Return to Portmeirion...

Every few years or so I get the urge to visit Portmeirion. I’ve been three or four times and each time I go I’m surprised by how something so higgledy-piggledy and architecturally disjointed can be so pleasing to the eye. I think that the bright colours of the painted buildings help and the terracing of buildings that Clough Williams Ellis decided upon adds interest and drama.

There’s no doubt that the place is certainly not typical of a Welsh village or any village anywhere come to that. It’s made up of bits and pieces from all over the place – France to China, Ancient Greece to Aberdeen - although most of it could be described as Italianate.

Clough Williams Ellis, the designer and builder of Portmeirion picked up bits and pieces everywhere and Portmeirion is full of found and donated ‘bits’ of other buildings. What C.W.E. couldn’t beg, steal or borrow he mocked up, and much of the village is more film set than solid.

Perhaps that’s what I like about the place. It’s real but it isn’t real at all. Many of the buildings were shells until fairly recently and some bits of it are made out of painted hardboard. It’s a place out of place, although it sits very comfortably in the landscape.

There’s more than a touch of the surreal around Portmerrion. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Salvador Dali pop out from behind the Watch Tower one evening brandishing a lobster, twirling his mustache and declaring that he 'iz ze Dali!'

Now that would be a dream come true.

Lighthouse for sale...

I’m fascinated by a lot of things – clouds, campervans, cats – and that’s just the c’s. One of my longest lasting fascinations is lighthouses. I find it hard to be within a few miles of one without being drawn to it on a visit. Of course it’s an interest I share with a lot of people; lighthouses seem to be one of those things that capture people’s imaginations. Perhaps it’s the thought of the loneliness of the lighthouse keeper, one man against the sea and the elements and all that.

This year I’ve sought out the lighthouses of Anglesey: South Stack, Penmon, the twin lights of  Llanddwyn Island. I thought I’d done Anglesey, but then, driving down a side road on the way back from lunch at Church Bay, I spied on a ragged headland another lighthouse. It didn’t look as grand as Penmon or South Stack, but it did have cottages and there was a for sale board on the track leading up to it.

Point Lynas lighthouse on the north-east coast of Anglesey in North Wales is privately owned, comes with three cottages and is a snip at 1.3 million! It’s still in use, rented back to Trinity House for a peppercorn rent, so you can’t actually live in the lighthouse itself. Mind you, it does come with it’s own build in torch - the 1,000-watt lamp shines for nine seconds out of every ten, 24 hours a day and it’s beam can be seen for 18 nautical miles, so thick curtains required. The three cottages each have three bedrooms and two are rented - £350 a week in low season and £950 high season, summer and winter. They made a gross profit of £42,000 last year which means that you’d make all of your money back in 30 years. I'm not sure about the fog horn on foggy nights though.

Of course, manned lighthouses are a thing on the past now. There are no manned lighthouses any more, they’re all automated, but a chap can dream can’t he?

That’s it. I’m off to buy a lottery ticket, I fancy myself as a lighthouse keeper.

Cottage garden...

It wasn't a great year for my garden in Wales. the combination of heat and lack of watering really didn't suit and, as I wasn't growing cacti in my outside pots, not many of the seeds I sowed in March came to fruition. Of course some plants might have flowered in our absence, but does a flower not seen really exist at all?

It was always hard enough keeping them alive in hot weather when we were visiting every weekend. So there was no chance this year; as we've only been able to visit monthly and it has been a summer to remember and talk about in years to come. Hot, dry and not at all suitable for absentee gardening. Oh well, you can't have everything.

At least my longiflorum lilies didn't let me down. There they were to greet us when we arrived at the cottage and they bloomed magnificently right up until the day we left. I woke up to find the petals scattered all around their pot like plucked dove's feathers.

It was almost as if they had saved themselves until we would be there to see them, and then decided to leave as we did.

Halfway along the lane...

Halfway along the lane in Wales - down the hill and through the tunnel of trees - sits Poo Sticks Bridge. Well, that’s what we call it and always have ever since we first took Holly to race sticks from one side of the bridge to the other all those years ago. It isn’t a big bridge, just a stone arch with a stream running beneath it, just wide enough for a herd of sheep or a tractor.

