Holiday in Wales

I'm back after a beautiful sunny week in beautiful sunny Wales.

Just a taster to start: The cottage we stayed in in Beddgelert - back (second along), front and the view early in the morning from the garden.

SATURDAY

We managed to make a reasonably early start which was amazing considering how much I hadn't had time to do on Friday with all the drama going on.

Our journey took us first to Clumber Park (Sherwood Forest) where we had a drink and a sandwich, then across the country via Bolsover, Chesterfield, Buxton, Congleton and Crewe (a mainly beautiful route) to Little Moreton Hall. I had been here before and remembered a feeling of slight disappointment in this fascinating building. Usually such feelings are dispelled on a second visit when expectations are less high and therefore all that is good comes as a pleasant surprise. This time it didn't vanish, but was reinforced. Architecturally amazing, it remains an unfurnished shell. Joe. a Fred Dibnah fan who remembered a programme he made about it, had precisely the same reaction. Yes, it's interesting. No, it neither moved nor excited either of us.

On our arrival in Wales the rain started - just spitting, but enough for Joe to sing his little triumph song about Wales being wet and my being wrong. (Our previous holiday in Wales had been dry all but the Sunday morning and one overnight rain storm.) The cottage, as you can see from the pictures above was lovely. In the heart of Beddgelert with a frontage (backage?) on to one of the rivers, it was furnished in that pretty, slightly kitch style one associates with the better sort of holiday cottage. Once we had taken our luggage in, we went in search of food which we found at the Antique shop cum Bistro just opposite the end of the bridge. Joe had his favourite lamb shank (how anyone can eat a whole lamb shank is beyond my understanding - I would serve that for a family of four) and I had crab thermidore. The standard was reasonable, and the price a little high. The owner (or to be accurate the owner's husband) was a Scot who had been brought up in Canada - in Hamilton where not only has Emma just finished a year at MacMaster University, but where the brother of one of my great-great-great-grandmothers settled in the mid nineteenth century. Mini-mini world!

SUNDAY

We went to church at St. Mary's - footpath from behind the house and across two bridges - where the service was in a mixture of English and Welsh with a service book printed in both languages so it was easy to follow. Afterwards we got talking to someone whose native place is not far from Kris's parents in Michigan. As I said, it's a mini world.

It is still early in the tourist season so the timetable for the Welsh Highland Railway is somewhat limited, and - going from Rhyd Dhu at the foot of Snowdon - Sunday was the only day which would give us a clear two hours in Caernarfon rather than a quick turnaround.

Back to the cottage for a quick cup of proper coffee, and then a couple of miles up the road to Rhyd Dhu where we parked the car and admired the view of Snowdon until the train arrived.

It was a beautiful day so we travelled in one of the open carriages to make the most of both the fresh air (plus sooty specks and sulphurous steam engine scent) and the photo opportunities. Joe has recently bought a superior (ancient and heavy) camera with many lenses to complement his enormous digital one and lugged both of them wherever we went doing his imitation of a Japanese tourist.
Here are some of my photos of the journey and the trains taken on my nice little camera which lives quite comfortably in my handbag.

Once in Caernarfon we found a cafe (not the one which was bad in 1963, still bad in 1978, and looks unimproved since, but another round the corner where we had some quite acceptable vegetable soup at a very reasonable price) and thence to the castle. Is it a sin to say that this is my least favourite of the Edwardian castles? Well, it is, but it isn't often that you find it as empty of people as this

which I find a big improvement on the usual crowds. And here are some views from a tower or two - there wasn't time between trains (nor the energy) to climb the lot, but we managed a respectable selection. Joe insisted on buying a new guide book which was big, fully illustrated and expensive; I would have been happy going with the yellow card guide that my father purchased for 4d in 1963, and on which there is a perfectly adequate plan. After all, how many accounts do I need of Edward I's annexation of Wales?


There was no time to look around the town (which once beat Grantham to the most boring town in which to live title - as voted by teenage radio listeners) but on our hurried return to the train we passed a 'gifte shoppe' in which I saw a toy border collie puppy. Sometimes a present metaphorically has someone's name on it: in this case it was literally so as the name on the pup's collar was 'Jess', so I stopped to buy it. Jess sat looking out of the window on the train, and thereafter slept on the spare bed in my room for the rest of the week; she proved to be very well trained.

