The town was originally Llangyngar - the church of St Cyngar - and it still has a Victorian parish church to that saint set on a wooded riverside spot the locals call the Dingle. The River Cefni gave the town its modern name, and it gave the town its border, and it gave the town its water until the modern reservoir at Llyn Cefni was built a mile and a half to the northwest. The settlement was an ancient parish until 1890, then a local government district, then an urban district under the 1894 Local Government Act, then a community when the urban district was abolished in 1974. Through all those administrative renamings the town did the same work it had always done: it served as the marketplace and meeting point for the farms that fill the centre of Anglesey.

Oriel Môn, the museum and gallery on the edge of town, holds the largest public collections of two of Wales's most beloved 20th-century artists. Sir Kyffin Williams - born in 1918, raised on Anglesey, dead in 2006 - painted the Welsh landscape with a palette knife the way other artists paint with brushes, building dark mountains out of slabs of pigment. His mountains scowl and his skies brood. Charles Tunnicliffe was something different. The Lancashire-born naturalist moved to Malltraeth on the south coast of the island in 1947 and spent the rest of his life painting birds with the meticulous accuracy of a man who had measured a thousand feathers. Both painters worked from Anglesey. Oriel Môn gathers them both under one roof and traces the island's history alongside them.

Llangefni had a station on the Anglesey Central Railway from 1864 until 1964. Passenger services ended that year, but freight kept rattling through until 1993. Then the tracks went quiet. The rails are still there. Network Rail still owns the route. A company called Anglesey Central Railway (2006) Ltd holds the lease and dreams of reinstating a working line at a cost estimated around £150 million. Other proposals push for a 16-mile cycle path along most of the corridor, with a heritage railway sharing the right-of-way. Nothing has happened. The nearest functioning station now is at Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, five miles away as the crow flies. Two major roads, the A55 and the A5, swing within two kilometres of the town centre via the short A5114 spur. Buses run frequently to Bangor and Holyhead. The trains, for now, do not.

The town has produced a notable list of people for its size. The preacher John Elias lived here from 1830 until his death in 1841; Christmas Evans, a contemporary preacher and chapel builder, had lived here from 1791 to 1826. Hugh Griffith, the Oscar-winning Welsh actor who played the Sheikh in Ben-Hur, attended Llangefni County School. So did the novelist Gabriel Fielding. The Welsh landscape painter Kyffin Williams was born here. And the Hollywood actress Naomi Watts, twice an Oscar nominee, lived in Llangefni from age seven to ten - one of those strange dislocations where a small Welsh town shows up unexpectedly in a Mulholland Drive star's biography. The town also hosted the National Eisteddfod twice, in 1957 and 1983, and the Urdd (youth) Eisteddfod in 2004 - the cultural festivals that keep Welsh-language poetry, drama, and music alive each year. Llangefni is small. It produces above its weight.