Wales

Well, I am certainly getting a variety of driving here in England and Wales. I have now driven on different sorts of roads, including motorways and country roads. I can say that I have driven through the Yorkshire Moors, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and now through North Wales, including the Snowdonia National Park!!

Wales was always going to be a very special part of this trip, simply because I remember it. On Thursday, we drove down from the North, through Lancashire and Cheshire and into Wales. The first thing that struck me was that the Anglicised spelling of place names seems to have been dropped, which I think is a good thing. When we lived in Wales, we all learned Welsh language at school, but I don't recall seeing a lot of the language around us. Now all the signage is in both languages, which I think is a good way of protecting the language and ensuring that it lives on.

We stopped Thursday night in Conwy, arriving there just after lunch. The afternoon was spent walking around the town, including of course the wall (Conwy is a walled town) and the Castle. Conwy Castle is one of the ring of castles built by Edward I to help contain the Welsh. He must have met with a lot of resistance!

Walking along the Quay in Conwy, we also came across the "smallest house in Britain", which is 72 inches (182.88 cm) wide and 122 inches (309.88 cm) high. According to one of the brochures, it rates a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

Today, we drove to Caernarfon in the morning and visited Caernarfon Castle. Like Conwy, it was built by Edward I as part of his ring of castles in Wales. Also like Conwy, Caernarfon is a walled city.

From Caernarfon, we drove through the Snowdonia National Park towards Aberystwyth. On the way through, we saw Mount Snowdon, and also Cader Idris. Now I understand Susan Cooper's descriptions in The Grey King (yes, more children's literature!). We will be going back that way for a closer look in a few days time when we go to Tal-y-llyn.

Coming down past Machynlledd we started to come to spots that were familiar to me. The first of these was Eglwysfach, where we lived when we first went to Wales, and where I started school. The house we lived in is no longer there, but the School is.
Turning off the main road, we headed down to Borth, where I remembered my way well enough to drive without direction to Cliff Road, where we lived. Fortunately, the cliff top remains unspoiled, although many houses have changed - oh, and things are smaller than I remembered! Our house, Maramba, is still there, although some changes have naturally been made. The view from the house and from the cliff top is exactly as I remembered, and the war memorial still stands out on the headland. I climbed the path to the war memorial, which now contains a plaque to say that it was damaged by a thunderbolt in 1983, but restored the following year.

Looking inland from the war memorial, I saw changes; on areas where I can remember doing rambles from school, which involved climbing sheep stiles, a very large caravan park now sprawls, although there is still some sheep grazing land up onto the headland.

We drove back to Devil's Bridge, which is where we are staying, via the original home of the College of Librarianship, Wales - now Information Management and located elsewhere in Aberystwyth University. This is where my father first lectured in Librarianship, and was our reason for moving to Wales in the first place!

We are staying here at Devil's Bridge for a few days, and will be visiting many more remembered places. There will be more Borth too!!