Llanfaelog

Lake paths and a dry village

Llyn Maelog is the only lake in Wales with official Village Green status, a designation handed out by the community council. It sits on the south-west edge of the village, 59 acres of reed-fringed freshwater, and you can walk most of the way round it in about half an hour. The southernmost shore is the exception; the footpath there links east to Llanfaelog and west into Rhosneigr. Grebes, tufted duck, pochard, shelduck and swans use it. So does toxic blue-green algae, so keep the dog out of the water.

The village has no pub. CAMRA lists none, and the wider community — Tŷ Croes, Bryn Du, Pencarnisiog — is essentially dry. For a drink you go down the A4080 into Rhosneigr.

Rhosneigr food and open-coast surf

The Oyster Catcher sits on the shore of the lake, directly across from the roadside parking, and calls itself the ultimate beach side venue and an iconic Anglesey landmark. It was built originally as a training restaurant. The food is seafood-led, with a beer garden looking over the water. Sandy Mount House does the upscale version a short way off, a beach house with rooms and the chef Hefin Roberts in the kitchen.

The coast is about a mile south-west. Traeth Llydan — Broad Beach — is one of the better surfing beaches in Wales and a serious kitesurf and windsurf spot; Traeth Cymyran is quieter; Porth Trecastell, or Cable Bay, is sheltered with rock pools. Boards and windsurf hire are down at the beach. A surfing guide to Anglesey rates "Rhosneigr on a 4ft NW swell in October, five people in the water, storm light, cold air" as genuinely good cold-water surfing.

Cable Bay and the Giantess’s Apronful

Cable Bay is named for a telegraph cable laid in 1902, which ran from the beach across the Irish Sea to Ireland and on to the United States. It was abandoned long ago. The name is the only part still working.

Above the bay stands Barclodiad y Gawres, the Giantess's Apronful — the folk name imagines a giantess dropping a load of stones from her apron. It is the largest Neolithic burial chamber in Wales, a cruciform passage grave with carved stones of spirals, zig-zags and chevrons that match the tombs of the Irish Boyne Valley. When excavators opened it in the 1950s they found a fire in the central chamber onto which a stew of wrasse, eel, frog, toad, grass snake, mouse, shrew and hare had been poured, then capped with limpet shells. Cadw opens the interior from time to time.

Shipwreck memory and practical connections

St Maelog's church, rebuilt in 1848, has a churchyard that keeps turning back to the sea. It holds shipwreck graves, six war graves, and the victims of an aircrash off the coast in 1941 buried alongside the police and soldiers who died trying to reach them. There is also a barrel mortuary, a store where unidentified bodies washed up from wrecks were kept until someone could name them. Many of the parishioners buried here were fishermen.

Tŷ Croes and Rhosneigr stations are both a couple of minutes away on the Holyhead line, the village sitting roughly between them; the A4080 meets the A55 at Junction 5. Buses run, occasionally, to Llangefni.

Life beneath the fast jets

RAF Valley is a few miles north, so fast jets pass overhead often, and the village carries on underneath them.