IN BRITAIN WHEN I FIRST READ ‘THE LORD OF THE RINGS’ IT WAS WITH A THRILL of recognition. The fictional world of Middle-earth was overlaid in my mind with the magical landscape in which I spent every summer: Snowdonia, with its sparkling lakes and misty mountains, its disused slate quarries that could be the entrance to the Mines of Moria. Tolkien was inspired not just by these views, but by the lilting language which he adapted into the Elvish tongue of Sindarin, and by the tall tales of giants and warriors and rings of invisibility in the medieval Welsh legends of the Mabinogion. North Wales is a land of dreamers, poets and bards, of Dylan Thomas and Bryn Terfel, where the most coveted honour is the crown or chair for poetry given at the National Eisteddfod by the Archdruid in flowing white robes. I was accustomed to such company as a child. My grandfather was a bearded pipe-smoking giant of a man called Richard Hughes, a celebrated playwright, screenwriter and author of A High Wind in Jamaica, but plain ‘Diccon’ to his friends and 13 grandchildren. It was he who introduced Thomas to his beloved village of Laugharne when he housed the penniless poet for a few months beside a ruined castle, until Thomas nearly ruined the wine cellar. By the time I came along, Diccon lived in a big house on the Dwyryd Estuary. It was, and still is, a place of marvels. The Dwyryd is tidal, always changing – rolling waters for half the day, ankle-deep
the train station. He set her on the back of his unreliable motorbike, which, Diccon used to joke, ‘went from time to time rather than place to place’ and married her not long after. In the 1930s, they attended bohemian parties at Portmeirion with other writers, intellectuals and artists. On one such evening, my grandparents had more guests staying than there were cars, so they sent the women round by road, while the men crossed the estuary on foot, stripped naked, holding their dinner jackets above their heads. They arrived dripping on the far bank to dress before entering the hotel, like James Bond emerging from the water in Goldfinger. Every summer, even now, 40 years after my grandfather’s death, I visit Carreg y Ro Bach, which my mother inherited as no more than a single stone-walled room with a stream running across the floor. The window is an old ship’s porthole set into a deep round hole in the slate walls: through it Portmeirion is perfectly framed. Yet in all these 50-odd years of admiring the village from afar, and visiting it along with 200,000 other annual sightseers, I had never once stayed the night. Portmeirion is astonishing enough by day: Williams-Ellis called it his ‘home for fallen buildings’, so that as well as the Mediterranean-style houses he designed himself, you will find a shrapnel-riddled Grade II-listed colonnade rescued from Bristol after the war (his own face is carved into a gargoyle); 32 mermaid-design ironworks from Liverpool; and even a great
THE MAN WHO PLANTED THE WOODLAND HID FROM BAILIFFS IN CATACOMBS BENEATH THE HOTEL, FED BY HIS LOYAL BUTLER THROUGH A TRAP DOOR UNDER THE PANTRY SINK banks of rich, soft sand for the rest. The sea leaves a wavy pattern on the sand, as on fingertips soaking too long in the bath, so that on summer days the white sand and blue water are indistinguishable from white cloud and blue sky, and you no longer know which is up and which is down and where the sky ends and the earth begins. In the middle of the estuary is a small and mysterious island, said to be inhabited by a misanthropic farmer with a blunderbuss. The only time I felt safe walking over to bathe in its rock pools was in the company of Princess Margaret’s children, on one glorious summer’s day in the early 1970s when their mother was riding my grandmother’s horses, since we were shadowed by two armed guards. The men tried to look serious and menacing, wearing suits with gun holsters poking out, but it’s not easy to look hard when you have to take off your shoes and roll up your trousers. Look up in any direction but the open sea, and the horseshoe of the estuary is fringed by mountain peaks, Snowdon uppermost. I first climbed Wales’s highest mountain at the age of five and had my children do likewise. Cnicht is another favourite: it looks so tall and pointed that it’s known as the Welsh Matterhorn, but you can get up and down in well under three hours. But best of all, across the estuary is a sight that never fails to astonish. A sprawling Italianate village emerges from the woodland as if through some rift in the space/time continuum, a Mediterranean vision in ice-cream pinks, teal and terracotta, its jumble of domes and towers a merry counterpoint to the dark hills. This is the hotel of Portmeirion, built over the course of 50 years by Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis, and it is, for my money, one of the most striking views in all of Europe. Just as Portmeirion owes its existence to Williams-Ellis, so do I. It was he who fatefully sent my grandfather to meet a young artist at
domed statue of Buddha which had been part of the set design when Ingrid Bergman filmed The Inn of the Sixth Happiness around here in 1958. Most spectacular is the Hercules Hall: its 17th-century vaulted plasterwork ceiling representing the Labours of Hercules was salvaged from Emral Hall in Flintshire before its demolition and transported here in more than 100 pieces. But the houses of Portmeirion aren’t just curiosities: they contain extraordinary guest rooms, with more in the main hotel building down at the water’s edge and in the Victorian mock-castle Castell Deudraeth above. Each is unique: one dedicated couple I met have been working their way through them for the last three decades. And it’s as a guest that you discover the magic hour is 7pm, after the day-trippers have left. The slanting sunlight illuminates the clock tower, the hush is broken only by the chirping of the birds, and the place becomes your own private fantasyland. Behind Portmeirion you can wander 20 miles of paths through private woodland. Sir William Fothergill Cooke, co-inventor of the telegraph, so impoverished himself in the task of planting it that he had to hide from bailiffs in catacombs under the hotel, fed by his loyal butler through a trap door under the pantry sink. Many still come for its associations with The Prisoner, the surreal TV thriller that was filmed here in the 1960s. There is a Prisoner shop, an in-room TV channel showing back-to-back episodes and an annual music and arts festival called Festival Number 6, named after The Prisoner’s hero. But really they come for what the show represents: a time of eccentrics and adventurers, when not everything was compartmentalised and explained, when a village like this could be built by an architect because it amused him to do so. In Snowdonia those eccentrics still flourish. In an old slate mine in nearby Blaenau Ffestiniog an entrepreneur has built a series
Opposite, clockwise from top left: at Snowdonia National Park; on the hill at Portmeirion and a quiet corner; a house on Llanbedrog beach; a local with a pipe; on the National Trust trail at Aberglaslyn; one of the bright buildings at Portmeirion; artefacts at Barmouth Sailors’ Institute. Centre, Cilan Head April 2018 Condé Nast Traveller 119