Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

When had I been before? Back in 2004, I came to the sand dunes at the south end of the island to visit Newborough. This was home to the “Prichard Jones Institute”, built by a Welsh retailer who was the Jones half of “Dickins and Jones”. The store had an all-you-can eat buffet that impressed me at the age of eleven (when I wanted to eat all I could if I could). With the money made from bug-eyed consumers like me, Jones had in the early years of the twentieth century built a library and reading room for his home town that later needed saving by Restoration. It was a quiet town and an interesting place, but few wanted to vote for it.

  Somewhere further down that southern coast I had also been to stay with an old friend called Peter. Peter is an agent these days. His white cottage was filled with seaside boat-bits and fishing lines, deckchairs and slip-on sandals. I realised that I had never really thought of him as Welsh. We shared a university, a career and friends, but when we went together to Bangor that afternoon, both to be awarded honorary degrees, he got up and thanked everybody in the Welsh language. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t match him. But Peter understood. He had lived here. He may have sounded like a bogus Taff, as I do, but he knew how deeply Welsh Anglesey and the whole region really was.

  At some point in my jumbled past, I also climbed the Parys Mountain. I did this to marvel at the pitted, moonface landscape of the place, and four thousand years of copper mining. The copper mine on Anglesey was once one of the largest in the world. The industry was only brought to an end in our own era. Tacitus recounts that copper was actually the reason the Romans came here to fight the Druids and their bare-breasted woman attendants.

  I was back in Anglesey and Amlwch a few years later. Again, I got a different take on the same place. The deep harbour at Amlwch, once busy with ore transporters, once boasting its own copper currency, was a steep sided tidal hole where I boarded a pilot ship, climbing down a 30-foot ladder in the darkness before dawn, to go out and meet a container vessel on her way into Liverpool.

  What I remember about that adventure, however, was the dash across the countryside in the dead of night, through deep lanes and a maze-like network of narrow roadways, under thick hedges and past sleeping farms, to get to the little port. It seemed to take us forever.

  A tangled, remote place? This was something new to me, and perhaps for many others, because, for the casual visitor, Anglesey is defined by the A55, which forms part of the European route E22, at more than 5000km one of the longest of European roads, starting in Russia and crossing Latvia, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. No wonder the island can feel like an adjunct to a ferry service: a mere last, flat, small thing to be hurried through before you hit the Irish ferry at Holyhead. Ever since Thomas Telford built his suspension bridge, which was, anyway, just part of a great scheme to reduce travel time from 36 hours to 27 and allow Irish MPs easy access to their representations in London, the island seems to have been treated as a staging post, but Anglesey is huge and wild and rural too.

  – FISH TRAP –

  I started in a trap. It looked like a house on a rock, but it was built to be a giant fishing net to gather the herring passing through the Menai Straits, which separate Anglesey from the rest of Wales.

  Ynys Gored Goch, on its island in the middle of the rushing tide to the south of the Menai bridge, doesn’t get as many herring these days. They have always been fickle, herring. They left the Welsh coast long ago. In the Middle Ages they would have blamed witchcraft. Today we rely on climate change. But I had been told that the fish trap still functioned. It was going to provide breakfast at the start of my journey.

  “This place used to be owned by the Bishop of Bangor,” another Peter, the owner, told me as we walked out along a curving sea wall that projected into the strait. “It was largely built 400 years ago. His Grace came here to write his sermons.”

  Bangor is about three miles to the north on the mainland side. I couldn’t imagine the Bishop himself scooping up his breakfast, but he might have had encouraging thoughts on the last supper, or the feeding of the five thousand, or even the fishing of souls.

  I deeply wanted to see the trap in action, but I had come at the wrong stage of the tide and too early in the season. Peter was patient. He explained that we could have opened the oak lock-gates that allowed the water to enter and shut the ones at the other end, thus marooning any fish that entered the trap. But it would have been useless. We might even have opened the wall-gates and released the water, in the hope of stranding our prey on the bare rocks. But we would have been disappointed. There simply were no fish.

