The Tudors of Penmynydd were Welsh nobility long before they were English kings. They served the princes of Gwynedd, held lands across Anglesey, and married into the island's other great families. Then came 1412, when Rhys ap Tudur was executed for his part in the Owain Glyndwr rebellion and the family's lands at Penmynydd were forfeited. It looked like the end. Instead, it was a hinge. Other branches of the family had already left the island - one young man named Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, anglicised as Owen Tudor, would find his way to the English court and, scandalously, marry the widowed Queen Catherine of Valois. Their grandson became Henry VII. The grand house of the senior Penmynydd line, Plas Penmynydd, was rebuilt in 1576 by Richard Owen Tudor - a generation too late to share in the throne his distant cousins had won.

Plas Penmynydd still stands, a Grade II*-listed building tucked into the slope above the village. The current structure is the 1576 rebuild, not the medieval hall the Tudors first occupied, but the site is unbroken. The senior line ended with another Richard Owen Tudor, Sheriff of Anglesey in 1657. After his death the house was sold and passed through several families. In the 2000s it was restored by Richard Cuthbertson and featured in the BBC Wales series Hidden Houses of Wales. The 17th-century almshouses in the village - founded under the will of Lewis Rogers - also survive, low whitewashed cottages built to shelter the parish poor. They are among the oldest still in their original use anywhere on Anglesey.

The geology beneath Penmynydd is older by an almost incomprehensible margin. Edward Greenly, the Edwardian geologist who mapped Anglesey in extraordinary detail, gave the village's name to the Penmynydd Zone of Metamorphism - a Precambrian blueschist terrane that stretches the length of the hill from Red Wharf Bay on the north coast to Newborough on the south. The blueschist event has been dated to roughly 550 million years ago, evidence of an ancient subduction zone where one slice of crust was forced down beneath another and cooked at high pressure but low temperature. Tudors come and go. The rock is harder to displace.

Penmynydd has another quiet first to its name. The bwthyn - the small cottage - at Minffordd was the first place on Anglesey used for Nonconformist worship, in the early 18th century. Before chapel architecture became one of the defining marks of Welsh village life, Methodists and Independents met in domestic rooms, often in defiance of the law, and Minffordd's cottage was one of the earliest such spaces on the island. The community today numbers around 465 people across Penmynydd, the village of Star and the hamlet of Castellior. The Victorian rectory, Neuadd Lwyd, has been converted into a country-house hotel. A radio mast was added to the hilltop in 2002 - the latest, least romantic addition to a skyline that has held a Tudor great house, a saintly church, and almshouses for the poor.