On the south-eastern tip of Ynys Môn, where the Menai Strait opens out into Liverpool Bay, stand the worn pink-sandstone remains of Penmon Priory. The medieval church is still in use, the dovecote still stands in the field beside it, and a short walk down the lane there is a small spring-fed pool inside a vaulted stone hut. This is Ffynnon Seiriol — the Holy Well of Seiriol — and the man it remembers was here in the middle of the sixth century.
Seiriol was a Welsh prince turned hermit, traditionally a son of Owain Danwyn of Rhos. Like many of the early Welsh saints he chose Anglesey for the same reasons the druids had chosen it five hundred years earlier: it was a defensible island, far from the political centre, and stiff with sacred groves and springs that he and his fellow Christian missionaries could politely re-dedicate. He founded his cell at Penmon, and a smaller retreat for the worst storms on Ynys Seiriol — Puffin Island — visible offshore.
But the loveliest piece of Seiriol's story is the weekly walk. According to a tradition first written down by Edward Lhuyd in the seventeenth century but plainly much older, Seiriol used to meet his close friend Saint Cybi — the founder of the church at Holyhead — at the holy well of Clorach, near Llanerch-y-medd, in the dead centre of the island. They met halfway. Seiriol walked west in the morning with the sun behind him, and east in the evening with the sun behind him; Cybi walked east in the morning and west in the evening, into the sun both ways.
The result, the people of Anglesey said, was visible on their faces. Seiriol was always pale, never tanned by the sun on either leg of his journey — and so he is remembered as 'Seiriol Wyn' — Seiriol the Fair. Cybi, who took the full sun coming and going, is remembered as 'Cybi Felyn' — Cybi the Tanned, or the Yellow. Their nicknames have outlived almost everything else about them. They are the dawn-walker and the dusk-walker of Anglesey, and you can still trace their route across the island on a Sunday in summer.
The well at Penmon is still there. The water is still very clean and very cold. People still drop a coin in for a wish. Whatever Seiriol's exact theological views were in the year 540, he chose his hermitage well — and the path between his cell and Cybi's is one of the gentlest pilgrim routes left in Britain.
Wear something inspired by Saint Seiriol of Penmon and you wear the dawn-edge of Anglesey: the priory, the dovecote, the holy well, and the long quiet walk inland to meet a friend at a spring.