Anglesey

• 1. Introduction

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  Anglesey sits off the north-west coast of Wales, separated from the mainland by a strip of water at its narrowest just 250 metres wide. It is the largest island in both Wales and the Irish Sea, at 676 square kilometres, and poets have called it by names ranging from Ynys Dywyll, the Dark Isle, to Môn Mam Cymru, Mother of Wales. That last title came from Gerald of Wales, who was noting what farmers had long known: the island fed the nation around it.

  But Anglesey is not simply farmland surrounded by water. It holds a county that ranks second in Wales for Welsh speakers, at 57.2 percent of its population. It contains a geology so varied and rare that UNESCO designated the whole island a Global Geopark in 2015. Its coastline stretches 125 miles and is almost entirely protected as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Its soil holds burial mounds from 7000 BC. Its seabird cliffs shelter puffins, peregrine falcons, and choughs.

  What makes an island of this size and remoteness a place where Roman generals fought druids, where medieval Welsh dynasties built their royal courts, where engineers raised two landmark bridges in a single century, and where the Welsh language has held on longer than almost anywhere else? Those are the questions this documentary will answer, beginning where the island itself begins: in deep time.

• 2. Deep Time, Deep Roots

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  At Aberffraw Bay, a Mesolithic site known as Porth Terfyn was buried beneath a Bronze Age cairn constructed around 2000 BC, yet the material underneath dates to 7000 BC. That is how old human presence on Anglesey is, stretching back to an era when Wales was still recovering from the last ice age, when Britain itself only became hospitable around 12,000 years ago.

  The first villages in Wales were built from around 4000 BC, and Anglesey claims one of the earliest, constructed at Llanfaethlu in the Neolithic period. Long houses rose from the same ground that had supported hunter-gatherers for thousands of years before. At Bryn Celli Ddu, a name meaning Dark Grove Hill, a henge enclosure took shape around 3000 BC and was adapted repeatedly over the next thousand years, eventually becoming the burial mound that stands there today.

  Twenty-eight cromlechs still remain on the island's uplands, many overlooking the sea. The landscape holds menhirs, cairns, and hillforts that trace a continuous human story from Neolithic to Bronze Age to Iron Age. At the Holyhead Mountain Hut Circles, known locally as Tŷ Mawr, ancient Celts were living in roundhouses from around 1000 BC. Limpet shells found on a wall at the site date to 200 BC; Roman-era pottery from the 3rd to 4th centuries AD shows the site was still in use far later. Some of those huts continued to serve agricultural purposes as late as the 6th century AD.

  The first excavation of Tŷ Mawr was conducted by William Owen Stanley of Penrhos, son of Baron Stanley of Alderley, whose work began to reveal the island's layered past to the outside world.

• 3. Druids, Romans, and the Fight for the Island

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  In 60 AD, the Roman general Gaius Suetonius Paulinus brought his army to the shores facing Anglesey with a specific objective: to destroy the power of the druids. He sent his Batavian contingent across the water as a surprise assault, then razed the sacred shrines and the nemeta, the groves that were central to druid practice.

  Suetonius had his victory, but news of Boudica's revolt in the south reached him almost immediately. He pulled his forces back before he could consolidate control, and Anglesey regained a measure of independence. It was not finally absorbed into the Roman Empire until 78 AD, when Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain, completed the conquest.

  Under Roman rule, the island became notable for copper mining. The foundations of Caer Gybi, the fort at Holyhead, are Roman in origin. The road that runs today from Holyhead to Llanfairpwllgwyngyll follows the line of a Roman road. Ptolemy, working from his study of geography, actually grouped the island with Ireland rather than with Britain, an indication of how its position in the Irish Sea shaped outside perceptions of where it belonged.

  Castell Bryn Gwyn, near Llanidan, illustrates how the island's sites accumulated history. A Neolithic monument that became a hillfort, it was used until the Roman period by the Ordovices, the local tribe defeated in battle by a Roman legion around 78 AD. Each era left its mark on the same piece of ground.

• 4. A Kingdom and Its Capital

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  After Rome withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century, pirates from Ireland colonised Anglesey and the nearby Llŷn Peninsula. A Gododdin warlord from Scotland named Cunedda ap Edern arrived to drive them out. The effort continued through his son Einion Yrth ap Cunedda and his grandson Cadwallon Lawhir ap Einion. The last Irish forces were finally defeated in battle in 470.

  During the 9th century, King Rhodri Mawr unified Wales and divided it among his sons. He gave Gwynedd to Anarawd ap Rhodri, who founded the House of Aberffraw on Anglesey. The island's defensible position made it ideal for a royal seat, and Aberffraw became the Llys, the court, of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. Rhodri Mawr moved his family's seat from Caernarfon and built a royal palace at Aberffraw in 873. Aberffraw remained the capital until the 13th century, when improvements to the English navy made the location difficult to defend.

  Devastating Danish raids struck Aberffraw in 853 and again in 968, part of a broader wave of Viking activity that has left traces in the island's very name. Anglesey was briefly the southernmost possession of the Norwegian Empire. The connection to Norse raiders appears in sagas such as the Jómsvíkinga, which recorded voyages through the Menai Strait.

  Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, known as Llywelyn the Great, was styled the Prince of Aberffraw in the 1200s, reflecting the title's ongoing prestige. After the conquest of Wales by Edward I, the island became a county under the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284, its old cantrefi of Aberffraw, Rhosyr, and Cemaes reorganised under English law.

• 5. Beaumaris and the Conquest

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  Prince Madog ap Llywelyn's rebellion in 1294 targeted Edward I's castles across North Wales and forced a direct response. Edward ordered Beaumaris Castle built at the south-eastern corner of Anglesey to secure his control of the island. The construction stretched on, and by the 1320s the build was abandoned, never fully completed.

