I like the fact that Newborough, our local village/town, was new in 1303 when Dafydd ap Gwylim described it as ‘Tref Nibwrch, tref llawn obaith’ (Newborough town, town full of hope).   It was originally the site of a royal court – a lys – and it’s been downhill ever since, although according to the Companion Guide to Wales, it was ‘once the centre of a thriving mat, cord, and net-making industry’.   Not in our time, it hasn’t been.   When we started coming in the 1970s, it had a garage, a butcher, a post office, two grocers and two small supermarkets.   Now there’s a single supermarket and so far the post office.   But this year a café has opened in what was the butcher’s:

There’s the Ebeneser Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, which says 1785 prominently on the façade, but dates from the mid-nineteenth century:

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We are staying, as we always stay, in the cottage where Maurice Wilks designed the land rover.   He worked for Hillman Motor Car Company in Coventry in the early 1920s and then spent two years with General Motors.   After returning to work for Hillman, he was appointed chief engineer at Rover in 1930, where his older brother was already works manager (he had previously been managing director of Hillman) and was to become managing director in 1934.   Wilks bought a smallholding on Anglesey and used an American army jeep to travel round it during the war.   He and his brother had the idea of designing a version of the jeep for British farmers which they decided to call a Land Rover.   The first land rover rolled off the assembly line on 11 March 1948.   It’s clear that Wilks belonged to a peculiarly British strand of manufacturing, strong in engineering and technical invention, more interested in high quality production than in volume, good with his hands and at carpentry.   He had the idea for the Range Rover in 1952.   So, next time I see a great Chelsea tractor, I will think of Maurice Wilks bumping around in a prototype over the boggy fields of south-west Anglesey. Continue reading →

One of my favourite things in Anglesey is the little stall which is placed outside the gate of a local farm from which one can buy vegetables, including small tomatoes and huge cucumbers and occasionally eggs, on the basis of trust.   I like the unpredictability of it (it’s on a back road down to the Straits).   We try and go every day in order to buy something of what’s on offer.