Anglesey
— — a low green island the sea keeps close.
Not only on a wall.
“An island the Welsh call Ynys Môn, lying off the Snowdonia coast across a narrow strait that two old bridges step over. The interior is flat farmland and hedgerow, ringed by cliffs at South Stack and long sand at Newborough. Buzzards work the fields. The light is sea-light, even ten miles inland. Travellers come for the lighthouse, the puffins, the neolithic tomb at Bryn Celli Ddu — and for the quiet that an island holds even when the carpark fills. from the studio
Anglesey, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Anglesey, Welsh Ynys Môn, is an island of about 711 square kilometres separated from mainland Wales by the Menai Strait. It has been crossed since 1826 by Thomas Telford's Menai Suspension Bridge and since 1850 by Robert Stephenson's Britannia Bridge, the second rebuilt as a road-and-rail deck after a fire in 1970. The administrative county seat is Llangefni; Holyhead, on the smaller Holy Island to the west, runs the ferry to Dublin. Population sits near 69,000, mostly Welsh-speaking in the rural north.
The island carries some of the oldest worked stone in Britain. Bryn Celli Ddu, a Neolithic passage tomb near Llanddaniel Fab, was built roughly 5,000 years ago on the line of an earlier henge; on the summer solstice the rising sun reaches down its passage to the back chamber. A few miles east stands Barclodiad y Gawres, with its incised spiral stones. The bedrock itself is older still, Precambrian schists exposed along the South Stack cliffs that pre-date almost everything walked above.
Most visitors arrive over the Britannia or Menai bridges from Bangor and head first for South Stack, where a 400-step descent reaches the lighthouse and an RSPB reserve with puffins, razorbills and guillemots from April through July. Newborough Forest and Llanddwyn Island take an afternoon. The coastal path runs 125 miles around the whole island and is walkable in a week. Ferries from Holyhead reach Dublin in just over three hours. The island is busiest in August; April and September give the same coastline with half the cars.