Snowdonia: castles, sheep and boulders galore

Dolwyddelan castle

For St. David’s Day, I thought I’d reread the scrapbook pages I had dedicated a trip to Snowdonia to, which my Mum and I took back in March 2012 when I was at university. It was the first road trip holiday my Mum undertook, and though it was good timing for the daffodils were in bloom, it was a bad time to drive as the UK was experiencing petrol shortage: on day six the petrol station we needed to use had “no fuel”. It was also our first proper trip to Wales, prior to which we’d only been to Cardiff on a day trip from Bristol, back when I was in primary school.

Porthmadog

We arrived in Porthmadog via the Tanat Valley, driving from Birmingham. Situated in the estuary of the Afon Glaslyn and home to the Purple Moose Brewery, Porthmadog was our base for our holiday in Snowdonia. Restaurants were deserted or closed, so in the end we ate lamb shoulder and a lamb rack washed down with Purple Moose in the lounge part of the Royal Sportsman Hotel, because the restaurant section was closed.

Anglesey

The next day, we drove to Anglesey across Robert Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge, and managed not to be the first visitors to Beaumaris castle, despite arriving 10 minutes before it opened. Described by historian Arnold Taylor as Britain’s “most perfect example of symmetrical concentric planning” and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, unfortunately Beaumaris castle will forever be stuck in my mind as the castle with the “danger, seagull attack” sign. But seriously, Beaumaris is steeped in history and its importance is based on more than just the castle: the hansom cab was invented here, and it has one of the oldest houses in Britain.

We lunched on Llandudno plaice and Bara Brith at Beau’s Tea Rooms, which featured in the Cheshire episode of the Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain. After that we drove to Plas Newydd, a National Trust property which boasts one of the loveliest views in Anglesey, and a fellow diner we chatted to at Beau’s sighed and wished he was going there too. We walked through a sea of daffodils to enter the house, and inside in the dining room we saw Rex Whistler’s masterpiece mural of a seaport that was had a mix of both British and Mediterranean. Rex Whistler was a child prodigy and after graduating from the Slade School of Art became one of the most acclaimed inter-war painters, but had a tragic life: the woman he loved, the daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey, married someone else, and he was killed in Normandy on the morning of his first day of action, at the age of 39.

We couldn’t leave Anglesey without stopping briefly in the train station car park in the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the longest place name in the UK. I wonder how often someone comes to catch the train. Another draw for us Chinese tourists was that Prince William was living and working as a Search and Rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey at the time, but naturally we never had a chance of seeing him as we didn’t want to have to be rescued from anything. Back in Porthmadog, we supped at the locals’ favourite, the Ship Inn. No traditional Welsh fare, so to compensate we vowed to drink as many variations of Purple Moose lager as we could during our stay.

Snowdonia National Park

Day 3 was our walking day, with a first stop at Dolwyddelan castle, which was once thought to be the birthplace of Llewelyn the Great but now Llewelyn is thought to have built the castle. Llewelyn was a 13th century King of Gwynedd, a Welsh kingdom that emerged after the Roman occupation of Britain and covered modern-day Snowdonia, and one of only two Welsh kings to be called “the Great”. The other king was the 9th century king Rhodri the Great, and his grandson Prince Idwal is the namesake of our next stop, Llyn Idwal, where is was mistakenly thought to have been drowned. We walked around the lake, as Charles Darwin once did for geological research, and saw the people scrambling up the Idwal slabs, as Edmund Hillary and his Welsh team mate Charles Evans once did to prepare for their climb up Mount Everest.

The reflections on the lake were crystal clear, and the colours were calming: yellow and russet, grey and purple. Boulders littered the landscape. It was the large, scattered boulders at Llyn Idwal that contained marine seashells that made Darwin realise that the rocks must have formed within an ancient ocean, and later uplifted to the surface by forces within the Earth’s crust. We did not walk up to the Devil’s Kitchen – a crack in the hillside – but saw it from below. It was called the Devil’s Kitchen because steam rose from the crack, leading people to say that the Devil was cooking inside. We ate lunch at the Bistro Betws-y-Coed, back at the gateway to Snowdonia National Park, and it was the best meal we would have until our day in Portmeirion. It served traditional Welsh dishes on wooden plates, and we ordered salmon with port and buttered mead sauce, topped with toasted bacon crumbs, cooked to an 18th century recipe, and smoked haddock with leek mash and mustard sauce topped with rarebit.

After lunch we continued to Beddgelert, which means Gelert’s Grave. Gelert was the faithful Irish wolfhound of Llewelyn the Great, but due to a misunderstanding was killed by his master. Llewelyn had come into his baby son’s chamber one day, to see Gelert with blood round his mouth and the cradle empty. He killed Gelert in rage, thinking that Gelert had killed his son, before discovering that his son was safe and that Gelert had slain a wolf that had tried to harm his son. Beddgelert was also home to Alfred Bestall, the creator of Rupert Bear, and doubled as China for the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. For supper we ate Welsh Black beef fillet and rib-eye in Y Sgwâr (The Square), a restaurant in Tremadog market square that was actually popular. So don’t eat in Porthmadog, take a half hour stroll to Tremadog – it’s worth it!

