Base Camp Journal: Barmouth

Several days in North Wales.

On the rare occasion that I venture north of Brecon, I'm surprised at how vastly different it is to South Wales, being clean and uncongested in comparison, and almost pleasant when the sun is out.

Robby and I had been staying at the Hendre Mynach caravan site, which is on the edge of a relatively obscure little town called 'Barmouth', on the coast of North Wales.

Since the A470 runs pretty much 90% of the way there, Robby thought it would be quite a straightforward journey, and it was, until we entered North Wales, and the A470 became a single-lane road that took us up a couple of the taller mountains.

We decided on taking a different route home, which runs along the coast from Barmouth to New Quay, and more directly to Cardiff from there. That took us about five hours. Cheddar Gorge might draw lots of tourists, but it's nowhere near as impressive as some of the valleys we passed through. But I suppose it's tricky turning a land feature, in the middle of nowhere, in North-West Wales, into a tourist attraction.

Hendre Mynach Site

We found Hendre Mynach to be quite a pleasant place to stay: The staff are friendly, the facilities are almost as good as on a CMC site, and there's a handy shop in the reception building. Every pitch was divided by small hedges. One thing I should mention is the entrance to the site is at the bottom of quite a steep hill - it's only a ~70 metre stretch, but getting a caravan back up there, with a junction and tight bend at the top, was a little scary.

I helped Robby set up his new awning - a Quest Falcon, which he bought last October. It's considerably smaller and lighter than the older one, and much quicker to set up, with just one air tube and maybe eight tent pegs to worry about. The insulation is probably crap, but we'll be using it for some extra room in the summer evenings.

We also bought (or I think I did) an LED tube, which installs quite nicely along the ceiling and can easily be connected to one of Bertha's 12v outlets.

Barmouth Town

The best route into the town from Hendre Mynach is the the path that runs past the childrens' play area, across the rail line and back along the promenade. It's a ~20 minute walk.

Surprisingly, Barmouth isn't as bleak as it appeared on the maps. Certainly there isn't much along the 'promenade' of dark concrete, aside from a cafe, a small hotel and a small amusement arcade thing that wasn't really active, but it's still a genuinely unique place. And it was quiet this time of year, which I quite liked.

'It's beautiful, rugged, and it's not uniform. Everything happens to be where it is.', Robby commented, on our way into the town.

What he meant was there seemed no logic in where anyone chose to build anything in Barmouth. A small council estate was situated along the promenade, and next to an old hotel and bar. A large manor house was just a few hundred metres away from that, and there was a high street of old stone shop buildings just further along the road. Between the council estate and the caravan park is a patch of wasteland and a very tidy nature reserve.

While on the promenade, we could make out the skyline of the Snowdonia mountain ranges in the distance, through the haze, and were fortunate to watch the sun setting behind it. The sky turned red, and briefly green afterwards.

For a couple of hours afterwards, everything in Barmouth seemed to have a vaguely blue tint, maybe because of a combination of the moonlight and the moisture in the air trapped by the mountain ranges that surround Barmouth.

Another strange thing about Barmouth is the town is sort of thriving, in a way that doesn't appear dependent on tourism. In almost every other seaside town we've visited, local businesses had long been depressingly supplanted by betting shops, vape shops, charity shops, Wetherspoons, vacant buildings, more betting shops, more vape shops, maybe an off-licence, etc. - the shite that became characteristic of the British high street. I think that's far more attributable to gentrification, and properties being bought up and rented back out at extortionate rates, than online shopping.

Barmouth's town is very different, in having a diversity of independent shops along its high street, and the Co-Op is the only non-local business we saw in the entire region. I think it's the variety of independent pubs, and an outdoor market, that brings the locals into the town.

The pubs, by the way, are generally quite nice. We mainly frequented the Min-y-Mor and the Tal-y-Don, both of which I recommend. Both are very dog-friendly.

Portmeirion

A famous TV show, The Prisoner, was filmed in Portmeirion in the late-1960s. My grandparents visited there maybe around 1975. Having never watched an episode of The Prisoner myself, I'd imagined Portmeirion was a colourful part of another Welsh village that one could just drive through and park nearby. Only when we got near there did we realise it's a tourist village, carefully maintained as such, and one must pay £20 to enter. Parking is free, though.

I'd imagine the premise of The Prisoner would be that the protagonist finds himself in the village with no idea of where he is. There is certainly nothing there to suggest he'd be anywhere in Wales, with Portmeirion being unlike any Welsh - or even British - town or village.

The architecture is some weird blend of Venetian, generally Italian and Mediterranean, and it's hard to discern the purpose of any of the buildings. Everything is painted as if there's a mysterious colour-coding scheme at work, and there are cryptic symbols everywhere. The buildings, with many windows, that tower over one side of the square, would give one the sense of being watched, if there was nobody else around.

At the bottom of the hill is a hotel right on the front of a large estuary. Snowdonia, it seemed, was on the other side. We could walk across it if the tide was at its lowest.

Fairbourne

On the other side of the estuary from Barmouth is Fairbourne. The trains run there, along the bridge, every two hours on weekdays. It is possible to get there on foot, along the bridge - and, I reckon across the estuary when the tide is out - but it's quite a walk.

The thing is Fairbourne is quite bleak. Leaving the train station, it wasn't long until we realised there wasn't a high street, or anything beyond a couple of shops at the station. We looked around the beach for ~30 minutes - the weather was too blustery to stay there - and went drinking in the Penrhyn Bar & Grill until the next train back to Barmouth.