After heavy rain the stream can become a torrent, whipping away our sticks and sending them tumbling down the bend to turn the corner and disappear. But usually it just ambles along and our sticks get stuck in the tangle of grass and dead wood that piles up by the place where the cows come to drink sometimes, loping down the muddy bank to stand in the water and stare nonchalantly, yet defiantly, up at you.

It’s a good place to come on a summer’s evening just to sit and watch the mountains in the distance or the shadows of clouds move across the fields. Of course if you sit on the wall you might find your pants full of ants or red spider mites when you get up. Generally though, we stand watching the swallows dart above the bridge catching invisible insects as they go. At dusk they are replaced by the odd bat or two and sometimes the owl I can hear from my bedroom window swoops to catch a mouse.

In the summer there are always dragon and damselflies at Poo Sticks Bridge; orange and blue and shimmering green. When I was a boy I used to think that they could sting, but of course they can’t. It’s funny the ideas you have when you are young, we used to call the flying red beetles that we sometimes saw ‘bloodsuckers’ and believed that if they landed on you they could drain your blood. Mind you, I believed a lot of things that turned out not to be true back then. I’m sure that there were more insects around though; moths and daddy longlegs, flying ants and ladydids. Apparently this year has been a good year all round for insects, a record year for cabbage whites and our huge buddleia,next to the cottage gates, has been covered with butterflies and massive bumblebees.

As we dropped our sticks into the water a damselfly landed on the bridge. For once I had my camera with me so I snapped it - such fine lacy wings, almost too delicate to see. I sat on the bridge watching it take in the warmth of the sun then it was off flittering away at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. It was then that I noticed that my legs were covered in ants – ouch! Well, I did say that it was a good year for insects.

Tommy rot...

TOMMY ROT! Oh, how well I remember that phrase from my childhood. Of course, I have no idea who Tommy was but his name was bellowed around our house at the slightest excuse, usually whenever I said something that wasn’t agreed with - even when factual and accurate… Oh happy days!

Talking of happy days, let’s get back to Wales shall we and my reasons for remembering Tommy or perhaps more pertinently his rot.

Of course Wales wasn’t all exploration, adventure and magic. There are always jobs to be done before the winter sets in and some of these jobs simply couldn’t be avoided no matter how hard I tried.

The discovery of wet rot in the main beams of my gates had, I hoped, been caught just in time. Unfortunately I had forgotten the words of Confucius when he say “Alway use bess possible filla fella” and I’d used some cheapo stuff than I’d hoped to get away with but hadn’t. The damn stuff simply wouldn’t dry, despite the three weeks it had been left to get itself into some sort of drying order. Pound shops! You simply can’t trust them. There was only one thing for it – I’d have to buy the expensive stuff that worked!

To be honest, some of the excavations I’d gouged into the wood of my gates were more caverns that holes. It really did look like only the best would do. As Frank, my old sometimes sparring partner and sometimes chum, had warned me when he saw those gates “look after them”, expressing the view that they would cost hundreds of pounds to replace. Of course he was right. There wouldn’t be much change from six or seven hundred pounds to replace the fifteen foot double barred gates, and I was damned if I was going to fork out all that money simply because of a couple of inches of soggy wood.

Purchasing the hardener and filler from the company who claim “it does exactly what it says on the can” was only difficult because it meant me parting with some of my fish and chip money. Luckily Wilkinson’s in Pwllheli had some which, to be honest, was a bit of a miracle as usually they have everything except what you want. Arriving back home I mixed the gloopy muck with a thin band of hardener and within minutes (yes minutes) the holes were filled, the filler hardened, shaped, sanded and I was ready to paint. It really did do exactly what it said on the tin.

It didn’t take long to rub down the gates and give them a lick of paint. As I painted I wondered who Tommy Rot was.

Perhaps it will and should always remain a mystery.

Happy magic...

I wasn’t at all surprised to find that Llanddwyn Island is where the Welsh Patron Saint of lovers came to live so that she couldn’t be loved. Well, the Welsh are a complicated people and as St Dwynwen herself said “Nothing wins hearts like cheerfulness”. Of course, she probably mumbled this as she smiled madly away to herself, living her entire life on the island as a hermit like all the best saints do.

