The first two miles into Anglesey command the whole range of the Snowdonian mountains; but nothing could be more monumentally striking than the Anglesey Column that shoots up from the wooded, rock-strewn hill of Craig-y-Dinas on the way to the village of “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll,” as a board on the post office amiably shortens that terrific place-name. The column, itself 100 feet in height, designed in the Doric style, rises from a crest 260 feet above the waters of the Straits, and commemorates the first Marquis of Anglesey; he who, as “Lord Paget” and “Lord Uxbridge,” warred with Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, where he left a leg, shot off towards the close of that famous victory. He was created Marquis of Anglesey three weeks after the battle, and lived to enjoy his title until 1854. He saw the column rise, long years before, but the bronze statue of him was not erected until 1860. It represents him in hussar uniform, standing with contemplative gaze across the water, towards England. The curious old uniform and the green stains with which the storms and rains of over forty years have coloured the metal give the bronze Marquis quite an awful Arabian Nights kind of blood-curdling uncanniness in certain conditions of light and shade. It is possible to make closer acquaintance with him by climbing the staircase within the column, and to see from that eyrie the family seat of Plas Newydd down below, by the waterside—the name of it latterly altered by the present Marquis, of jewel-robbery fame, to “Anglesey Castle.” It was there that George IV. stayed in 1821, and heard of the death of his Queen. Doubtless the bluff Marquis congratulated him on the event, for he was no adherent of Caroline, having, indeed, the worst opinion of that more or less injured lady. Time was, indeed, when his house in London had been assailed by a mob clamouring in her favour. They insisted upon his drinking the Queen’s health, and he did. “The Queen,” he said, with bitter sarcasm, “and may all your wives be like her!” What more could champions desire? Yet it is possible that they were not satisfied.

The full name of the village that now comes in view at a bend of the road presents an unparalleled array of grotesquely assorted letters to the bewildered Saxon. It is without doubt by far the longest place-name in the United Kingdom, and can probably challenge the whole world. It is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch. The stationers and booksellers of Bangor and Menai Village sell for the modest price of one penny what is described as the “Englishman’s cure for lock-jaw”—a printed sheet with this fearsome word divided into its proper syllables, and the translation into English underneath. Enterprising tourists, at pains to master the pronunciation of Welsh, go forth into Anglesey, and, having caught a Welshman who can be made to understand a little English, parade their version; but when the native can be induced to pronounce it at all the name sounds very different. He generally, however, calls it “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll”; while the signposts, not provided with longer arms than usual, are models of compression, with “Llanfair P G”; the London and North-Western Railway recklessly naming the station “Llanfair,” careless of the fact that Llanfair, meaning “St. Mary’s Church,” is as common a Welsh place-name as Jones is among Welshmen.

But this astonishing name, like most others in the Principality, is (or was originally) descriptive, and contained almost as much local information as a guide-book. Done into English it means “the church of Saint Mary in the hollow of white hazel, near to the rapid whirlpool of Saint Tysilio and a red cave.” The church of St. Mary may, indeed, be found in the deep hollow at the foot of an incredibly steep lane and by the shores of the Menai, where whirlpools of sorts are created by the tides that set so strongly through the Straits, and rise and fall over twenty feet; but the red cave is not now to be discovered, and they are oaks and elms rather than white hazels that to-day enshroud the hollow.

Llanfair church has been rebuilt and is uninteresting. In its churchyard, close to the shore and almost in the shadow of the great Britannia Tubular Bridge that carries the mail trains between Anglesey and the mainland, one may find the decaying monument, overgrown with bushes, erected to the memory of fifteen men who lost their lives on the bridge works between 1846 and 1850. The bridge itself, “that ’ere great, long, ugly iron thing,” as the coachmen whom it drove off the last length of road called it, bulks large from this point of view, with an irrevocable air in its straight, clear-cut lines and massiveness, and a stern and solemn grandeur—like that of some Egyptian monument; in sharp contrast with the Menai Suspension Bridge, spanning the waters in the distance like the product of some fairy wand.

It was in April 1846 that the foundation stone of this great structure on the then Chester and Holyhead Railway was laid, on the Britannia Rock in the middle of the Straits. The rock itself obtained its name from the “Britannia,” a vessel wrecked some years before at this point, and in its turn suggested the very appropriate title of the bridge. The width of the Straits, here about 1,100 feet, presented an even graver problem to Robert Stephenson than had been faced by Telford, over twenty years before, for not merely a suspended road-bridge, but a rigid structure to sustain the burden of trains weighing 200 tons had to be designed. The Admiralty, jealous to preserve the navigation, forbade an arched bridge of any less height than a clear hundred feet above high water, and moreover refused to allow the interruption of the passage for a single day during the construction. Arches were out of the question, and eventually Stephenson resolved what was then the novelty of a bridge on the beam principle, consisting of rectangular iron tubes supported at intervals by giant masonry piers. There are three of these supports: the Britannia pier and tower, midway, and one on either shore. The two spans, or main tubes as they are called, across the water are each 472 feet in length, and that of the side spans 230 feet each; the whole length of the bridge 1841 feet, the weight of iron 10,000 tons, and the cost £602,000. The idea of this vast mass of riveted iron being elastic, seems grotesque, but when Stephenson designed the bridge he had sufficient forethought to allow for the expanding and contracting properties of iron under extremes of heat and cold. This precaution for securing free movement of the tubes, that would otherwise have broken down the supporting piers, took the form of allowing their ends to rest on cast-iron rollers and balls in a clear space left in the masonry. Experience has shown the expansion and contraction to be fully twelve inches. The first train ran through on March 5th, 1850, completing the present railway route from London to Holyhead; and although the weight of locomotives and trains has doubled since then, the bridge still serves its purpose.

A near sight of the Bridge is generally sought for, and when one has climbed the railway embankment and walked along the line to its gloomy entrance, it can scarce be denied that the expedition is worth the while. There are the two parallel tubes for up and down lines, and above them the masonry of the Anglesey tower; on it deeply carved the name of Robert Stephenson and the date. On either side the colossal granite figure of an Egyptian lion crouches on its pedestal, guarding the approach, and with sphinx-like inscrutable gaze seeming to bide the coming of an appointed day. The impression of weird mysticism they give at twilight; the inky blackness of the two railway tubes in between; the evening mists gathering over the Snowdon heights in the background; and the last rays of the setting sun flushing the Britannia tower with a dusky red, is indescribable. Suddenly as one gazes, a hollow rumbling is heard, gradually increasing until with a hellish clang and the reverberation of a million echoes, a train dashes out, bringing with it a taste of the sooty air that lingers in the tubes, the product of fifty years, and abominably like that of an unswept chimney.

But the curiosities of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll are not yet exhausted. One other remains, in the shape of a colossal granite statute of Lord Nelson, claimed to have been “designed” by Lord Clarence Paget, placed ridiculously on an undersized pedestal on the sea-weedy rocks by the Menai. It is, as a matter of fact, an exact copy of the well-known statue crowning the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, with empty sleeve pinned across the breast and cocked hat on head. Here, lonely in a meadow, beside the water he stands, with a very fine view of nothing in particular, and looking as though left to be called for. The curious who seek to know all about it may make the circuit of the slippery rocks and find the date 1873, and, facing the water, Nelson’s famous signal, “England expects that every man will do his duty.” But why the statue should find a place here, in so remote a spot, is not revealed.