At the station there was something of an altercation going on between two people concerned with a bus tour. I gathered that the mainly wheelchair bound passengers had been one way on the train and someone had reacted badly to the journey, and that this apparently was all the fault of one of the organisers who should have known better than to subject someone with a disability to such a disagreeable experience. I wonder how many others had really enjoyed their train ride, and how many other wheelchair users travel on the Welsh Highland Railway each year with no ill effects and just as much enjoyment as the rest of us?

The return journey was every bit as enjoyable as the outward one.

Back at the cottage I cooked a massive mixed grill which Joe well and truly ate.

MONDAY

Down the Lleyn Peninsular to visit Plas yn Rhiw - Joe's rather surprising choice for a revisit. I love the simplicity and charm of Plas yn Rhiw, but Joe tends to go for the private palaces rather than anything smaller. We managed to get there early despite a diversion on the road to Porthmadog, having to stop to buy a battery for my watch, and the fact that the Tesco petrol station had closed which necessitated a hunt for petrol at anything approaching a reasonable price.

I said most of what I wanted to say about Plas yn Rhiw in September 2006, so I won't repeat myself, but just add that the gardens are even more lovely in the spring. The first two photos are of the same views I took last time, while the third was taken while I was chatting to an old lady (92) who was also visiting the place (quite sprightly, and still mentally all there - we should all be so lucky!)

On then to Aberdaron - usually too crowded to park, but a good visit this early in the season. We had a pot of tea, and I bought a fresh crab to take back for supper, after which I went down to the beach where I spent a pleasant couple of hours painting a very bad watercolour and having a paddle, and Joe mooched around doing his own thing (he doesn't do beaches and certainly doesn't do anything as childish as paddling!)

This is much better than my painting.

By missing the junction for Nevin I took us home by an accidentally scenic and circuitous route, but the crab salad together with the hovis I bought from a baker in Porthmadog made an excellent supper and was well worth the wait.

TUESDAY

I went for a walk to Gelert's Grave while Joe stayed in and watched some Find an Unsuitable House for a Fussy Couple who Don't Know Their Own Minds programme (repeat). Unfortunately I reached my destination to discover that my camera was not in my handbag as I had taken it out to recharge the battery the previous night. "Never mind," I thought, "it's only a short walk - I'll be back before the end of the week." I wasn't, so I have 'borrowed' this picture from someone else's website.

A chat with a young woman ranger who was monitoring the stream's flow, then back towards the village and a quick visit to the shops. I had noticed a craft shop and intended to buy something typically Welsh for Joshua. The shop in question had many wonderful craft items from all over the world (as well as a certain amount of tourist kitch) and a fair trade policy, and I was seduced into buying a didgeridoo - not so much a product of Wales as - possibly - of New South Wales, but something which I knew he would really appreciate and only £8! Across the road to another shop to buy some Beddgelert made fudge for Daddy and a postcard of Gelert's Grave to send to Jess and Helen; I also spotted a silly (rude) one about sheep and shepherds which I knew would appeal to Glen, Jacob and Josh so I divided the family by gender and sent the two. It was at this point that I discovered that my address book was also not in my handbag and made the decision to send no more postcards since I carry no postcodes but my own (and by extension Helen's) in my memory, and precious few house numbers.

After a cup of coffee, Joe and I set off for the National Slate Museum at Llanberis - somewhere which I never got round to visiting in my many stays in Wales in the past. I may well have been the winner here as it is one of the national museums which now have free entry. We had a little look round, then went in to see the film 'How to steal a Mountain' about the slate industry, and thence on to the demonstration of slate splitting. I think the demonstrator was called Daffyd Davies, and he gave an excellent talk.

Here he is trimming a slate. He then cut a round one, and offered it to anyone who could work out what it would be used for bearing in mind that they were never made commercially, but just for the worker's themselves. Plates, teapot stands and chimney covers were all guessed, but my guess that it was for covering dishes in the pantry won me the slate which I shall possibly not use for that purpose, cling film, tupperware and fridges having rendered them obsolete. Teapot stand seems good to me.

