Holy Island, Anglesey

In our holiday to Anglesey, we’ve been to Holy Island. We’ve been there before, at South Stack Cliffs and it’s a beautiful place. This time we’ve explored the island a little bit more. The main city is Holyhead, located halfway up on Anglesey’s west coast. The Island was a landing point between Ireland and Britain for almost 4,000 years. The name Holy Island comes from the incredible amount of standing stones and burial chambers found on the island.

My favourite location on Holy Island was Porth Dafarch Beach, owned by The National Trust. It opens out to the Irish Sea. We found it by chance, while we were driving around the island. The sand is beautiful, the water was warm, it was a wonderful surprise.

From this beach we could go on a kayaking trip, but it looks pretty rocky for an inflatable kayak, as it’s ours. It’s a shame as the water is only a couple of meters away from the car park.

We’ve also visited the Holyhead mountain Hut Circles, they are part of CADW. Opposite the circle is a free car park, only a few minutes away from South Stack Cliffs, so if you want to visit the nature reserve or the lighthouse, stop at the circles too.

At the Hut Circle are the remains of 50 dry stone buildings. Many of them were excavated in 1860s, others in the 1970s. The remains date from Iron Age to Roman Times. The houses were round and only the foundation was stone, the rest was made up of wood.

The Lighthouse is visible in the background.

May is the breeding season for Puffins and Guillemots. They are stacked together to protect the eggs. It’s quite intriguing how they manage to raise their chicks in such a tough environment.

I think they are so cute. When they are not staying on the cliffs, they would go offshore to fish and they will also spend time relaxing on the water.

Other birds will try to steal their eggs. It was luck (maybe luck is not the best way to describe this) to see the stealing crow. But this is how nature works and the crow has its own chicks to think about.

After seeing the birds and the coast, we head up to Holyhead mountain.

The scenery is amazing, the lakes and the seagulls, the Irish Sea, the mountains. It’s a beautiful place.

There are plenty of circular walks, I would like to try . We didn’t complete any as we were not prepared. We had no idea how long it would take to complete them.

I mentioned the name of the island comes from its religious artifacts. This is just one of them, the Penrhos Feilw standing stones.

The stones might have been set up in early Bronze Age, this means the period between 2000 – 1500 BC. I would say the stones are 10 feet or 3 meters in height, comparing to my size. I looked on the CADW’s website and I was right. It’s quite impressive to see them. On the other side of the road there is another monument, the Plas Meilw Hut Circles. I didn’t see them.

Holy Island is beautiful, there are lots of interesting things to see, birds at the RSPB nature reserve, there are museums and beautiful beaches, mountain and an amazing coast. Have you been to Holy Island?