  The unfinished castle still had a history ahead of it. Owain Glyndŵr besieged it in the early 15th century. By 1609 it was described as ruinous. The 6th Viscount Bulkeley purchased it from the Crown in 1807, and since 1925 it has been open to the public under Crown guardianship. Today it is part of the Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd World Heritage Site.

  The nearby village of Newborough owes its existence directly to the castle's construction. When Edward built Beaumaris, the townsfolk of Llanfaes were relocated to create the site, founding the settlement now called Newborough. That village includes the site of Llys Rhosyr, another court of medieval Welsh princes, featuring one of the oldest courtrooms in the United Kingdom.

  A short distance from the town of Menai Bridge lies Bryn Celli Ddu, the same Stone Age burial mound whose henge enclosure was first built around 3000 BC, completing a thread from prehistoric ritual ground to Norman fortification to modern heritage site within a few miles of each other.

• 6. Bridges, Industry, and the Modern Economy

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  Two bridges span the Menai Strait, and together they transformed Anglesey's relationship with the Welsh mainland. Thomas Telford designed the Menai Suspension Bridge, which opened in 1826. Robert Stephenson designed the Britannia Bridge, originally completed in 1850. The town of Menai Bridge grew specifically to house the workers and materials needed for the first of those crossings; before the bridge, the settlement of Porthaethwy had served as one of the main ferry ports to the mainland.

  Industry followed infrastructure. Amlwch, on the northern coast, grew substantially in the 18th century around the copper mining operation at Parys Mountain. In 1971, a 100,000-ton-per-annum aluminium smelter opened on the island, a joint venture involving Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation, British Insulated Callender's Cables, and Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation as a 30 percent partner. When that smelter closed on the 30th of September 2009, it cut its workforce from 450 to 80, a severe blow to Holyhead in particular.

  Energy has been a recurring theme. The two reactors at Wylfa Nuclear Power Station began producing power in 1971, with construction having started in 1963. One reactor was decommissioned in 2012, the other in 2015. Plans offered in 2013 by Horizon, a subsidiary of Hitachi, proposed a new nuclear plant at the Wylfa Newydd site, with production targeted for the 2020s. On the 17th of January 2019, Hitachi-Horizon announced it was abandoning those plans, stating the decision had cost the company over £2 billion.

  Today tourism is the major economic activity, with agriculture second. Holyhead handles over two million ferry passengers a year, operating routes to Dublin, forming the main surface link from central and northern England and Wales to Ireland. RAF Valley, holding the RAF Fast Jet Training School and 22 Squadron Search and Rescue Helicopters, provides employment to about 500 civilians.

• 7. The Welsh Language Heartland

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  In 1901-91 percent of Anglesey's population spoke Welsh. By 2021 that figure had fallen to 55 percent, a decline measured in each census over more than a century. The county still ranks second in Wales for the proportion of Welsh speakers, and it is considered a heartland of the language.

  The decline is real but the distribution is uneven. Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni, in the interior county town, has 68 percent of pupils speaking Welsh as their first language, with 87 percent sitting their exams through the medium of Welsh. Ysgol Uwchradd Caergybi in Holyhead, the island's largest town and its most outward-facing port community, has just 14 percent of pupils speaking Welsh at home, with 11 percent taught the Welsh First Language curriculum.

  The island hosted the National Eisteddfod in 1957, 1983, 1999, and 2017, each time providing a national stage for Welsh-language culture. Môn FM, a volunteer community radio station, broadcasts across the island and into northern Gwynedd, operating from Llangefni.

  The poetic names for the island reflect how language and identity have long been intertwined here. Ynys Dywyll, the Dark Isle, referenced the sacred groves that the Romans destroyed. Y fêl Ynys, the Honey Isle, spoke to agricultural richness. Môn Mam Cymru, coined by Gerald of Wales, asserted the island's role in sustaining the nation. William Jones, born at Llanfihangel Tre'r Beirdd in 1675, became a mathematician of international standing, a reminder that Anglesey's Welsh-language culture produced figures who moved far beyond the island's shores.

• 8. Geology and Living Landscape

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  Anglesey is the only onshore part of the United Kingdom to contain sediments dated to the Early Middle Miocene period, known as the Langhian. That fact alone gives a sense of what the island's geology represents: a record stretching back far beyond ordinary British rock sequences.

  The foundation of Anglesey is Precambrian rock, appearing at the surface in four separate areas: a western region near Holyhead and Llanfaethlu, a central area around Aberffraw and Trefdraeth, an eastern region including Newborough and Pentraeth, and a coastal strip at Glyn Garth between Menai Bridge and Beaumaris. Above these ancient rocks lie layers from the Ordovician, Carboniferous, and other periods, all folded, faulted, and in places metamorphosed. Parys Mountain, a patch of rhyolitic and felsitic rock, is where copper and iron ochre have been worked since prehistoric times.

  Under the name GeoMôn, the island joined the European Geoparks Network in 2009 and the Global Geoparks Network in September 2010, before receiving UNESCO Global Geopark designation in 2015. The geology attracts field trips from schools and colleges across Britain.

  The living landscape above those rocks supports two of the UK's remnant red squirrel colonies, at Pentraeth and Newborough. The cliffs at South Stack near Holyhead provide nesting sites for large numbers of auks including puffins, razorbills, and guillemots, alongside choughs and peregrine falcons. The bird populations of the Afon Cefni estuary at Malltraeth were made internationally known through the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe, who lived and died at Malltraeth on the Cefni estuary. The Anglesey coastal path, 124 miles long and touching 20 towns and villages, begins at St Cybi's Church in Holyhead and traces the full outline of this island where geology, ecology, and human history have been layered, one on top of another, for seven thousand years.