Better late than . . . early

At the risk of becoming repetitive, Friday again looked like it could easily rain all day.  Our hiking guide recommended that when it rains in the hills, it is sometimes fine on Anglesey – a large island separated from the rest of North Wales by a narrow strait.  In fact, the tide is so extreme around here that at low tide it is possible to walk across, but there are several bridges now so we didn’t have to.

Jill dismissed as wishful thinking the fine weather on Anglesey theory, but still said it would be a good thing to do.  She recommended we go to South Stacks on the far west coast of the island.  It’s got lots of cliffs where some otherwise African and some otherwise polar birds breed in the warm months.  Neither Sara nor I is a big birder, but it’s always interesting to see how other fractions of the fringe lives, so we gave it a go. 

They’ve built a marvelous road across the island, so it was an easy drive and I got to appreciate some of the scenery even behind the wheel.  Military historians reading this will be interested to learn that Anglesey was where the Welsh always hung out and grew food while enemy armies were trying to bash their way across North Wales, confounded by the terrain, the weather, and the marksmanship of Welsh archers.  It really wasn’t until ships got big enough to deliver armies to the coast that there was any hope of taking Wales.  We could certainly feel the difference between the twisty little roads that are all you can get away with through the mountains and the American style road we raced across on.

South Stacks itself is a tiny little outcrop with a lighthouse on it, but the cliffs around it are full of birds.  We spent a little time in a viewing tower run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, but we clearly weren’t serious enough to stay there for long.  We walked a little under a mile along the cliff face back towards where we parked.  It was a wild, windy morning with rain just spitting enough to keep our hoods up.  Of course, this was the one day we didn’t bring binoculars along, but we saw a scattering of birds flying around and fishing.  Even more impressive to me was the wide variety of wildflowers all in various stages of blooming and seeding around us.  We moved at an absolute crawl just because there was so much to see. 

The weather started to clear just as we got back to the car, but we decided to drive on any way.  Our next stop was in Beaumaris, on the coast near the mainland.  We bypassed our opportunity to visit the butterfly palace just as we had skipped the butterfly jungle in Conwy.  In Beaumaris, we walked around the outside of the castle, which looked remarkably like the castle at Conwy, so we skipped goin in.  We did go into and spend a lot of time in the courthouse, since Jill had told us the original building there was a lot like the original of the inn we were staying in.  It was easy to see the resemblance, although each had been modified so many times over the centuries that they differed as well.  The courthouse was largely a museum to the arbitrariness of English justice to the Welsh, though with fair recognition that upper class English of the past treated lower class English just as badly as they treated the Welsh. 

We had a very nice lunch at the Old Bulls Head in town.  Sara had looked in a volume of fine dining in Wales and this was literally one of two entries for all of North Wales.  It was very good – could have stayed open even in a foody US town. 

After lunch, we had an invigorating drive across a small suspension bridge and through the town of Bangor.  For whatever reason, the traffic was awful and the signage was practically random.  Sara kept us almost perfectly on course though.  She’s always gotten light duty as a navigator before, since reading in the car makes her woozy, but she’s discovered that ginger helps.  She’s been munching candied ginger she bought in London and doing a great job with the maps.  She got us to Penryth castle in short order. 

Penryth is a purely synthetic castle, built entirely in the 1820s and beyond, but it is a beautiful collection of craftsmanship and it’s just immense.  There were rooms where it looked as though the noble having it run up couldn’t decide which of three types of arch to use, so he just told the builder to nest one of each.  Wood carving, stone carving, inlay work – it really had it all.  There were fabulous grotesques in one of the stair cases – dozens of heads no two alike and all interesting. 

The only blot on the visit, and it was minor, was that we had arrived close to closing, and the stewards kept telling us we should rush or we would miss the Victorian kitchens.  We did somewhat slight the room where they had all the most woohoo paintings hanging, and as Sara said, the Victorian kitchens were nice, but if she’d missed them to spend a few extra minutes with the Rembrandts, she would have been fine with the exchange.

Sara struck up a good conversation with an artist who was running the sales desk at an art exhibition upstairs in the stables.  (Yeah, I know, when I tell you that the other end of the stables had been used to display a half a dozen steam engines the National Trust didn’t know what else to do with, I will finally have given you a sense of the scale of the place.)  He trapped her into saying that one particular painting was essentially the only one in the show she thought had significant merit, then telling her that he had two canvases in the show.  As often happens when Sara opens by dropping a bomb on someone, he became extremely friendly.  He walked away with one of her cards, and I won’t be at all surprised if we hear from him if he’s ever close to DC.  I actually liked his stuff better than I like most modern art, but that’s kind of faint praise.  I was impressed that he painted things that were identifiably mountains but in color schemes that made them look very kinetic without ceasing to look like mountains.  It was the visual version of Pancake Hill (which my mother, the career English teacher, has since written to remind me is an oxymoron for any of you who may have been wondering).

We walked our artist friend and his banjo out to the car park.  By now, the weather was absolutely spectacular – blue sky, right on the warm/cool boundary, light breeze.  We decided we had to have some more outdoor time.  Our hiking guide had a short, easy rated walk that could be right on our way home, so we decided to stop and take it.  It kicked off just south of a village the name of which we never figured out how to say, so I’ll just leave it out here.  It turned out to be a very fine few hours of walking. 

We started out walking along a smooth track very slightly uphill through a bit of forest that is being systematically logged.  We checked in at an “Interpretive Center” that was clearly part of the logging company’s quid pro quo for the rights to cut.  They also maintained the paths we used and published a nice path guide we picked up to augment the little map in our walk guide.  The route took us past a superb group of mid sized waterfalls.  It then climbed up the western edge of the valley, high enough that we got great views back to all the waterfalls and got a sense of the shape of the whole place.  It slowly kept climbing until we could see a big stretch of Anglesey and all the way along the North coast back to Great Orme at Llandudno.  It was impossible to get lost on the second half of the walk, because we could see almost the entire route down on the ground looking just like our map.  It wrapped up with a descent that could easily have been a ski jump ramp and a short walk back to the car.

This is where I figured out that the outdoors doesn’t close at 5 or 6 pm, so since then, I’ve been shifting some of my walking later in the day to take advantage of touristy things and businesses that close early.

We had an easy drive back to Betsy, but we saw a lot of people driving the direction of the road that led deeper into North Wales from the rest of the world.  This was our first hint that the UK was headed into a three day weekend that, like the US Memorial Day, also essentially opens the summer touring season.

We got back to Betsy too late for supper in any of the restaurants, but also feeling like we didn’t need it after our nice lunch.  The only noteworthy thing the rest of the evening was that we had a great conversation with Jill – reporting on what we’d gotten up to and getting walking advice from her for Saturday.  We got the longer version of the story of how she and Mark came to be running the old courthouse, most of which probably falls into the “you had to be there” category, but we enjoyed it.