When Prince William was posted to RAF Valley as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, he and Catherine - then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - rented a modest farmhouse on the Bodorgan Estate for around 750 pounds a month. They had been married in April 2011. Prince George was born in July 2013, and his first months were spent here, in a working farmyard a few minutes' drive from one of the busiest fast-jet bases in the United Kingdom. Catherine later spoke about how isolated those early Welsh years felt, particularly during long stretches when William was on shift. The cottage's location was protected by an unusually disciplined press silence; helicopters and long lenses largely stayed away. By the time the family moved out in 2013, William's RAF tour had ended and Anglesey had given them three of the quietest years they would ever have.

The hall itself is Grade II* listed - the second-highest rank in the Welsh heritage register - and the parkland carries an equivalent listing on the Cadw and ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales. The main house was completed between 1779 and 1782, a neo-classical mansion built, in the careful phrasing of the listing, 'of smooth ashlar masonry in a pale, yellowish stone, with a slate roof'. Significant additions arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. The terraces date to the late 1840s; the stable yard and coach house followed around 1841. The kitchen gardens once covered more than three and a half acres and have been pared back to about two.

The Meyrick family - properly Tapps-Gervis-Meyrick, a triple-barrelled name that records three centuries of inheritance and marriage - have held Bodorgan since the eighteenth century. The present owner is Sir George Meyrick, who lives at the hall with his wife Lady Candida. The family connection to the place runs deep enough that the prince and princess's tenancy felt almost ordinary: the heir to the throne and his wife paid rent to a local baronet on a working estate, and farmed the experience of being briefly normal out of the bargain. The deer park is still in use. The dovecote and a barn are listed in their own right at Grade II.

Anglesey gets under your skin slowly. From the high ground above Bodorgan you can see the Malltraeth Sands stretching out at low tide, mile after mile of corrugated mud reflecting whatever colour the sky happens to be that morning. The poet and naturalist Charles Tunnicliffe lived nearby for most of his life and filled sketchbooks with the wading birds that work the estuary - curlews, oystercatchers, redshank. The Meyricks chose this corner of the island for the same reasons the royals would later: it is beautiful, it is quiet, and the weather makes sure not too many people stay long. Behind walls and trees, the hall has watched 240 years of Welsh weather come in off the Irish Sea and gone on growing peaches under glass.