Map coordinates: Ordnance Survey Road Map 6 (Wales/Cymru & West Midlands); see also Elliott 1997 (p. 106); Google world map home page (with satellite option): enter search terms "anglesey + wales".

Route: South from Bangor via the A5 towards Betws-y-Coed, through Snowdonia.

Log: Heading south from Bangor early on a cool, clear and dry morning, we drove past cloud-capped hills and steep, sloping pastures.

Gawain’s journey in SGGK begins in Camelot, which, in keeping with Arthurian convention, is not identified with an historical location. (Malory puts it in Winchester, but this is a late development in Arthurian legend.) The first reference to an historical place-name occurs in 697-98, when Gawain enters North Wales and passes Anglesey. Here the SGGK poet writes that Gawain “keeps all the isles of Anglesey on his left” (698) and then crosses by ford at “the Holy Head” to the Wirral (700-01), the peninsula between the mouths of the Rivers Dee and Mersey which in the 14th century was a notorious wilderness.

In the century before SGGK was written, Edward I had fortified North Wales and Anglesey with castles such as Caernarfon (birthplace of Edward II; below) and Beaumaris (below) as a means of controlling the Welsh. In the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances, North Wales is the domain of the King and Queen of North Wales. In the Prose Lancelot and in Malory's Morte Darthur, the Queen of North Wales is one of Morgan le Fay’s companions in an attempt to seduce Lancelot. Thus, North Wales would be the first hint that Gawain’s journey will take him to Morgan le Fay.

Anglesey is today the name of the largest in a group of islands off the coast of North Wales, accessible from Bangor via the Menai Bridge, one of England’s earliest suspension bridges. It is dotted with Neolithic standing stones and tumuli (below), and it is the site of one of the oldest hermitages in Britain, St. Seirol’s well (below).

Our route down the A5 to Betws and then back up along the Conwy is not likely the route that Gawain would have taken from Angelsey. After passing Anglesey on his left Gawain more likely would have headed due east towards the Wirral. However, it is possible that Snowdonia was part of the “realm of Logres” (691)--the literary name for Arthur’s kingdom--through which Gawain passed on his way from Camelot on the way to Anglesey.