Held Under the Spell of Wales

Welsh pride is riding high, celebrating a culinary heritage as distinctive as any in the European pantheon. Here’s where to eat, drink, and stay, whether you’re in Llandudno, Llandeilo, or …Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

- Brandon Presser

Little-known fact: The Welsh landscape contains such towering ridges and crags, it served as Sir Edmund Hillary’s training ground before he climbed Mount Everest in 1953. Its glacially hewed peaks and iridescent coastal valleys fill some of the most dramatic vistas you’ll find west of the Himalayas. But the mountain I’m here to climb can’t be measured in feet.

I’m visiting a village on the Isle of Anglesey with the distinct honor of having the longest place name in Europe: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It means “The church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the church of Tysilio by the red cave.”

Getting to Llanfair PG, as it’s commonly shortened, is easy. Most people arrive by train, where an unabbreviated station placard is a point of pilgrimage for enthusiasts of obscure geography like myself. The Everest-style challenge is, instead, tackling the pronunciation.

Even locals stumble in that esoteric quest, partially because the old Celtic tongue native to the country has been repeatedly quashed by invaders since the dawn of the Romans. In the 1500s, King Henry VIII strictly forbade its usage; in the 19th century, when schoolchildren got caught speaking it they were forced to wear the Welsh Not, a plank of wood strung around their necks with a cord as a form of humiliation. Even today, only 30% of residents speak the language, and that’s up roughly 10% from a decade earlier.