here in Holyhead, was a rare treat for us. Of course they were most delighted by James, but I'll always keenly remember how, in hearing all that we would be visiting on our trip, the old man exclaimed with his melodic Welsh accent, "oh my! You'll have to tell this little one that he'll have seen more of Britain and Ireland than I have!" So it was just by chance that we happened to come across this church on our walk and chat with these folks, but we were glad we did.