Our next port of call was the restored inclined plain with the same guide rushing ahead to demonstrate that too. He scampered up the steep side like a young chamois to get the thing started, and a bit later we were joined by another guide who explained very nicely what I would have though was clear to anyone watching the thing at work, but apparently from the questions asked wasn't.

Back in the museum proper we had lunch, and then finished the tour looking at the miners' cottages furnished in three periods
No. 3: The Golden Age of Slate (Tanygrisiau near Blaenau Ffestiniog, 1861) was rather sparsely furnished even for the period, and there was no real feeling of the crowding you would find in such houses.
No. 2: The Penrhyn Strike (Bethesda, 1901); this too had less clutter in it than one would expect.
Number 1: Dinorwig Closes (Llanberis, 1969); this was the one that convinced me that the museum curator's heart isn't really into domestic history as there were so many glaring anachronisms - biscuit tins in a design which didn't appear until the late 1970s, and a TV which anyone on a halfway decent wage would have replaced long before 1969 if only to be able to watch ITV, let alone BBC2 and even the burgeoning colour output. We were very much in Heartbeat territory here where anything from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies will do for any year in the 1960s. It's a shame, since the industrial stuff was excellent, and I would have liked to see the Engineer's House (which was closed for decorating) to see whether it was better presented than the humbler dwellings.

The waterwheel just couldn't be captured by my little camera, so here is another borrow - this time from the museum's own website.

But the foundry picture is my own.

Outside the museum we decided to indulge in another steam train journey on the Llanberis Lake Railway which was very pleasant and gave us a lovely view across the lake to Snowdon seen from the other side from Sunday's journey.


The combination of the lake, mountains and steam train made me think of Uncle Peter, so, Uncle, this journey is for you, and I hope that you find all these things in Heaven, and not 'every valley exalted and every rough place made plain' (Isaiah 40), which in my opinion would be very dull and not at all heavenly: I prefer 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my strength' (Psalm 121).

My last visit of the day - I somehow managed to mislay Joe who, I think, believed that I was heading underground - was to the hidden lake - actually a flooded quarry. This is very deep, very still and very mysterious, and belongs to a diving centre.

WEDNESDAY

Conwy always strikes me as having all the virtues which Caernarfon lacks. From the car park we headed straight to Anna's Tea Rooms in the Georgian drawing room above what is now a climbing shop, but in a building which was clearly once a fine town house. We came here in 2006, and Joe was determined to come back - they do serve very good coffee.

We went on to Aberconwy House (see last year's description) and then went on to Plas Mawr. A good many years ago Liz and I visted this building which was then an art gallery holding at the time, I seem to recall, a less than inspiring exhibition. Since then it has passed into the hands of Cadw and has been totally transformed with a restoration which goes to the very bounds of what that can mean, and leaves one feeling that it almost is a Tudor house as the original owner intended. The furniture is for the most part very good reproduction, the decorative scheme goes back to the closest that a study of layers of pigments can reproduce and in the kitchens there are rushes on the floor - it is very convincing and much too good to be thought of in terms of fakery.


It is a hard line to follow, and so easy to drop into disneyfication or dismal failure as at Connisborough Castle, or to play it safe as at Alford Manor House or, as I mentioned earlier, Little Moreton Hall. Here, as at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum and Gainsborough Old Hall, the success is triumphant. Of course there are criticisms: I for one cannot believe that any housekeeper in any period of history would have game hanging and dripping blood (though we have to imagine the dripping bit and I assume that is what the display designer failed to do) all over a table on which other foods are placed and prepared!

And here is the view from an upper window.

As you will see from the above, it was but a short walk to Conwy Castle, and thither we went for a brief revisit, and an opportunity to enjoy the fantastic views over the harbour and of the two bridges - well, three, but the 1958 road bridge wouldn't fit in and in any case interests me less than the Telford and Stephenson bridges.

Our last port of call in Conway was back to Anna's Tea Rooms for a very good fish pie each followed by lemon meringue pie for me and summer fruits cheesecake for Joe.

A brief stop on the way home - originally to check on what felt like a flattening tyre, but was actually just a noisy and bumpy road surface, but ended up as another long look at the amazing views of Snowdonia.

