In April 2024, I started a new life in Amlwch on the rocky northern coast of the island of Anglesey. It's a beautiful place to live - away from the tourist trail but only 10 minutes walk to the dramatic coastal path along the cliffs.
My house is a small terraced cottage and needed a complete renovation - it had no heating or hot water when I moved in. That's been interesting work and is habitable but incomplete after 18 months as I write this. I'm in to the standard "makeover" type work now, so can fit that around having a normal life doing other things I enjoy.
One of the big appeals of the house for me was that, although the house itself is quite small, it came with a fairly enormous garden, about 100 feet long in total. The top half of the garden (which I obviously call "the Top Garden") is only about 18 feet wide, but the bottom half (you got it - "the Bottom Garden") stretches out to over 30 feet.
The whole garden is south facing. The Top Garden is made up of about 1/3 paved area, with an old abandoned outhouse; then steps down onto a gently sloping grassed area. There's several very old and gnarly apple trees, with an overgrown hedge at the end of the Top Garden and then the Bottom Garden slopes fairly steeply down (dropping about 5 feet) for the first half to a flat area for the remainder. Beyond the garden is a "no-man's land" area about 10 or 15 feet wide and about 4 feet lower, which belongs to a neighbouring house, but has been left to go wild. And then beyond that is the long abandoned Amlwch to Llangefni railway, which is still intact but very overgrown. The whole area beyond the garden is very natural, with lots of very mature trees.
The boundaries down the eastern and southern sides of the garden are low dry stone walls, which are not in the best of condition. The western boundary of the Top Garden is a very ugly concrete block wall about 5 feet tall. That boundary continues into the Bottom Garden as a very old and overgrown privet hedge.
The whole garden, but particularly the bottom, was completely overgrown and wild when I moved in with lots of very overgrown trees and hedging fighting for light. On the first visit, I couldn't get down into the Bottom Garden. On the second visit we came equipped with boots and gloves and had to carefully fight a route towards the end but we couldn't actually get to it (or even accurately see where the boundary was!)
I was completely smitten as soon as I saw it!!
Abandoned Outhouse
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