By the 1790s, this small Welsh harbour was loading more copper ore than any port in the world. Around ten thousand people lived in Amlwch, working a sliver of harbour barely wide enough for a single ship to enter, and the town had become the second-largest in Wales after the iron-smelting capital of Merthyr Tydfil. Today around 3,800 people live in Amlwch, which is roughly what it was before copper was discovered. The cliff-edge geography, the inlet harbour, and the slow Welsh sense of a town that has been busy and quiet and busy again all remain.
Two miles inland rises Parys Mountain, a low hill stained orange and ochre by the metals beneath it. The Romans worked the surface ore here. In 1768, a fresh strike near the summit launched a copper rush. Within a decade the mountain was the largest copper producer on Earth, and a town that had been little more than a fishing settlement exploded. Amlwch's harbour, a narrow rocky cleft called Porth Amlwch, was widened and rebuilt by act of Parliament. By 1801 the population had reached around 10,000. Tobacco works opened. The famous 'Amlwch Shag' was rolled and exported. The town minted its own coins. The Welsh word amlwch likely comes from am + llwch, meaning 'around the inlet' - the same root as the Gaelic loch.
Production at Parys Mountain collapsed in the mid-1850s as cheaper ore came in from Chile and the United States. Most copper boomtowns simply emptied. Amlwch found a second life. The harbour, no longer needed for ore, filled instead with timber for shipyards. From the 1820s through the early 1900s, ocean-going schooners and brigs were built and repaired along the inlet - some of the finest small wooden ships ever launched from a Welsh harbour. In 1864 the Anglesey Central Railway reached the town, and freight that had once gone by sea took to rails instead. A brewery and the tobacco works kept people employed. By the early 20th century the shipyards had also slowed.
In 1953 an unlikely industry arrived. Associated Octel built a plant just west of the harbour to extract bromine directly from seawater - the bromine was needed for the anti-knock additives that made leaded petrol possible. For decades the plant was one of the largest employers on Anglesey, served by freight trains hauling chlorine in from Ellesmere Port and the finished product back out. When the world stopped using leaded petrol around the turn of the millennium, the demand evaporated. The Octel works closed in 2004, and were eventually demolished. Through the 1970s the town also hosted a single-point offshore mooring - the Amlwch Oil Terminal - used to discharge supertankers too large for the Mersey. It too is now gone.
Amlwch has a quietly remarkable list of native and adopted sons. Lemmy, founder of Motörhead, attended Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones, the town's secondary school. William Williams won the Victoria Cross in 1917 for steering a Q-ship through a U-boat duel that helped sink the submarine. Captain Keith Mills commanded the small Royal Marines detachment that briefly defended South Georgia against Argentine invaders in 1982. Andy Whitfield, the actor who played the title role in Spartacus, grew up in Bull Bay just down the coast. The restored harbour now houses a copper-mining museum, a Geo Môn watchtower with geological exhibits, and the maritime heritage gallery that tells, room by room, the story of how one small inlet supplied the metal for the Industrial Revolution.
Amlwch town and harbour at 53.41°N, 4.35°W, on Anglesey's north coast. From cruising altitude the rust-coloured spoil heaps of Parys Mountain just south of the town are unmistakable - a low hill stained yellow, orange and dark red unlike anything else on the island. The harbour itself is a single narrow notch in otherwise sheer coastline. Nearest airports: Anglesey/Valley (EGOV) 14 nm west, Caernarfon (EGCK) 18 nm south. The coast here is among the most exposed in Wales, with Atlantic depressions arriving directly from the Irish Sea. The Isle of Man, on a clear day, sits 40 nm to the north.