Research on walks on Anglesey revealed a place none of our other guidebooks mentioned, Moel-y-don. (Not a champagne). It is on the Strait of Menai, island side, probably not a mile west of Plas Newydd.
When the Romans came, in the first century BC, they soon outlawed Druidism, the religion of the Celts. According to the Romans, the Druids were practicing human sacrifice. (This sounds like a trumped-up charge to me, but that's what happens in victors' histories.) Anyhow, the Druids at length withdrew to their spiritual center, the Sacred Oak Grove at Brynsiencyn, on Anglesey. The Romans tracked them down and then finished them off at Moel-y-don. Tacitus describes it thus: "By the shore the opposing battle line was formed, thick with men and weapons; between the ranks flashed women draped in black like the Furies, with flowing hair and carrying torches. The Druids stood among them, issuing frightful curses, with their hands raised high to the heavens. Our soldiers were so frightened by this unfamiliar sight that their limbs were paralyzed, and they stood motionless, vulnerable to wounding."
Evidently, the Celtic bark was worse than the bite. The Romans regrouped, crossed the Strait, slaughtered the Druids and then hacked down the Sacred Grove. End of Druidism; at least until Stonehenge became a National Trust site. (English Heritage site?)
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| Moel-y-don, on the Strait of Menai |
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| Druidess Vicki |
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| Viking ship? Roman? Welsh? |
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