After our Eggs Benedict breakfast, we spent an hour or so looking around Dolgellau, a very attractive town with bluestone buildings. We were so glad that we spent the night there. So often the unexpected delights occur and this was certainly one of them.
We then drove to Blaenau Ffestiniog, a slate mining town with most of its buildings built out of, surprise, slate. Someone told us years ago that the town is all grey and depressing. We thought it had a lot of character and was attractive. We walked down to the station to see the little steam train that runs between Porthmadog and Blaenau Ffestiniog and managed to spend 10 mins or so before it left. One of the beautiful little Welsh trains, R & G took the return trip a couple of years ago. We didn’t have time this time, pity.
There was a National Trust building near Betws-y-Coed that we wanted to see, an old stone farmhouse called Ty Mawr Wybrnant. We found some very narrow roads to get to this out of the way property and wondered how visitors were able to find the place. The paper map we have doesn’t show enough detail, the car GPS didn’t have anything helpful in it’s database. Again, the trusty tablet with the “Here” maps app was fantastic. We crossed some very picturesque bridges over beautiful little streams. Ty Mawr means big house. In the late 1500s, William Morgan lived here and completed the Welsh translation of the bible and this ensured that the Welsh language thrives. Without this translation, the Welsh language would probably have died out. This house was a wealthy person’s house, although it was only a 2 room house with a small barn opening into the house, it was built of stone and was reasonably insulated. A poor person’s house would have been built of timber and inhabitants often didn’t survive the winter. People slept sitting upright to help keep fluid off the lungs.
We took another “short cut” once we left Ty Mawr Wybrnant. The tablet showed a minor road. We haven’t travelled on such a minor road before. The road obviously went through farms because we had to share the road with sheep and open/close gates. We were gratified when we reached a slightly better section of road and other odd houses which confirmed that we were actually on a public road.
It was a reasonably uneventful drive then to Llandudno and we have checked into a nice little B&B. Fortunately we had booked this before we left home, because most have no vacancies, including ours.
It’s now almost 10:30 pm & we’re just back from the most fantastic 35 voice Welsh male choir concert in a near by church. Dinner in the pub took longer than we hoped and we got to the church just before the start. Somehow Gary managed to get front seats. As well as the fantastic choir, there was an amazing female soloist, Sian. She seemed to put no effort into projecting her voice, but it was so powerful. The concert was even better than the great one G & R went to 2 years ago at the same venue.
Back to finishing the blog.
