Buying a train ticket home should not require an 18-syllable word, but for residents of one village on the Isle of Anglesey it is simply their address. This episode looks past the famous 58-character railway sign to uncover the 4,000-year history of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, from Neolithic settlers who built a dolmen at Ty Mawr, to the Roman commander Suetonius Paulinus who stormed the island to crush the Druids and then abandoned it to fight Boudica, to medieval tenants farming nine bovates of land under the Bishop of Bangor.

The heart of the story is the 19th century, when land enclosures, Thomas Telford's Menai Suspension Bridge, and the Britannia railway bridge ended the village's isolation and threatened to send trains straight past it toward Holyhead. The response was a marketing masterstroke: stuffing every local landmark into one enormo ...