North Anglesey

Stand at Cemaes Head on a clear day and you can count the Hebrides. That's north Anglesey for you — open, elemental, and just far enough from the A55 to thin the crowds to almost nothing. This is the island at its most unfashionable and, for the right traveller, its most rewarding.

Amlwch (the county's second town after Holyhead) was once, improbably, a world city: at the peak of the copper boom in the 1780s, the Parys Mountain mines were producing a third of the world's copper supply and Amlwch Port — hand-carved from solid rock — was the busiest mineral-shipping harbour in Britain after Bristol. The mines are long closed, but the landscape they left behind is extraordinary: an ochre-and-purple moonscape of oxidised minerals and open shafts that sits freely accessible on the hillside, one of the most visually striking industrial ruins in Wales.

The coast between Amlwch and the far north-western reaches of the island is lightly walked and dramatically beautiful. The Coastal Path here earns its reputation: cliff arches, sea caves, and headlands where the only sound is wind and guillemots. Church Bay (Porth Swtan), tucked into a fold in the northern cliffs, has a seafood pub — The Lobster Pot — that people drive from across the island to visit. Cemaes, the most northerly village in Wales, is a working harbour that has somehow kept its character through decades of tourism pressure.