More than a wet weekend in Wales
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 7 ~ May 21 ~ Hedd Wen, visiting Portmeirion and Harlech
Amanda goes for an early morning run and finds a surprise at the next village – twinned with a town in Patagonia! However, it turns out to be in the Northern part of Argentian Patagonia, a long way from anywhere we've been.
Looks like something of an arms war among the postbox topper fraternity!
After yesterday's sunny spells, it's rather dull this morning and as you can see from the water drops on the fence wire, there's been some more rain. Still, we've bought advance tickets for Portmeirion today, so that's where we'll be heading.
The weather is worse as we set off. Oh well, we'll just have to hope it improves again.
Here we are. Still very overcast, but dry at least now.
Aristophanes reads his new play, “The Birds”, in public for the first time, but unable to source suitably trained birds themselves, he resorts to hanging a sheep in mid-air and telling everyone it's dramatic licence, they should use their imagination.
This, of course, is what many of us first knew Portmeirion for (although we didn't know it was Portmeirion until the very end), and it seems that there's still quite a cult fandom to this day.
Interestingly, although it was originally broadcast in black and white, being two years before ITV started colour transmissions, it was filmed in colour to help sell in the US market, and that's what modern audiences get on DVD or TV repeats.
A little retrospective from the BBC here.
The other thing it's generally known for is Portmeirion Pottery ceramic and glass products. Now it has to be said that the vast majority of their output is very flowery and flouncy and not at all us, but years back they produced some beautiful metallic purple and silver-grey plates and bowls which we absolutely loved. (‘Dusk’ by Jo Gorman, although even most of those were completely different. If you go to this specialist website, you can see that the purple Dusk is a bit of a misfit).
Sadly, our original collection was lost in the 2016 fire and the range was now out of production, but we found some pieces on eBay.
The galette is not mine, I hasten to add, but it's the only picture I can find of one of the plates right now.
Back to the village.
It's always described as “Italianate”, which doesn't really do it any kind of justice. We've never seen anything like it in Italy or anywhere else.
The chessboard often featured in the TV show.
Amanda takes up position.
The village was made to look a lot bigger than it really is: you certainly don't need any kind of vehicle to get around it, and there is no taxi service.
Its absence of a coherent style of art or architecture is its style of art and architecture. Italian? Well let's add a Javanese dancer or something for balance!
The first construction was the conversion of an old mansion house into a hotel, the income from which would help fund the rest of Clough Williams-Ellis's vision.
It's still a hotel today, with many of its hundred-year-old features still intact. That boat, for example, is actually not a boat at all, it's a concrete extension of the courtyard area.
Many of the other village buildings are now holiday apartments too. We're not 100% certain we'd like to stay somewhere so busy and public ourselves, but the rates are pretty reasonable.
Beyond the hotel, there are some sandy beach areas. Being a good couple of minutes walk away, they are quite deserted.
The local geology is known as the Ffestiniog Flags Formation, late Cambrian sedimentary rocks dating back almost half a billion years. That's about twice as old as the very first dinosaurs! We are not aware of this as we walk along, we just think they are some cool-looking rocks.
Oops, we appear to have been caught by the tide.
But, but... There are lots of signs warning about the tide. We have not been ignoring them.
The high tide is even printed on our tickets.
It should have been at the maximum half an hour ago, not still coming in.
It's only ankle-deep, and we could easily have climbed the bank in an emergency, but we're still very confused as to how it's happened.
Petrol pumps were different in the 1920s! This was almost certainly a bit out of the ordinary even then: we have seen historic pumps at Brooklands Museum, for example, but nothing quite like this.
I note I haven't got any pictures from our lunch. Lunch was a disappointment. The main hotel restaurant sounds interesting, described on the website as, “a unique style of Modern-Welsh cuisine, combining traditional French techniques with Japanese flavours”, but we're not after fine dining, just a spot of light lunch. We plump instead for, “Caffi’r Ddraig offers a variety of Take-away Street Food located in the centre of the village. Enjoy very tasty super-fast food”. Unfortunately, “very tasty” appears to be a euphemism for “quantity rather than quality, lots of salt and smothered in gunk”.
This is more what we were hoping for.
But apart from that, we would absolutely recommend Portmeirion. We've even been lucky with the weather after our dodgy start.
So where now? Harlech Castle is not that far.
For some reason, it's not until we get here that we remember that we visited in 2019!
It doesn't seem to have changed. Well, there's quite a bit more vegetation in that bed at the side of the car park, and also on the lower left of the castle. Otherwise a picture I took from the same angle looks pretty much identical. Not exactly surprising, it's probably looked like that since Cromwell ordered the ‘slighting’ of this and many other castles in the 17th century.
In we go.
From the top we look back down to the car park and visitor center: the obviously modern building with the grass roof. Entry, though, is through the traditional stone building it's connected to: if you look closely you can see some grey paving and an awning to the right.
The grass roof hasn't grown thicker since last time, though.
In fact, compare the ‘now’ picture with ‘then’. Much sunnier and the car park is busier, but I think you'd struggle to see much difference otherwise.
That previous holiday didn't get a blog at the time. In those days, the running blogs were much more the focus and only the big holidays got their own feature. In fact, I note that the 2019 page on FatSlowCow.uk has 25 running/triathlon entries and no holidays at all. Our India trip spilled over into that year, but started in 2018 so is placed there, and the next biggie was Ethopia in January 2020. Our only other holidays that year were a short family break in South Wales earlier for Amanda's mother's birthday, and then just over a week cycling in Croatia. That almost certainly doesn't have a write-up because we were in family holiday land in school holiday time, discovering that there was a good reason we never normally did that!
[Further Croatia-related aside: when I was in the job market leading up to my present employment, I was contacted by a Croatian company. I told them that I didn't think that I was quite looking for what they were offering, but they asked if we could talk anyway. We had a few video calls and all got on really well, and I told them that I thought I'd like were they were located much more than the parts of Croatia I'd seen. They agreed! They were nice guys, but realised we weren't quite right for each other; if I were ever in their part of the world, I think we'd happily sink a beer or two.]
You don't say!
Ok, I think they're telling the truth.
Last time, I don't think we descended this path, down to what was once a sea gate. The sea has moved out a lot in the last few hundred years and people have now built houses where once they would have needed houseboats.
That's interesting. We've been to a street in New Zealand that also makes that claim. Are they both right?
But wait: that's just one little sign. Let's look back at 2019 again...
Gosh, they were a lot more excited about it then!
What has Guinness got to say? They are the authority being cited after all.
Well, well, well! Look at the Guinness Steepest Street page. Dunedin, New Zealand, yes, but dated 7 November 2019, while the pictures above are from the 11th of September that year. Looks like they got demoted!
Oh, but hang on! We were in NZ in 2015!
So Baldwin Street has the record, Baldwin street loses the record, Baldwin street regains the record. This is a movie plot, isn't it!
I think 40% is probably the Department for Transport official grading, rounded for simplicity, while the little inset 37.45% is the actual measured value, although as the Guinness page says, that's the steepest possible line, not the one that they use to establish the record.
It's hard to convey in a photo, but it is really steep, even to walk.
And so back to our cottage, and dinner is fish, pasta and veg bake with some cheese on top.
Pud is some raspberries and cannoli, which I forget where we bought. They look better than they taste, at least to us. Too sweet and gunky, which comes as no surprise to me and should have come as no surprise to Amanda, but she is a bit of a hopeless optimist sometimes.
Choccies from the lovely choccie shop in Brecon are much more successful!
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