№ 18Islands · Llŷn Peninsula, Wales

Bardsey Island

The island of twenty thousand saints, reached by a boat through a tide race at the end of Wales.

Bardsey Island rises like a whale across the glittering waters of Bardsey Sound, seen from a path at the tip of the Llŷn Peninsula. — Pl. IIAcross the tide race

A whitewashed stone cottage with red-painted door and window frames stands in long grass below a hillside on Bardsey Island. — Pl. IIIWhitewash and red paint

Photographs Robert Powell (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Geoff Charles (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons

Ynys Enlli lies off the very tip of the Llŷn, across a sound that boils on the wrong tide. In the medieval reckoning, three pilgrimages here equalled one to Rome, and the island is said to hold the graves of twenty thousand saints — plus, in one stubborn tradition, Merlin, asleep in a glass castle.

Today it holds a lighthouse, a handful of houses, Manx shearwaters in their thousands, and one of the darkest official skies in Europe — Europe's first Dark Sky Sanctuary. The boat from Porth Meudwy takes twenty minutes and all summer to guarantee.

Field notes

The knowledge

Getting there: Boats run from Porth Meudwy, near Aberdaron, roughly April to September, sea permitting; day trips give a few hours ashore.
Best time: June for seabirds and wildflowers; September for seals and the first proper dark skies.
Local tip: Climb Mynydd Enlli, the island's one hill — Ireland on one side, the whole spine of the Llŷn on the other.

Field position52.7580° N · 4.7920° W

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