  In the early twentieth century, it was fashionable for visitors to cross to the island to enjoy whitebait teas. They would walk down to the shore by a footpath through the Coed Môr woods, ring a bell placed on the shore for the purpose, and a boat would pull out from the island to collect them. But recently the weather had been cold and wet. Thanks to the delayed winter, the fish just weren’t ready to take part in our late medieval industrial hoovering system, even for televisual purposes. Peter regularly caught more than he could gather, but not today.

  I did at least discover my challenge disguised as a message in a bottle bobbing about in the lagoon. And I took a little stroll around this isolated kingdom, poised as it was, halfway between the wooded banks of the mainland and Anglesey Island. The Menai is wholly tidal, with strange currents, and the sea surges in from both ends and makes swirling eddies and dangerous whirlpools on the black, glistening surface. The difficulty of the waters caused the HMS Conway to sink there in 1953 and at times of low tide, it’s said, you can still see the remains.

  Our tour took us round the neat paths and tiny lawns across the little island, and down to what I assumed, from the number of gates, sluices and locks, was an entirely different fish trap to the east. This one was a project in hand. Peter had bought this island in order to conserve and restore it. He escaped here at weekends from a property restoration business he ran in the Wirral. Inside, his main cottage had the proportions of a large boat. Outside there were borders of flowers and neat trees, which overhung whitewashed walls. In the early morning’s blazing sunshine I could have been in Greece.

  Despite the continuous presence of human beings since deepest history (we were close to the point where the Roman legionaries had forded the stream to grapple with the last of the rebellious Welsh) sea birds still behaved as if we had never arrived.

  “Over there in the border,” Peter whispered “you can see the oystercatcher nest.”

  I looked, and in a rough bundle of grass and straw amongst the perennials under the kitchen window sat a couple of coffee-coloured eggs.

  “The mother and father are just over there waiting for us to go.” Peter pointed across at the rocks, where two oystercatchers were bobbing about, 20 feet from where we were standing. “If we go inside, they’ll go back and she can resume sitting, but she won’t do that if we stay here.”

  So we went inside and had a cup of tea. Then we had toast. And some croissants. The oystercatchers returned to their nest and I met Peter’s wife and his friends. And I forgot about the whitebait.

  – PUFFINS –

  My message in a bottle was to try to “spot a puffin”. I am not a twitcher, but I was prepared to make an exception for this bird. It rather excited me. To begin with, the puffin has an exotic, highly-coloured beak. Often the rarest and most inaccessible birds turn out to be drab, unexciting creatures. A puffin is almost a parrot by comparison. In fact one of its nicknames is the ‘parrot of the sea’ or the ‘clown of the sea’.

  Further study revealed that it has a mysterious side too. It lives in burrows; often burrows vacated by rabbits. But it only stays on the land for a short time, around four months, and then only in order to breed. The rest of the year the noble, if tiny, puffin heads off to sea and despite its puny dimensions and slightly fragile, nay delicate, nay ornamental, appearance lives on the wing out in the stormy North Atlantic. No wonder island dwelle
rs thought it was really a form of flying fish and regularly ate it, especially at Lent and on Fridays to avoid meat-prohibition by the Catholic Church.

  Having missed out on whitebait, I suppose I could have eaten a puffin myself. But Welsh puffins are quite properly protected from the most vigorous appetite. Puffins themselves eat fish (I wonder if they are to blame for the lack of herring). They usually catch around 10 fish per trip, though the record in Britain is a whopping 60 fish at once.

  Peter helped me to board a local tourist rib from one of his three or four available slipways or jetties and we shot away. The mountains of Eryri gleamed in the sun. The boat charged up the strait, blasting under the Telford Suspension Bridge, one of the great engineering feats of its time, condemned as ugly by some, but rightly hailed by Southey, the great Romantic poet, as the symbol of the spirit of the age.

  It took 150 men using a pulley system to raise the 23.5-ton chains to the top of the tower in 1826. They had to repeat this 15 times to get the remaining chains in place. Not surprisingly, a large crowd gathered to watch the first being got up and they cheered wildly as the connection was made.

