out and about - 2014
12 October 2014 .............. Maltreath Bay and Llanddwyn Island
It was a beautiful day with blue sky and sunshine, and quite warm for October out of the east wind, so I headed off to Newborough Forest, Maltreath Bay, and then Llanddwyn Island.
Maltreath Bay has a lovely beach, this is looking out across the bay to the opposite headland Pen-y-parc. At very low tides it looks as if you can walk right across to the higher ground at the far side of the beach - however there is a deep channel right over by the rocks that never dries out, so you can`t get there.
In the opposite direction there is a super view along the beach to Llanddwyn Island, with the most amazing backdrop of the Lleyn Peninsula.
Maltreath Bay is a great place for a swim - so I went for a swim !
It was noticeable that the sea temperature was beginning to drop - but this was just after a really cold spell, so this wasn`t too surprising - but with the rather cold east wind, the water felt warmer than the air !
Not bad for mid October !
Maltreath Bay is often used by naturists, and is quite well known for this - it is fairly isolated, and well away from the big car park in Newborough Forest - it is a shame that Anglesey Council doesn`t make the decision to make it official - there is quite a demand for naturist facilities, and it would bring in quite a lot of tourism to Anglesey.
Right along the beach now, and on the big shingle bank that connects Llanddwyn Island to the mainland except at very high tides - the view across to Snowdonia and the Lleyn Peninsula is quite stunning.
This is the sweeping shore of Llanddwyn Bay, with Newborough Forest in the background, and a wee bit of the eastern end of Snowdonia in the distance.
The public car park is hidden in the trees roughly in the middle of the picture, and is accessed via the toll road from Newborough.
Llanddwyn Island has quite a bit of history attached to it - one of the legends is about St Dwynwen, the Welsh patron saint of lovers - here is the remains of St Dwynwen`s Church.
Llanddwyn Island has a significant maritime history, as it sits at the western end of the Menai Straits - there was a lot of ship traffic in and out of the Menai Straits carrying away the slate from many of the slate quarries in Snowdonia.
Some of these ships required pilots, and there was a row of houses for the pilots -
From 1840 until 1903 there was a lifeboat based on Llanddwyn Island, and the pilots acted as some of the crew members.
The other crew members came from Newborough, and they were summoned by a blast from a cannon -
Two lighthouses were built at the far end of Llanddwyn Island - the original one, Tŵr Bach stands on the more easterly point.
The newer lighthouse, Tŵr Mawr, stands on the more westerly point, and was built in 1845 - this is looking across from the old lighthouse to the new lighthouse.
This is it from further up the island -
The new lighthouse provides a good vantage point - this is looking back across the far end of the island to the old lighthouse, and you can see there are lots of wee islands around there.
A bit round to the right, there is a pair of fairly inconsequential islands - at least that is what they appear to be.
However beside the new lighthouse there is an information board -
and in the corner there is this box of information -
I didn`t actually see any cormorants on these two islands, and considering how many cormorants I have seen in places such as Penrhyn Glas, Middle Mouse, and Rhoscolyn Beacon, it seems to be a strange claim.
Round a bit more to the right, and this is the view across to the headland Pen-y-parc, and up the coast to Dinas Bach, then Braich-lwyd, and even up to Rhoscolyn Beacon, with Holyhead Mountain in the distance.
Pen-y-parc looks to be quite an interesting bit of coastline - at the moment I can`t see how to get to it by sea kayak - it seems to be a long way from any launching point.
Quite different from the excellent long beaches in Maltreath Bay and Llanddwyn Bay that run along the front of Newborough Forest, Llanddwyn Island has lots of small and quite secluded bays and beaches - however don`t expect any privacy - they are all overlooked from the coastal path around Llanddwyn Island, and Llanddwyn Island gets a lot of visitors.
Some of them have already been seen in some of the above photographs, however here are a few more.
A few more general views of Llanddwyn Island - this is looking north along the west side of Llanddwyn Island, towards Maltreath Bay.
Looking across the island past St Dwynwen`s Church, and again, with Maltraeth Bay in the background.
Part of the coastal path, and as it happens, with Maltreath Bay in the background again.
Llanddwyn Island is a fascinating place, and one aspect of it that I haven`t really touched on much is the amazing views it gives you of Snowdonia and the mountains on the Lleyn Peninsula - if it is clear enough, from the far end of Llanddwyn Island you can see from the hills above Llanfairfechan right down to Bardsey Island - that`s 80 kilometres of coastline.
You will have seen glimpses of these views in some of the above photographs , however this webpage is long enough, so I think I`ll explore these views more fully on another page.
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PS - just for geeks
When I was writing this webpage I discovered that the names of the lighthouses - Tŵr Bach and Tŵr Mawr - wouldn`t display properly on Internet Explorer 10 - but they worked okay on Firefox, Opera, and IE 11.
I also found that the W3C validator would fail them.
I eventually found that the Welsh language is the only language in the world that puts accents on the characters w and y, and none of the character sets ASCII, ANSI, or ISO-8859 knew about the ŵ character.
So I had to go digging in the UTF8 character set, and found that as well as the entity ŵ, there is a decimal value that can be used instead - ŵ - and this works in IE 10, and the W3C validator is happy with it.
So it was all rather fun !
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