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More About the Llŷn Peninsula

Drive west until the road runs out. That is Aberdaron, a village on its own beach at the end of everything, with Bardsey Island two miles offshore across a tide race. Pilgrims walked here for a thousand years to make that crossing.

Pwllheli is the market town, with the harbour and the end of the coast railway. Abersoch is where the boats are. Criccieth and Porthmadog sit at the neck, where the peninsula meets the mountains of Eryri, better known in English as Snowdonia. It is about thirty-five miles end to end, and the sea is never far off on either side.

Two miles off the end of the peninsula lies a small island: Ynys Enlli in Welsh, Bardsey Island in English. The Welsh name means the island in the currents, and the sea between it and the mainland still runs hard enough to strand a boat for days.

Around the year 516 a nobleman called Cadfan crossed from Brittany, on the north-west coast of France, and founded a monastery there, said to be the first in Britain. By the Middle Ages it was held that three journeys to Enlli were worth one to Rome, and Rome was the greatest journey a Christian could make.

Pilgrims walked to it along a road now called the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way. It runs about a hundred and thirty-four miles from Holywell in the north-east, marked the whole way by churches and holy wells. Its last stretch comes down the Llŷn from Clynnog Fawr, where St Beuno founded a church in the seventh century.

The walking stopped at Aberdaron, and the waiting began: for the tide, for the wind, for a boatman willing to try the crossing. So many chose to be buried on the island that it was called the resting place of twenty thousand saints.

You can walk that road today, and much of it is waymarked. The church at Clynnog Fawr stands right beside the main road, far bigger than the village around it needs.

The wells and the smaller churches are still strung out along the lanes west of it, and the coast path now runs the whole way round the peninsula. You can pick it up in any village.

The island has had one more improbable turn. In 2023 it was named an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, the first in Europe. Its own mountain blocks the mainland’s glow, and the nearest serious light is Dublin, seventy miles off across the sea.

People still cross the sound for much the same reason the pilgrims did. The difference is that most of them now go to look up.