Very few are the old travellers or modern writers who have a good word to say for Anglesey. It is “flat, dull, monotonous, barren, treeless, wind-swept,” and many more things expressed by adjectives in the uncomplimentary sort; but will the present historian be credited when, with his hand upon his heart, and if necessary—should his bare word not be held to deserve credit when opposed to that bulk of damnatory evidence—his lips upon the Book he declares that Anglesey is none of these things? A recent traveller finds in the word “Mona” what he calls a “soft-sounding name, well suited to the present aspect” of the island. What does he mean? “In all the bare, flat fields,” he continues, “you scarcely see a tree.” To this the returned traveller from Anglesey may reply, in the inelegant but expressive schoolboy phrase, “What rot!” But then that writer traversed Anglesey by train, as he confesses, and therefore has no locus standi in topographical criticism. Probably the others explored the island as little as he.

It is a high table-land of an island, mounted atop of rugged cliffs for a goodly part of its jagged and irregular circumference, and divided athwart by the Malldraeth Marsh, a valley almost deep enough to admit the sea, which would in that case divide the isle in two unequal parts. Even the modern and easy high road, made by Telford in 1825 for a direct line from Menai Bridge to Holyhead, is by no means flat; while the old coach road is not only hilly but mountainous. Along its course lies Penmynydd, whose very name, meaning “mountain-head,” should have checked the pen that talked of flatness in Anglesey. This was the place where the mails and the stages were commonly upset: the place that so alarmed London coachmen imported for the duty of driving the mails, that they refused to remain. Penmynydd is the worst spot on that old road, but hills along its course are the almost invariable rule, and flat stretches the very infrequent exceptions.

Now as to the barrenness of Anglesey. That is a contention no Anglesey farmer will support, for the island is a quite celebrated dairying district; and the best of butter and milk are not usually obtainable from barren wildernesses. From one or other of the numerous tor-like granite-crowned hillocks that plentifully stud the Anglesey landscape, and give it a close resemblance to Cornwall, fertile farms and numerous scattered white farmsteads and cottages are seen. They paint prosperity in the mind’s eye, small though many of the holdings and cottages be, and although in a proportion of them lives a mining class. These whitewashed granite cottages and the stone walls that fence the fields render the resemblance to Cornwall very close: and no one yet has been found to apply such disparaging remarks as those quoted above to that county. As in Cornwall, too, the myrtle, the hydrangea, and the tree-fuchsia flourish all the year round in the cottagers’ gardens, and few sights are so lovely as that of a lowly, granite one-storeyed cottage, its walls and garden-walls alike whitewashed, and its garden luxuriating with the myriad red and purple blooms of the fuchsia, the pale mauve or pink blossoms of the hydrangea, or the more delicate petals of the myrtle. Wind-swept the hills of Anglesey are in winter, but in the warm and sheltered valleys these alien creatures of the garden live unharmed.

Nor even is the isle treeless. So little so is it that the pine-woods of Menai village might reasonably for their beauty and extent be envied by Bournemouth itself; while peculiarly characteristic of Anglesey are the strange groups of trees, looking like lineal descendants of Druidical groves, that are everywhere to be seen; generally very line umbrageous trees, and often hiding in their midst some old mansion or farmstead of the larger kind.