Ynys Llanddwyn is a long thin tidal islet stuck out into the southern Menai approaches from the great dune-system of Newborough, on the south-western coast of Ynys Môn. At high tide it becomes a true island; at low tide you can walk out across the sand. On its rocky spine stand the roofless walls of a small medieval church and, further out, the chalk-white tower of a nineteenth-century daymark for ships entering Caernarfon Bay. The whole place is named after the woman buried there: Santes Dwynwen, the Welsh patron saint of lovers.
Dwynwen, in the tradition recorded by Edward Lhuyd and Iolo Morganwg, was the daughter of the fifth-century Welsh king Brychan Brycheiniog. (Brychan was famously fertile: medieval Welsh genealogies credit him with twenty-four sons and twenty-six daughters, almost all of whom became saints. Dwynwen was the most famous of the daughters.) She fell in love with a young man called Maelon Dafodrill, who fell in love with her too — but for reasons that vary with the teller, the marriage was forbidden. In some versions Maelon turned on her in rage and was punished. In other versions Dwynwen, broken-hearted, asked God to free her from love altogether.
An angel came to her in the night and gave her a potion that erased her love for Maelon and turned him to a block of ice on the spot. The angel then granted her three wishes. She used the first to thaw Maelon back to life. She used the second to ask that all true lovers, ever afterwards, should either be united with the one they loved or be freed of their longing for them. She used the third to ask that she herself should never have to marry. Then she retired to Llanddwyn, founded a small religious cell on the islet, and lived out her life as a hermit. She died, traditionally, on 25 January in the year 460. That date is now Dydd Santes Dwynwen — Santes Dwynwen's Day — the Welsh equivalent of Valentine's Day.
Beside the ruined church there is a small spring-fed well, Ffynnon Dwynwen, which throughout the medieval and early-modern period was one of the most-visited love-oracles in Britain. The procedure was specific. The hopeful lover scattered crumbs of bread on the surface of the well and then laid a clean handkerchief on top. They then watched for the sacred eel — a real eel that was said to live in the spring — to disturb the cloth. The direction in which the cloth moved told the lover their fortune. The eel was reported as recently as the eighteenth century.
The island today is part of the Newborough National Nature Reserve. The walk out from the car park, across the dunes, along the white-sand beach and onto Ynys Llanddwyn, is one of the loveliest in Wales. The church is roofless, the cross beside it is modern, and the well is still there — though if any eel survives in it, it is keeping a low profile.
Wear something inspired by Santes Dwynwen of Llanddwyn and you wear the gentlest of the Welsh saints: a princess who asked, on behalf of every lover who came after her, that no one should ever have to stay heartbroken.