🚴‍♀️ 14 miles / 22.5 km
🌄 600′ / 183 m
🥪 Community Café
Starting at the pretty fishing village of Cemaes, Wales’ most northerly community, on this guided bike tour, we take inspiration from Anglesey’s maritime heritage to share some stories from the island’s seafaring past.
On this short and leisurely ride along very rural lanes, we cycle within sight of the coast, before looping inland. This is a scenic rural and gently undulating ride along quiet lanes, more populated by walkers than cars.
Anglesey’s maritime heritage
Before the advent of the modern road network, the seas were our communication highways, so it’s no surprise that Anglesey has a long history of seafaring!
We’ll share stories from Anglesey’s maritime history, including tales of those who profited legally and illegally from a seafaring life and of those early pioneers who put their own lives at risk to safeguard seafarers caught in a storm. You’ll hear at first hand from an Eighteenth-century squire and diarist, among others, how essential seaborne cargoes were for everyday life in rural Anglesey.
Along the way, we’ll visit Cemlyn lagoon and nature reserve, the home of thousands of endangered terns, elegant seabirds who nest on the lagoon islands over the summer months. Here we’ll tell you about the location’s role in saving lives at sea. With Anglesey being on the main shipping route to the transatlantic port of Liverpool, islanders saw more than their fair share of shipwrecks, and these only increased as the global shipping trade increased during the nineteenth century.
We stop to look towards the Skerries, only one of many hazards for seafarers, an early lighthouse and the haunt of smugglers!
Cycling a little further, we stop at Llanfairynghornwy Church to relate a fascinating story of one small boy found shipwrecked on the Skerries and how he founded a dynasty!
We’ll break the journey with lunch or a choice of magnificent cakes (or both!) at the delightful community café at Llanfechell, before coming full-circle, and biking back to Cemaes.
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