In a fit of wild enthusiasm, we went back to Menai Oysters to collect 3 dozen (£7 a dozen).   The founders of Toast undertook the shucking.   The oysters were delicious:-

We went last night again to The Marram Grass, the restaurant at the local caravan site, which we unfortunately did not know was a great centre for gastronomy and only went to for breakfast and wi-fi until it appeared in this year’s Good Food Guide since which it has been almost impossible to book.   It’s a very nice combination of exceptionally good local food – baked oysters and fish and chips (others had lobster) – with extremely friendly casualness.   I wish we had been going all those years when we didn’t know that it’s a mecca.

I still get a frisson walking across the narrow isthmus between Newborough Forest and Llandwyn Island along the path overlooking Bodorgan, to the ruins of St. Dwynwen which Clough Williams-Ellis proposed reconstructing:-

Up a small mound, one sees for the first time Twr Mawr, an early nineteenth-century lighthouse which has been disused at least since 1973:-

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Good red sky last night:-

I’ve written about Crûg before.   We go there every year.   It’s a nursery and garden which even I, as a botanical ignoramus, enjoy, dense with rare species collected by the Wynne-Joneses on plant-hunting expeditions, most recently in Colombia:-

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While on the subject of the difference between natural and farmed food, I should do a post on Hooton’s Homegrown Farm Shop which has for a long time, and continues to, contribute to the pleasures of Anglesey.   It began as field on a local farm where you could pick your own strawberries and has grown into a big commercial enterprise (their shop opened in 1998) selling chickens and Welsh lamb, fresh broad beans, biscuits and lemon cake.   It’s probably the biggest change since we started coming in the 1970s that one can eat really well, better than in London.

I walked past the ruins of St. Nidan at Llanidan today.   The church was demolished in 1844 in order to allow the construction of a new Gothic church at Brynsiencyn up the hill in spite of the fact that its origins were Anglo-Saxon and it had been the parish church of Henry Rowlands, the antiquary, who published Mona Antiqua Restaurata in 1723 which claimed erroneously that Anglesey was the centre for the Druids:-

Next door is Llanidan Hall, which is invisible apart from the seventeenth-century stables which were used as the vicarage:-

I had read on the web about Menai Oysters and we went in search of them down an unpromising driveway outside Dwyran.   They have oysters in big tanks under UV light and we were allowed to buy a dozen:-

We could have bought mussels from the stacks which were being shipped off to restaurants:-

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We went to Bodnant to see the garden, first established by Henry Pochin, a successful industrial chemist who bought the estate and employed Edward Milner, a pupil of Paxton, to lay out the garden in grand Victorian style with a water garden, pinetum, and The Poem, the family mausoleum down by the River Hiraethlyn.   His daughter, Laura, married the first Lord Aberconway and it was the second Lord Aberconway who built the layers of terraces, sponsored plant hunting exhibitions in China and the Himalayas and gave the garden to the National Trust in 1949.   The garden is huge and rather gloomy, a monument to grand Victorian arboricultural taste with pine trees from around the world, all protecting the visitor, and presumably the original owners, from the Welsh countryside around.   What I really liked was the bark of the trees:-

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One of the pleasures of walking inland is that one sees the old farms, uncontaminated by modern farming techniques.   The first was heralded by a good example of an old cast iron gate:-

I was surprised to find a peacock in the farmyard, as well as an elderly Hebridean sheep:-

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