Dwynwen, let’s call her Dwyny, was one of the 24 daughters of St Brychan, a Welsh prince who probably deserved to be sainted for simply putting up with all those women around him. She fell in love with a young man named Maelon, but rejected his advances for any one of a number of reported reasons. (1) She wished to remain chaste (2) To become a nun (3) Her father wanted her to marry another (4) She was a bloke in drag.

Either way, poor old Maelon was turned to ice by a potion that Dwyny made him drink. Then, after a good old pray, Dwyny was granted three wishes. She chose that Maelon be restored, that all true lovers find happiness, and that she would never again wish to be married and spend the rest of her days alone on the island, playing with eels and chucking breadcrumbs around.

Mind you, I could see the attraction as I wandered the crushed shell footpaths that criss-cross the island. What a magnificently isolated place to live your life in isolation – eels, breadcrumbs and all. With its ruined chapel, Celtic cross, shrine, Christian cross, lighthouse, pirate's cannon, lookout beacon; there seemed to be something mystical and wondrous at each new turn of the winding path - probably because there was.

What a place; wondrous in the truest sense of the word... a place to wonder at. The island was formed as molten lava from nearby volcanoes tumbled into the sea. Pilots once lived in the tiny windswept cottages on the island, guiding ships into the Menai Straights from the stormy Irish Sea. Sailors were saved from drowning and brought to the island for shelter by the lifeboat that once set sail from its rocky shores on stormy nights. Even the Greek Gods once roamed the islands chucking about thunderbolts – albeit for the 2009 remake of Clash of the Titans.

As I walked back along the beach, counting steps to make the walk a little easier, I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t seen a mermaid or a pirate. It would have been nice to be chased by a giant or come across a small dragon in a cove - green smoke curling from his wide-flared nostrils - and it would have been great to glimpse an unexpected elf out of the corner of my eye. But all-in-all I was pleased with the peace of the place and I left Ynys Llanddwyn with a head full of happy magic.

A puff of green smoke…

There are some places where the old stuff seems to still live on. You know the stuff I’m talking about, the ‘there might be elves, or pirates, or a dragon just around the corner’ stuff, the stuff of our childhood imaginings, the stuff that still keeps me looking for a puff of green smoke above every beach-bound outcrop of rock I see.

Magic. It’s everywhere if you look hard enough

.

I’d never been to Newborough Forest on Anglesey and really didn’t feel the need to go there. But then I stumbled across a picture of a lonely lighthouse and on investigation found that it, and another smaller lookout tower, are to be found at the far end of the beach at Newborough Warren on Llanddwyn Island. A lighthouse and an Island! I could smell adventure and I knew immediately that I had to visit. After all there could be a few pirates, even a giant or two, and couldn’t I just see a puff of green smoke from behind the imaginary rocks inside my head?

Llanddwyn Island (Ynys Llanddwyn) is a magical place, a narrow finger of land sticking out like a pointer across the Irish Sea. It isn’t quite an island, generally you can walk to it as it remains attached to Wales by a spur of rock and sand at all but the highest tides. It is almost an island though, surrounded by the vast views of Snowdonia and the Lleyn Peninsula in the distance.

We arrived at the forest gate, the sat-nav guiding us there without fault, and paid our three pounds. The forest was dark and cool and tall, a reserve for red squirrels (not that we saw one) with a winding sun-dappled track leading gently to the beach car park. After a camping stove hotdog lunch at the fine stone barbecue stands in the excellent car park picnic area we strolled along the magnificent wooden boardwalk to the beach.

To be honest this place was too good to be true. Too well done, too well kept, everything for an afternoon ramble had been thought about right down to the dozens of forest brown butterflies that fluttered about as we walked besides the meadow flowers along the deep brown bark chippings path. Down the steps and onto the sand - was that a pirate ship in the distance? Did I catch a glimpse of a mermaid’s tail as it shimmered in the sunshine before disappearing back into the bright blue sea?

The beach was long and sandy and in the distance to the right I could see the island and the two lighthouses on the stony outcrop of rock. We set out along the beach which was disappointingly practically shell-free; a flaw, albeit a small one, in the perfection of the place at last.

Along the beach and up the shingle and thirty minutes later we were there. We had reached Ynys Llanddwyn and a magical gateway stood before us. All we had to do was open it and step through… was that green smoke I could see in the distance, or did I glimpse the flutter of a Jolly Roger?

And down the road, not five miles away, the ogre sniffed and bellowed.