THURSDAY

Some time ago I watched a programme in the Restoration series which implied that Gwydyr Castle had long been in a state of ruin and neglect when the current owners bought it in the 1990s which belied what I remembered of visiting it in the early 1980s. To be fair the claim seems to be an invention of the television people and is not made in any of the literature left in the rooms by the present owners who have done a great deal of work and some amazing restoration especially in getting the entire fittings of one room back from America. Much less good than their restoration is their presentation of their home. There are no human beings to talk to about the house apart from the middle European girl with a less than perfect grasp of English who sells the tickets at the entrance, and the typed room guides in each room are very tatty with lamination which is coming adrift and feels quite dirty when you hold the sheet - moreover there is just one copy per room. One of the beauties of the computer is that new copies can be made of any document with very little trouble, and using a laminator is hardly more difficult. To be fair, I don't think that tourism is high on the owners' list of priorities, and their literature suggests that in letting the public into their private house they were bowing to the inevitable rather than fulfilling a long held plan; nonetheless it wouldn't hurt to update their room guides.

I recall that last time I visited I was wearing sandals and that the gravel got painfully between my toes; this time I was wearing trainers which may have a somewhat Minnie Mouse look with my bare legs and dress, but which improved my enjoyment of the garden no end.

For years I told people that the best cream tea in the British Isles could be bought at Ty Hwnt ir Bont in Llanrwst, but as the distance in time between me an those fondly remembered teas became greater an element of doubt entered into my mind about how good they really were; after all standards of catering have generally improved so much that surely anything which was outstandingly good thirty years ago must be fairly run of the mill in the twenty-first century?

On entering Ty Hwnt ir Bont seemed completely unchanged, and we took our seats and ordered - I a no.2 special (scone, jam, and cream, barabrith, and a pot of tea) and Joe soup of the day, coffee and scone, jam, and cream. Now I make very good scones (they are my speciality produced for village fetes, friends to tea etc.) and as a rule other people's scones are graded on a scale from 'not very good', 'quite nice', 'not as good as mine' and 'pretty well as good as mine'. At Ty Hwnt ir Bont there is another category 'better than mine', and I realised that my assertions over the years about the quality of the cream teas were nothing short of the plain unvarnished truth. Joe and I raised our cups to Liz, with whom I first visited this excellent tea shop. It has in fact changed hands just the once since those days when the couple who had run it for thirty years retired six years ago and the present couple took over, presumably inheriting the recipes in the process. In the upstairs gallery there are a few changes with the odd bits of tourist tat giving place wholly to original art.

Our next port of call was Trefriw Woollen Mill which I had never visited. We watched the sorting, carding, spinning and weaving with reasonable interest and Joe bought a set of dinner mats. I don't suffer from his urge to buy souvenirs wherever we go.

Back in Llanrwst we had a look at the Almshouses Museum which is a tiny but nicely presented local museum, and I bought milk, mushrooms, grapes and bananas at the cleanest shop I have ever been in - just a little Spar, but the whole place shone and, even in the middle of the afternoon, you felt that you could have eaten off the floor!

Along to another place which is much changed in the twenty-eight years since my last visit. Ty Mawr Wybrnant is the birthplace of bishop Morgan who translated the Bible into Welsh at the behest of Elizabeth I. When Liz and I went there in 1980 it was just another Welsh farm house in which one room was given over to mementos of the bishop. We knocked on the door and were admitted by the tenant/custodian. She showed us the few treasures including a copy of the Welsh Bible, and asked whether either of us knew Latin as she wanted to know what the dedication at the front said. Having myself failed 'O' level Latin not marginally but spectacularly badly, I happily nominated Liz, who (after a certain amount of modest protest) sat down to start the translation, whereupon two year old Richard needed to go to the loo. Left on my own while the custodian showed Liz and Richard up to her private bathroom, I too looked at the dedication which proved to be reasonably simple and by the time they came back I was able to give a rough gist – an interpretation with which Liz agreed. "That's what the other gentleman thought it meant" said the custodian, and offered us a cup of tea (which we accepted - the only time any school subject has directly earned me anything).