Caernarfon

Caernarfon castle, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, was our destination the next day. The angularity meant it did not have the romantic appeal of Harlech – another UNESCO World Heritage castle we would visit – but of all the castles we visited in Wales, this one was the most significant. This was where the English King Edward I’s son was born, giving rise to the title ‘the Prince of Wales’. Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) was invested here and so was our current Prince Charles. David Lloyd George was MP for Caernarfon. We ate lunch at the Black Boy Inn, the oldest in Caernarfon. Mum had cawl (which is actually just Welsh for ‘soup’) and I scouse (North European sailor’s stew that’s popular in the nearest English city, Liverpool), and the portions were huge and came with lots of bread.

Penrhyn

After lunch we drove to Bangor, Wales’ oldest city, and visited Penrhyn castle, another National Trust property and a Neo-Norman marvel that was designed for showing off rather than comfortable living. Nevertheless, it did host Queen Victoria in 1859, and there is a convenient (for the person who needs it at least) potty in the dining room for guests to relieve themselves without having to find the bathroom. The white stone staircase with its myriad carvings is the most incredible staircase I’ve ever seen, and the art collection is one of the finest in Wales. We had hoped to eat at Lyn’s Café on the way back to Porthmadog, but it was closed, so we ate Caerphilly cheese and Tregoes butter toffee waffles among other things in our B&B room.

Llŷn Peninsula

In my scrapbook, I had written that the day we drove along the Llŷn Peninsula was “the day we almost died”. This was because of a scare we had when turning into a National Trust property, a sharp right on a steep hill. But to go back to the beginning, we started the day in the seaside resort of Criccieth, at Criccieth castle, which along with Dolwyddelan was built by Llewelyn the Great. Next we visited Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, a local art gallery for a driving coffee and toilet break, on our way to Plas-yn-Rhiw, a National Trust garden with views over Cardigan Bay. By then the weather had turned, and we had “almost died”, so we did not make it to what would have been our final destination, Porth Oer, with its whistling sands. It would have required us to continue going up the steep hill. We continued along the coast to Abedaron, but once we got there nothing was open so we had to give up on a seafood lunch and head back to Porthmadog, where we bought some Snowdon Green Thunder cheese.

Harlech

Sadly, the weather improved only for short bursts the next day, which was a shame as that was the day we visited the most romantic sites on our trip: Harlech castle and Portmeirion. To get there, we had the excitement of driving through a 50p toll bridge that spanned the estuary and was only the width of our car.

Harlech castle was my favourite castle because of its round towers, brilliant defence system – which includes a moat, a two-tower-protected bridge across the moat, and a water-gate – and its place in the Welsh epic cycle the Mabinogion. It is where the legend of Branwen begins, with Branwen’s brother Brân the Blessed sitting on a rock and looking out to sea at the approaching ships of Matholwch, King of Ireland, who was coming to ask for Branwen’s hand in marriage. Supposed to bring peace between the Welsh and Irish kingdoms, instead it was the beginning of a conflict that would end in the deaths of Brân and Branwen. I also found some cool souvenirs in the gift shop: gift tags made of recycled sheep poo that smelled of grass or daffodils. But with no gifts planned, we settled for a tin of cookies decorated with sheep, which remains our most frequently used biscuit tin to this day. We ate Welsh rarebit for lunch at Cemyln Tea Shop and got some money out of the HSBC just in time as it was only open for two hours a day!

Portmeirion

We now retraced our route diverted to Portmeirion before the toll bridge. Portmeirion was modelled after Portofino, a fishing village in Italy, and, like eating ice cream while being buffeted by the Welsh wind, it seemed strange to spend an afternoon in an Italian village in order to get to know Wales better. But Portmeirion is steeped in British TV culture! It is a place of pilgrimage for fans of The Prisoner, a British sci-fi TV series that aired in 1966-68, about Number 6, a man who wakes up in The Village and finds that he is now a prisoner, who then wants to escape but is prevented by a giant white balloon. It so happened that on the day of our visit there was a The Prisoner convention, so there were lots of people dressed as Number 6 and men in white suits walking around, and even a giant white ball. Until I went to ComiCon several years later, this was the closest I’d ever experienced something akin to Disneyland in the UK. There we finally found more Welsh food to try: Perl Wen cheese (Welsh brie) sandwiches inside the ‘theme park’ and oysters and mussels from the Menai Strait (that separates Anglesey from the mainland) at Castle Deudraeth, the ‘theme park hotel’.

