Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless signal across open sea from Flat Holm on 13 May 1897, a Morse message to a receiving mast at Lavernock Point on the mainland; the original slip of paper, signed by Marconi and his assistant George Kemp, is now in the National Museum of Wales. The island, Ynys Echni in Welsh, sits about five miles out in the Bristol Channel from Cardiff, though it belongs administratively to the city rather than the Vale of Glamorgan coast opposite. A lighthouse has stood here since 1737, and Victorian gun batteries and an old cholera isolation hospital, built to quarantine ships arriving at Cardiff, are dotted around the island too.
The Gull and Leek, a small pub in the old Victorian barracks, is often called the most southerly pub in Wales; it serves bottled beer and cider and opens for visitors passing through. Across the water to the south, Steep Holm is Flat Holm’s Somerset counterpart, a similar limestone island with its own wartime remains. Cardiff Council runs Flat Holm as a nature reserve, and boats from Cardiff Bay land you for two to three hours ashore between March and October, with a landing fee paid to the warden on arrival.