  The bridge is also mentioned in a Lewis Carroll poem in Through The Looking Glass – the White Knight says to Alice:

  I heard him then, for I had just completed my design

  To keep the Menai Bridge from rust

  By boiling it in wine.

  It wasn’t boiled in wine, however, but linseed oil.

  The western bank flashed past. It was lined with large suburban villas lurking in the trees. More rich incomers, I supposed. Bangor swooped by on the south. We bounced on, quickly overhauling a solid-looking, industrial fishing boat.

  “Mussels,” Charlie, my skipper, shouted at me. The Menai Strait’s unique topography is perfect for mussel-farming and Anglesey is home to the country’s biggest mussel farm, providing around three quarters of our farmed mussels. The estuary opened out to either side, the Anglesey shore now sporting low, greenish hills; the landward side stepping back from the coast to higher, blue parapets. To our right, the mound of what appeared to be a tall, domineering island swung into view. It was in fact the peninsula headland of the Great Orme, joined to the mainland by an invisible low spit. I was due to explore that on another occasion.

  Now we hugged the Anglesey coast. Beyond Beaumaris, we shot past a few weathered old industrial buildings and powered on towards the 69 acres of Puffin Island, ninth largest off the coast of Wales, and a long high-backed lozenge, pointing north. This seemed like the obvious place to fulfill my quest.

  On the eastern side we slowed and crept in towards a layered ragged cliff of carboniferous limestone, with the engines gurgling like washing machines. Above us a great rookery of birds swept restlessly back and forth. Charlie shouted out their identities. “Guillemots! Cormorants! Razorbill! Kittiwake!!”

  “Puffins?”

  “No.”

  Things might have been easier 200 years ago when (it has been estimated) 50,000 puffins lived on this island. Gradually the numbers reduced. It was not simply that locals found them a delicacy. The truth was that the island was swarming with rats. By the twenty-first century around only twenty breeding pairs remained. Perhaps to avoid having to rename the place “Rat Island”, the Countryside Council of Wales intervened and set about poisoning the rodents. Whether this encouraged the twenty pairs to continue breeding I do not know.

  “Razorbill! Guillemot! Flamingo!” I was randomly shouting out the names of the other birds, but still I couldn’t spot a “Fratercula”. The puffin’s Latin name means “little brother”, because it clasps its feet together as if in prayer when it takes to the air. The island had been a haven for real monks, big brothers, since the sixth century, but both now seemed to have left.

  It wasn’t a wasted trip. It was a fabulous trip. At the north end we passed close to an exposed ledge, where fat, furry seals lay uncomfortably on the rocks and strained upwards, in inverted ungainly bows, turning their dog-like faces to check us out, like nudists surprised by interlopers.

  Tommy, who had joined us for the journey, voiced his approbation. “I have never seen this,” he said. “I’ve worked on Anglesey for five years now, but I never knew any of this was here.”

  We rounded the northern tip and chugged back, through deeper water, even spotting rare human beings on the eastern cliff top. “You can go as part of a guided tour,’ said Charles, but you’re not supposed to land without permission.”

  He pushed his throttle forward and we roared back to Beaumaris where he put me ashore alongside a flotilla of visiting yachts that seemed to have come from Northern Ireland. “What are you up to, eh?” they shouted.

  “Nothing,” I shouted back through fixed teeth, trying to remain disengaged for the camera.

  There is something satisfying about landing in a seaside town from a boat, as long as you manage to do so safely. On the way back, Charles pointed out the sites of various wrecks that had failed to make the entrance to the strait and come a cropper on the great shallow expanses of sand that ran away towards Bangor. Somewhere out there were the three wrecks that all went down on the same day, December 5th, though separated by many hundreds of years. All these ships lost all hands, save for one person. And that one survivor, spookily, was called Hugh Williams, in each case.

  The only Hugh Williams I know changed his name to Hugh Bonneville, and went on to skipper Downton Abbey. I hope Hugh has the good sense to remember who he really is if he ever finds himself in a winter storm in the Menai Straits.

