Ynys Seiriol — Saint Seiriol's Island — is the small uninhabited island, less than a mile long, that sits in the sea about a mile east of Penmon Point at the easternmost tip of Ynys Môn. The English call it Puffin Island, because of the very large seabird colony that nests on its low northern cliffs. The Welsh name remembers what was there long before the puffins: the storm-retreat of Saint Seiriol of Penmon, and the small island monastery that grew up around his cell from the sixth century onwards.
The monastery on Ynys Seiriol was never very large. The ruined cell-tower that still stands on the summit — a square stone shaft, much rebuilt — is twelfth century, but it certainly stands on much earlier foundations. A small community of Augustinian canons was established there in the medieval period, attached to the mother house at Penmon Priory across the water. They kept sheep, fished off the rocks, prayed the office, and were buried in the small enclosed cemetery against the south wall. The community survived in some form until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537, when it was closed down and the island gradually reverted to its bird-population.
The folklore began almost immediately. Anglesey fishermen working the strong tide-race between the island and Penmon Point — Trwyn Du, 'the black headland' — reported within a generation of the Dissolution that they were still hearing the office being sung from the ruined cell-tower. The descriptions are surprisingly consistent. The voices were always plural — never a single voice — and they were always heard at dawn and dusk, the canonical hours of Lauds and Vespers. They were always heard from a distance, never from directly under the walls. And they were always heard most clearly on still mornings, when the wind was off the land and the sea was glassy.
There is a famous early-nineteenth-century account by the antiquarian Angharad Llwyd, who recorded the testimony of a Beaumaris fisherman who in or about 1815 had drifted close in to the island in a flat calm at first light to set lobster pots. He swore on his life he had heard a clear, slow male chant rising and falling from the summit, with the unmistakable rhythm of a Latin psalm, lasting about twenty minutes, and then stopping. There was, he said, no one on the island. There has been no one living on Ynys Seiriol since 1537.
The naturalistic explanations are obvious. The puffin colony makes an extraordinary, almost human noise at dawn — a low collective moaning that bird-listeners often describe as choral. The tide-race at Trwyn Du produces strange acoustic effects under certain conditions of swell and wind, and the ruined cell-tower itself, hollow and roofless, almost certainly resonates in particular weather. But the people of Penmon, then and now, have never been very interested in the natural explanations. The monks are still there, they say. They just no longer expect to be relieved.
The island is now a designated Special Protection Area for seabirds and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. You cannot land. You can take a small boat from Beaumaris in the summer season and circle the island, and the boatman will point out the cell-tower on the summit. On a still morning, if the wind is off the land and the puffins are quiet, you might catch what the Beaumaris fishermen have been catching for nearly five hundred years.
Wear something inspired by Ynys Seiriol and you wear the easternmost edge of Anglesey at its quietest: a sixth-century saint's storm-retreat, a Dissolution-era ruin, and a community of monks who were dismissed but who have not yet been informed.