Inland farms make up the bulk of Mechell, with a narrow strip reaching to the north coast east of Cemaes Bay through Llanbadrig community. To the east lies Cylch-y-Garn, to the south Tref Alaw and Rhosybol. The settlement pattern is dispersed - small clusters of houses around a chapel, a windmill, a row of cottages - rather than a compact village. Llanfechell is the largest. Tradition holds that Saint Mechell, a sixth-century Breton missionary, was buried somewhere in Llanfechell. The prehistoric sites attest to much earlier habitation. Pen-y-Morwydd Barrow rises on a hilltop between Llanfechell and Bodewryd. The Llanfechell Triangle Standing Stones - three Bronze Age uprights aligned north-west to south-east - stand a short walk from the village square. Cup-and-ring rock art was found on a packing stone of the Llanfechell standing stone north of the church, a kind of mark very rare in north Wales.

Mechell's agricultural economy supported an impressive infrastructure of milling. The community once held four watermills and three windmills along the Afon Cafnan and its tributaries. Meddanen Water Mill and Melin Mechell Windmill sat close enough together that the same miller probably worked both, switching between water and wind as the weather allowed. Further south stood Pant y Gwydd windmill; to the west, along the river, Cefn Coch Water Mill and Windmill, the Pandy Cefn Coch fulling mill, and Cafnan Water Mill at the river mouth. Most are now ruins, the windmill towers sometimes converted into private houses. The chapels tell another story. Nine non-conformist meeting houses opened across the community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Calvinistic Methodist at Libanus, Independent at Ebenezer and Seion, Welsh Baptist at Calfaria, Welsh Calvinistic Methodist at Bethania and Bethlehem and Hephsibah. Most are closed now; Hephsibah Chapel at Rhosbeirio was converted into a house in 1985.

Wylfa Nuclear Power Station opened in 1971 on the coast 3 kilometres northwest of Llanfechell, paired with the older Trawsfynydd plant in Snowdonia as one of the two Magnox reactors in Wales. For forty-four years the twin reactor buildings dominated the north Anglesey skyline. They lifted electric output of the island to grid-scale and provided steady employment for several thousand engineers, technicians and support staff across the surrounding communities. The plant closed at the end of 2015. Decommissioning will continue for decades. Horizon Nuclear Power has proposed building 'Wylfa Newydd' - a new station on or near the existing site - though as of the most recent updates the project remains under consideration. The closure took a hard economic toll on Mechell and its neighbours. The villages remain; the farming continues; but the principal industrial employer of an otherwise quiet rural community is now a slowly decommissioning piece of infrastructure on a windswept coast.

Of all the historical figures connected with Mechell, the most useful to historians is William Bulkeley (1691-1760), whose surviving diary covers daily Anglesey life from 1734 to 1760. He lived at Brynddu on the edge of Llanfechell. He noted weather, prices, harvest, gossip; he counted heads at chapel; he recorded who married whom. Through Bulkeley we know more about the texture of eighteenth-century life in this community than about most rural districts in Britain. The Bulkeley family - and their descendants - still hold Brynddu, now a 900-acre farming estate run by Robin Grove-White, former director of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Plas Bodewryd, a Grade II*-listed fifteenth- or sixteenth-century hall house, sits in the parish of Bodewryd with additions in every century since. Together with the four medieval churches - St Mechell, St Fflewin, St Mary, St Peirio - the houses, mills and standing stones form a continuous human record of a small Welsh community that has stayed at roughly the same size, and roughly the same pattern, for the better part of a thousand years.