Cove, church and headland
Llaneilian
A scattered coastal parish shaped by Porth Eilian, St Eilian's medieval church and the walks around Point Lynas.
- Best for
- Coastal walking, medieval church detail and wildlife watching
- Give it
- A coast-and-church day
- Don't miss
- The painted skeleton above St Eilian's rood screen
Photo: Christine Courtney · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
Come for the cove, stay for the church
Llaneilian has no conventional village centre; its appeal lies in a sheltered cove, an exceptional medieval church and a wildlife-rich headland.
Porth Eilian, St Eilian's Church and Point Lynas give this spread-out parish a clear focus. The short circular walk ties low cliffs and farmland to the former slate quarry, old telegraph station and lighthouse, while Amlwch and Parys Mountain add the nearby copper story.
Where to go
Places in Llaneilian
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesLlaneilian Circular Walk
A roughly 2.1-mile route over low cliffs and farmland, passing Porth Llaneilian, a former slate quarry, the old telegraph station and Point Lynas lighthouse.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours 30 minutes
- Locality
- starting near St Eilian's Church
- Access
- The route is moderate and includes a challenging hill with a potentially difficult descent.
Amlwch Port
A historic harbour for the area's maritime and mining story, with the Copper Kingdom Centre nearby and access to the coastal path.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Amlwch Port
Parys Mountain
Walks around the multicoloured Great Opencast of the 18th-century copper mine, once the largest copper mine in the world.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours
- Locality
- above Amlwch
Walks & outdoors
1 place
Point Lynas Lighthouse
A short headland walk to the low 1835 lighthouse, with clear-day views towards the Isle of Man and opportunities to watch marine life and coastal birds.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Point Lynas headland
History & heritage
2 placesSt Eilian's Church (Eglwys Sant Eilian)
A Grade I church with a 12th-century tower and pyramidal spire, a late-medieval rood screen and a painted skeleton holding a scythe above it.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- the village core by the church and cove
St Gwenllwyfo's Church
A Grade II* mid-19th-century church by Henry Kennedy of Bangor, containing 15th- and 16th-century Flemish stained glass.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Dulas
Things to do
1 placePorth Eilian (Traeth Eilian)
A sheltered sand-and-shingle cove with a slipway, identified for kayaking, sailing, diving, rock-pooling and wildlife watching.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- the north-east corner of Anglesey
- Access
- The cove has a slipway used for kayaking, sailing and diving.
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Three ways to explore Llaneilian
Signature outings
Porth Eilian's cove
Spend time at the sand-and-shingle cove, where the slipway is used for kayaking, sailing and diving and the pools draw rock-poolers.
St Eilian's medieval detail
Begin with the 12th-century stone tower, then look inside for the oak rood screen and its painted skeleton holding a scythe.
Point Lynas lighthouse
Follow the short coastal walk to the low 1835 lighthouse and watch for seals, porpoises and coastal birds from the point.
The village story
Llaneilian Village Guide
A cove-led guide to a scattered Anglesey parish, its exceptional medieval church and the coast around Point Lynas.
The cove and scattered parish
Porth Eilian is a sheltered sand-and-shingle cove with a slipway, and on a decent day you'll find kayaks going in, people diving, and children turning over rocks in the pools. It sits on the north-east corner of Anglesey, and it is more or less the centre of gravity for a place that otherwise doesn't have a centre.
Llaneilian is a scattered parish rather than a village. The houses spread out among a handful of hamlets — Dulas, Penysarn, Pengorffwysfa, Nebo — with the church and the cove at one end and no obvious middle. There are no shops, no cafés and no pub. For all of that you go to Amlwch, about 2.2 miles west along the minor lanes off the A5025, where there's a harbour, a kiosk selling ice creams by the free car park, and the Copper Kingdom heritage centre.
The church worth the walk
So the reason to be here is the coast and the church, and the church is worth the walk.
St Eilian's is Grade I listed and reckoned the best-preserved of Anglesey's medieval Celtic churches. The stone tower with its pyramidal spire is 12th century; the nave and chancel were rebuilt in the 15th. What people come to see is the rood screen and loft from around 1500, oak, with a skeleton painted on the coving above it. The skeleton holds a scythe, and beside it runs a banner reading "Colyn Angau yw Pechod" — "Sin is the sting of death." The roof beams end in carved wooden angels, some of them playing flutes and bagpipes.
Parish relics and the pilgrim well
There is also a pair of 18th-century wooden dog tongs, used to remove disruptive dogs from services, and a 1667 iron-bound alms chest for pilgrims' offerings.
The pilgrims came for Ffynnon Eilian, a holy well at the foot of a seaside outcrop where people once knelt for cures for ague, fits and scrofula. The offerings it collected were said to fund two farms that kept the church going.
The circular walk to Point Lynas
The walking is the other draw. The Llaneilian Circular is about 2.1 miles, starting near the church and crossing low cliffs and farmland — moderate, with one hill the guides describe as a challenging descent. It takes in the old slate quarry, an 1841 telegraph station, and the lighthouse out at Point Lynas.
Point Lynas is a short walk in its own right. The 1835 lighthouse stands high enough on the headland that it needed almost no tower, and from the point you can see the Isle of Man on a clear day. It's a good spot for grey seals and porpoises, and for chough, ravens and oystercatchers overhead. The keeper's cottages are let as holiday accommodation now.
Coastal path and saint's legend
The whole coastline falls within the Anglesey Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the Coastal Path runs through, linking Porth Eilian west toward Amlwch Port and east toward Dulas Bay.
By legend, the saint was granted as much land as his pet doe could cover in a day. A greyhound killed the doe, so Eilian cursed the ground: no greyhound could be kept there afterwards. Whether the dog tongs were a precaution, the record doesn't say.
Stay around Anglesey
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Anglesey, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Point Lynas Lighthouse - geograph.org.uk - 3179373.jpg — photograph by Christine Courtney; Point Lynas Lighthouse by Christine Courtney. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Porth Eilian (Traeth Eilian) — visitmidwales.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Eilian's Church (Eglwys Sant Eilian) — coflein.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Llaneilian Circular Walk — visitanglesey.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Point Lynas Lighthouse — trinityhouse.co.uk other published source
- Amlwch Port — visitanglesey.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Parys Mountain — visitanglesey.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Gwenllwyfo's Church — cadwpublic-api.azurewebsites.net other published source