All has now changed: the house has been completely gutted and returned to its sixteenth century form and there is far more to see. There is also a massive collection of Bibles in numerous languages - all donated by visitors to Ty Mawr Wybrnant. And there are visitor lavatories in another building together with a display about the life and times of Bishop Morgan.

It was now time to head back to Beddgelert and I had wanted to go to either the Swallow Falls or Conwy Falls on the way, but it had started raining - rain which increased steadily throughout the evening which explains why I neglected to take any photographs at Ty Mawr, although I did hear my first cuckoo of the year. Here are some borrowed photos.

Not all was lost to rain as I was inspired to do a pencil and wash picture of Snowdonia in the rain after we had eaten supper. Distinctly better than my efforts at Aberdaron - I have posted two versions as the photographs of the painting are less than satisfactory - the original being too faint and the adjusted version too crude.

FRIDAY

Our last full day, and revisits to Beaumaris and Penrhyn, as well as a final chance to drive through Snowdonia.

We crossed to Anglesey via the Britannia Bridge - cleverly reused, but a mere shadow of Stephenson's amazingly innovative original design - and drove along the coast road up to Beaumaris, and on to Penmon where I hoped to see the priory. The views from the road were quite wonderful across the straits of the mainland shrouded in mist.

We arrived at the priory and I quote from the website "Parking is free outside the priory (as of 2007) but there is an option to travel further, on a toll road, toward the point and Puffin Island for a small fee (£2.00 as of 2007). The church is open throughout the day, all year." However, as I was about to get out of the car, I was told in no uncertain terms by a man with a very aggressive manner that it was private land and that the £2 fee had to be paid. We left.

Back in Beaumaris we had coffee, and I went to see the Town Gaol while Joe went to look at the shops. I had been before and I thought Joe would be interested, but it seems not and we agreed to meet at the courthouse in a couple of hours.

An early cell, a whipping post and the treadmill
It is well presented, with informative boards about the place.

The Courthouse is also well presented although, as with the gaol, there is a lot of repetition of information as well as the usual problem of having to explain everything as though to the totally ignorant so that it gets quite tiresome having to skip through to find anything specific to the place which I may not have heard before.

There is some sort of family story about great-grandfather Huston (who was a civil engineer) being involved in work on the Telford Bridge. Clearly it is too early for him to have been involved on the original build, so I wonder whether his role was on the restoration project of the late 1930s, although I would have thought he had retired by then. Anyway, whether or not there is any family connection here are two pictures, and - just in case anyone is concerned by the the second - yes, I was driving, but no, Joe took the picture.

Penrhyn Castle had undergone another change since my last visit - or rather my response to it had in that my feelings had veered back to quite liking its massive pseudo-Norman architecture and fittings. Whether on not one likes the interior, the setting is a delight.

I managed to get a cup of tea and a slice of barabrith, but Joe spent so long chatting to the room guides that the castle was closing up around him and the people in the tea shop had cashed up and gone.

A quick visit to Tesco for petrol and the wherewithal for supper, then a final trip through the mountains - fully visible now after being hidden for much of the day in mist and low cloud.

SATURDAY

And finally we reach the homeward journey. It's the beginning of the bank holiday and even in the morning I noticed that there was a steady flow of traffic (mainly caravans and cars with boxes of camping gear on top or in little trailers) heading in the direction opposite to us.

At Llangollen we went to Plas Newydd which was the home in the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries the home of two women known as the Ladies of Llangollen. They 'prettified' an ordinary cottage and made this:-

- a house with a much carved and betimbered front, and a totally different back. The garden was very pretty, and I am glad to have seen it, but not to the point of making it a regular port of call en route to Wales.

We went on to Valle Crucis Abbey which is a Cistercian Abbey on a rather smaller scale than those in Yorkshire. Parts of the dorter and Abbot's lodging are roofed and show clearly the signs of having been used as a farm house for centuries after the dissolution of the manasteries.


After this we headed east towards England, but not without a final detour for a glimpse of the amazing Trevor Aqueduct.

Joe doesn't really share my passion for these wonderful feats of civil engineering, but I'm driving the car so we go where I take us.

The homeward journey was mainly a simple reverse of the outward one with just a brief stop at Blaze Farm not far before we reached Buxton for some very delicious ice-cream, and then just a surprisingly traffic free potter across England and home.