Aberdaron

A thousand years of people waiting for a boat

Aberdaron was never a destination in its own right. It was the place you stopped because the land ran out and the sea was not ready for you, and almost everything here grew out of that wait.

1. Two stones and a saint’s name

   Two carved boulders now kept in the church commemorate priests called Veracius and Senacus, who lived in the fifth or sixth century; they were found in the eighteenth century on farmland near Mynydd Anelog. The church itself carries the dedication of Hywyn, and the village carries the river’s.

2. The last stop before Enlli

   Medieval pilgrims held that three journeys to Bardsey were worth one to Rome, and the crossing is short but treacherous, so they waited here: sometimes for weeks. Gruffudd ap Cynan took sanctuary at the church in 1094; Edward I came through on his way to the abbey in 1284.

3. A coast that worked for a living

   The nineteenth century put the parish to wool, herring, shipbuilding, limestone, lead and manganese. Manganese was found at Y Rhiw in 1827; by 1906 the workings employed two hundred people, and more than 113,000 long tons of ore came out between 1840 and 1945. The two stone bridges over the Daron went up in 1823.

4. The church given up, and taken back

   In 1841 the parish abandoned the old church on the shore and worshipped inland instead. It stood empty for sixty-five years before it was restored and reopened in 1906, and it was refurbished again in 2006, under a hammerbeam roof.

5. Poets, and the holiday years

   After the Second World War the village turned to holiday trade. R. S. Thomas was vicar here from 1967 to 1978 and wrote much of what the outside world knows of the place; Roy Campbell had finished The Flaming Terrapin here half a century earlier, and Dic Aberdaron, the self-taught linguist, is the subject of one of Thomas’s poems.