Anglesey/Ynys Môn

Talk of something special, we have emerged onto the beach, and it stretches for a mile to the left at least, a mile to the right at least, and depth of it must be half a mile, um, before it meets the sparkling waters of the end of the Menai Straits as it meets, uh, the Irish Sea.

Luna's trotting along in the water beside us.

And beneath us the sand is compacted and really easy to walk on.

Very soft underfoot, but we're not sinking in it at all.

Little tiny bits of seaweed here and there, and the bars of cuttlefish shell decorating the path ahead of us.

We're heading towards Holy Island, which is a bare patch of promontory.

Slight gap between it and the mainland, which is covered in trees, but the island itself just tufted grass.

And there's a lighthouse at the end of it poking up like a rhino's horn, and then just these gentle slopes of what looks like very thin soil over that rock.

And what is the rock type, Emily?

It's igneous, and there's quite a lot of rhyolite around here, but basically it's really hard, so it's still there despite battering by the wind and the rain.

And this rock over here looks like it's lava.

Yeah.

So there's pillow lava on there, so solidified.

And you can see the different colors on it.

Yeah.

So-

Kind of blue at the bottom.

Yeah.

There's lots of slate in North Wales.

Um, that's a kind of bluey-gray rock, pretty hard.

That's made from really compressed mudstone though.

That's...

I think that's metamorphic as opposed to igneous.

There are three gulls ahead of us just poking their beaks into the sand.

And the wind picking up, but because it's behind us it feels as if it's hel- helping us.