Blaenau Ffestiniog

We went to the slate mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog on “a dead Sunday”.  The “no fuel” situation at the petrol station that we encountered the night before was not a problem as we travelled there from Porthmadog by train, on Prince, the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway’s oldest operating locomotive. It’s on the Countryfile’s UK-biased list of the 12 railway journeys to make in 2020! At the Llechwedd slate mines, we learned that what looked like rocky hills were actually heaps of slate, and that in the old days 90% of what was mined was waste. There were many caverns and 13 levels of caverns, and it took 15 years to mine just one cavern. Each cavern had a controller who would haggle with miners every morning to set the commission, then send the miners to work. Relatives and friends would be sent to work in the same cavern. While that sounds nice, it was dangerous and life-shortening work. Aged 8, children would be loading the mined slate onto wagons, and aged 12 they would start to do some rock carving. By 16, they would be operating explosives, and if they didn’t get killed in an accident, they would develop lung disease from the dust in their early 20’s, forcing them to retire in their mid-30’s and killing them in their 40’s. Back above ground, we turned to the happier thought of Welsh cakes and lob scouse at the Miner’s Arms. This pub, like pubs around the country, was an important place for the survival of Welsh folk music, which had been suppressed by the English and the Methodist church. When Welsh music was banned everywhere else, pubs still welcomed harpists. Learning how to play the harp was a useful skill back then: a harp was the only possession that could not be collected for debt, so when you had lost everything, you could still earn a living by playing the harp. Back in Porthmadog, we ate a lamb burger and fish and chips at Lilly’s Kitchen.

Conwy

Our last full day in Wales was spent in Conwy. The town is home to “the smallest house in Britain”, which was smaller than the smallest house in Amsterdam that we had seen on a tour years ago. The last person to live there was a fisherman, who was forced to move out when health and safety regulations banned him from staying in rooms with ceilings too low for him to stand up in. We struck luck again with finding Welsh food and were able to try laverbread, grey mullet in fennel sauce, and coley in garlic sauce at Chrissie’s Kitchen. We also bought some Y Fenni cheese (cheddar mixed with mustard seeds and ale) on the High Street. The final UNESCO World Heritage Site on our holiday, Conwy castle was the best to visit for children, I thought. They had cool signs with clues that were revealed only when you put a red acrylic filter over them. The castle is also one half of the only two UNESCO world cultural heritage sites that are twinned: its twin is Himeji-jo (Himeji Castle) in Hyogo, Japan. Wales’ official tourism site has more on the longstanding cultural exchange between Wales and Japan. Together with Blaenau Ffestiniog, Conwy are must-see places for fans of Ghibli animations.

Powys

We visited Powis castle, yet another National Trust property, before leaving Wales. The seat of the Earl of Powis, in what was once a rival kingdom to Gwynedd, it houses the treasures that Robert Clive and his son brought from India, because the son, Edward, married the Earl’s daughter. That was a surprise to us, so far we had only visited castles that were defensive fortifications. Other surprises were in store, from the peacocks that roamed the driveway to the state bedroom where a balustrade separated the bed from the rest of the room, after the fashion of the French royal apartments at Versailles.

Snowdonia is a beautiful region when the sun is out, and its castle dotted landscape was a favourite of J.M.W. Turner’s. For sure, one of the best places in Britain for a staycation, and though it’s been almost 8 years since we visited, everyday we place our hot drinks on the slate coasters we bought from Blaenau Ffestiniog and are reminded of the wonderful time we had there.

Food and drink

Don’t expect to hear much of the Welsh language and make more of an effort to research where to eat if you want traditional Welsh food. I bought a Welsh phrasebook from Browsers Bookshop in Porthmadog on the very first day, but had little chance to practice. The bookshop owner herself was not Welsh, Carl, our host at the Tudor Lodge, is a self-proclaimed “Viking” (he and his wife Anya come from Norway), and people who are Welsh generally speak English. Moreover, though there are more sheep than humans in Wales, sheep road signs are common, and we had to stop the car to allow a flock of sheep to cross the road, Welsh lamb that’s not in burger form is hard to come by unless you’re in a hotel restaurant.

While we would have liked to experience a wider range of Welsh cuisine, we fully embraced Wales’ high reputation for gelato. Italians flocked to Wales during the Industrial Revolution, then again after the Second World War, and opened ice cream parlours known as Bracchis, making Wales one of the best places to eat gelato outside of Italy, despite the cold and rainy climate. We tried berry ice cream, frozen yoghurt, and a Tortufo (a vanilla and chocolate sauce sundae) at Cadwaladers in Porthmadog and rose petal and pistachio and blue banana ice cream at the Criccieth flagship branch, pistachio ice cream from Glaslyn Ices in Beddgelert (winner of many national ice cream awards and named by The Sunday Times as one of the top ice cream parlours in the world in 2008).

This post was last updated in May 2020.