Wales becomes the geographical clue that turns Jacob Portman’s grandfather’s last words into a journey. The name appears as Cymru on an old postmark from Cairnholm Island; when Jacob recognizes it as the Welsh name for Wales, he connects the letter to his grandfather’s childhood and sets out to learn what happened there. The island’s landscape and local accounts then place that family mystery within a history of wartime loss and a community’s own ways of remembering.

The letter and the destination

An old photograph enclosed with the letter shows a woman smoking a pipe. Jacob recognizes a possible connection to his grandfather’s childhood stories of a children’s home protected by a bird who smoked a pipe. The photograph alone does not explain who the woman is, but the postmark—Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK—offers a place to investigate.

Jacob reasons that Cairnholm Island must be the island mentioned in Miss Peregrine’s letter. He recalls that his grandfather had told him to find the bird, and wonders whether the woman in the photograph is the headmistress who had rescued his grandfather. The letter’s postmark is fifteen years old, so Jacob cannot know whether she is still alive; even if she is not, he hopes island residents may remember his grandfather. Wales thus enters the story not as a general destination but as the route from an enigmatic image and a family injunction toward testimony and history.

Arrival on Cairnholm

Jacob and his father reach the island after a grueling thirty-six-hour journey involving three airplanes, two layovers, and a ferry crossing. Fog initially obscures the island. When the cliffs emerge from it, Jacob sees a bleak, steep-sided place ringed by birds; its formidable appearance makes the possibility of a magical history seem less implausible to him. His father, meanwhile, is excited by the birds overhead, including Manx shearwaters.

The journey also brings Jacob into contact with the everyday island he had imagined only from a distance. The Waiting Woman, a black-stone memorial to islanders lost at sea, stands near the Priest Hole pub, whose sign advertises drinks and food but offers only one room. Its cramped, dim interior and early-morning drinkers give Jacob an unromantic first impression of local life. These details place his search amid working landmarks and lodging, rather than in a remote landscape detached from the island’s present community.

Local history on display

At the island museum, Jacob encounters the Old Man, a preserved body displayed in a case at the front of the former church sanctuary. Curator Martin Pagett identifies him as Cairnholm Man, the island’s oldest resident: more than 2,700 years old, though only sixteen when he died. The preservation is attributed to the conditions beneath the island’s bog, where oxygen and bacteria cannot exist. The exhibit gives the island’s past a literal presence, while Jacob’s startled response connects it to the creatures that have haunted his dreams.

The display also illustrates how Cairnholm presents its history to visitors. The Old Man is both an archaeological subject and a familiar local figure, known simply by that name. For Jacob, however, the island’s museum is not merely a collection of curiosities: he has come hoping to learn about the abandoned house and the people who once lived there. Local exhibits and recollections offer a public account against which his grandfather’s stories can be tested.

War, loss, and family memory

Martin’s uncle Oggie explains that the island’s children’s home has been unoccupied since the Second World War. An anti-aircraft battery on the island had made it a military target, and, according to Oggie, a German air raid struck the home. He recalls the island’s preparations for bombing—sirens, residents seeking shelter, and an air-raid warden ensuring that shades were drawn and streetlights extinguished—before describing the night the bombs fell.

Oggie says the town itself suffered no deaths, though the island’s gun crew did, and that one bomb killed the children at the home. He gives the date precisely: September 3, 1940. The account recasts the ruins Jacob has come to investigate as the site of a wartime disaster, not simply an abandoned children’s home. It also offers a local explanation for why nobody has lived there since the war.

The account becomes personal when Oggie recalls a boy who had survived the bombing. The boy spoke only to ask when the next boat would leave for the mainland, saying he wanted to take up arms against those who had killed his people. Jacob recognizes the boy as his grandfather. His disclosure astonishes the islanders and binds together the two histories that brought him to Wales: the community’s memory of the raid and his family’s memory of the child who left Cairnholm after it.