  The pier where we landed once greeted paddle steamers from the Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company, bringing tourists from the Mersey. I strolled down the springy planks, past the day-trippers and the ice cream guzzlers, and into Beaumaris itself.

  This was my first real encounter with Anglesey on this trip. The town appeared to be a neat Georgian-looking box, but it was built in 1295 to accompany the castle, regarded by many as the pinnacle of James of St George’s career and the low point of Welsh independence. It was part of the ring of iron, the circle of fortresses designed to put us Welsh in our place. Beaumaris Castle is described by many as the most technically perfect castle in Britain.

  Strolling amongst the Lancashire accents, I wondered how many realised that Welsh people themselves were once banned from the town: a sort of outpost in the injun territory, like a cowboy fort. For centuries the Welsh were not allowed to buy property in the borough. Perhaps that’s why they still seemed to keep a low profile.

  A paper poster outside a newsagent’s informed me of the “N.WAKE QUAKE”: a reference I think to the earthquake that had recently rocked Llyˆn in N. Wales. Inside I picked up a glossy magazine that boasted (on its cover) that one of the best places to find puffins in Britain was on South Stack in Anglesey, and I chatted with the proprietress. Olwen happily corrected me on my would-be French pronunciation. The Welsh call it “Bew-mariss” she told me. This was despite the fact that it got its name from the Norman occupiers who in 1300 had thought the site was a rather attractive bog, or “beau marais”.

  Olwen explained that Welsh was her first language. That, despite appearances, and despite the tourists, the incomers and the holiday cottages and English entrepreneurs running power-ribs, restaurants and antique shops, the heart of Anglesey was deeply Welsh. She herself lived outside the town. I don’t think this was because of any old medieval rules, but old habits linger on in rural Wales. The conquest of the late thirteenth century is talked about as if it happened a few months ago. The English are still held to account. Mind you, I would have thought that the French origins of the town’s name might have fingered the real villains: those blasted, avaricious, bastard Normans.

  Olwen was happy to tell me that the only Welsh word I regularly heard in my house: “bach” as in “Griffith bach!” expressed usually in tones of huge sorrow, meant “little”, (I always assume it meant “darl
ing”.) So I was little Griffith whenever I cut the heads off the tulips or broke those windows round the back of my friend’s farm or hit my sister. But I also discovered that if I wanted to find South Stack I would have to follow the coast along the southerly side.

  – SALT-WATER TAFFY –

  I retraced my route, but this time on land, skirting the south shore of the island and taking a bus through the leafy parkland round the back of Plas Newydd – “At the house there is also a Military Museum which contains campaign relics belonging to the first Marquess of Anglesey, mementos of the Battle of Waterloo and the Anglesey leg, ” I read.

  Lord Uxbridge’s famous articulated false leg on show in Anglesey’s stately home was built to replace the original, which became a tourist attraction in Belgium after it was amputated and buried under a willow tree. I would rather have liked to see the hallowed fake limb but we had no time. ITV wouldn’t pay for visits to great houses and, besides, I was meeting a man about some salt.

  I found him waist-deep on an unprepossessing beach. He was peering into an instrument that measured the salinity of the water in his inlet pipe. “Halen Môn” produces an upmarket condiment extracted from the strait. I was a little surprised by this news.

  “Surely, I said, swinging a hand over the horizon, “that’s Caernarfon over there”. They have pipes leading down to the water too, don’t they? Aren’t they, ahem, putting stuff in as opposed to taking it out.”

  David was not fazed. “The water here is exceptionally pure, salty Welsh seawater,” he assured me, “and the action of the strait and the tide rushing through it effectively…” he chose his words carefully “…flushes it out, on a daily basis.”

  We strolled back towards his factory premises. Not bad, considering he originally started with a saucepan on the Aga. Fifteen years before, he had boiled down a pint or so of local seawater to produce some particularly fine-looking crystals; he sold them to a local butcher and now exports to twenty-two countries. David was another incomer. He originally studied at Bangor University across on the mainland, and I congratulated him on staying over to exploit the wild freedoms of Wales.