Anglesey

We crossed onto Anglesey over the Menai Suspension Bridge, which is its own small piece of history — Thomas Telford’s bridge from 1826, one of the first major suspension bridges in the world, and you barely notice you’ve crossed water at all until you glance down and see the strait running fast beneath you. The island on the other side felt immediately different from the mainland — flatter, quieter, more exposed to the sky, farmland running right up to low cliffs and beaches that stay mostly empty even in summer.

Of course we stopped at the village everyone stops at. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch — I’m not going to pretend I can say it, and neither could Lia after three increasingly hysterical attempts in the car park — has the full 58-letter name painted across the train station sign specifically because some 19th-century locals wanted to draw tourists, and it’s still working. We bought the obligatory platform ticket with the name stamped on it, took the obligatory photo under the sign, and honestly enjoyed the silliness of it more than I expected to.

But the island earns its keep well beyond the pun of a name. We drove out to Bryn Celli Ddu, a Neolithic burial chamber older than Stonehenge, sitting quietly in a field with a single standing stone inside the mound and almost nobody else around — no gift shop, no queue, just a low stone passage you duck through into a small chamber that people were using for something ceremonial roughly five thousand years ago. It’s a strange kind of quiet, standing inside something that old with sheep grazing right outside.

We finished the day out at South Stack, on the far western edge of the island near Holyhead, where a lighthouse sits on its own little islet connected by a steep staircase and a footbridge. The cliffs there were loud with seabirds — guillemots and razorbills packed onto the ledges — and the wind coming off the Irish Sea was strong enough that Lia grabbed my arm on the steps down, half for balance and half, I think, just because the whole scene felt dramatic enough to warrant it.

When to go: Late spring to early summer is best if you want the seabird colonies at South Stack in full swing; for a quiet, empty-beach kind of visit, September works just as well and the water’s still warm enough to wade in.