In the Land of Giants by Adams Max;

Author:Adams, Max; [Adams, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

CWM LLAN

ASIDE FROM the fact that my great-grandfather Alf Richmond died in a boating accident off Cemaes Bay in 1895, my knowledge of Anglesey’s history is limited to a line in Bede, a couple of entries in the Annales Cambriae and a vague idea that the Romans believed it to be an Island of Druids. It inhabits an exotic corner of the imagination, fortified by the Menai Strait and cut off from the rest of the world, as Sicily is from Italy or as Britain is from Europe. Its reputation as a bastion of Welsh identity gives one, perhaps, the sense that Anglo-Saxons are not welcome; that this ancient and magical land of mists and wizards, defended by fierce tidal races, wishes to keep itself to itself.

The gossipy Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola commanded a campaign of conquest in Britain during the late first century, records that when confronted with the Menai Strait and with no fleet at hand, the general hand-picked troops trained in specialist assault and had them swim across to the island of Môn.54 The enemy, he says, were so awestruck by the sight of swarms of amphibious semi-clad soldiers that they lost their heads and surrendered their island fortress without resistance.

We had seen the lights of Holyhead, one night, from the helm of Eda Frandsen, the Dublin ferries coming and going ahead of us in a blaze of lights. Now, in the second half of August 2014, Sarah and I crossed Thomas Telford’s stupendous Menai Bridge on a small local bus—the twin arches that pierce the bridge’s superstructure so narrow that there was barely more than a couple of inches’ clearance on either side—and found ourselves deposited at a crossroads near the village of Moelfre on the island’s north-east coast. I wanted to start my journey among the Britons at a suitably evocative spot: the ruins of a stone-built native village called Din Lligwy. In August the back lanes of Anglesey’s rolling hills are choked with holiday traffic: refugees from the bustle of Manchester and Liverpool who succeed annually in bringing city-centre traffic chaos with them. The campsites are more like car and caravan rallies, with armies of marshals, electronic gates and myriad notices forbidding this and that. We poor pilgrims on foot were as invisible as sewer rats.

We found Din Lligwy hidden in a copse of trees, like some sacred grove, on a small limestone rise not far from the site of a medieval chapel now inhabited only by cows and crows. Din Lligwy must have been the settlement of an elite family: the massive neatness of the stone foundations which survive tell of wealth and architectural pretension; the trapezoidal curtain wall, of privacy; the setting, of a deep sense of belonging in the landscape. The site, covering perhaps an acre internally, may have been inhabited since the Iron Age: two houses are perfectly circular in the pure native tradition of the British West, but the long rectangular buildings which nestle against the inside

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