Magical Journey: Part Six - Adventures in Dolgellau

Railing and bussing out of Colwyn Bay on a Sunday turned out to be a hungry experience; there were very few (read: none, to our perception) open restaurants on route. Apparently the post-church Sunday lunch rush is a phenomenon unique to America, where some people still actually go to church. We tightened our belts and decided to sit back and enjoy the view, which was getting progressively less New England-ish. As we traveled south, the land waxed rugged and stony. Trees thinned, and the slopes around us rounded and covered themselves in brushy heather. It was more like what I'd imagined of an ancient land, helped along by the occasional tangible reminder, mixed in with modernity.

Might as well build a park around the stone circle. Why not? 

Dolgellau (it's impossible to phoneticize the pronunciation of this: the best I can do is "Dol GELL hie", in which that double "L" sound is created by holding the tongue at the roof of the mouth and blowing noiselessly - it's not quite an "L", not quite an "H", but something in between, utterly alien to English) was a charming and picturesque little village obviously not much changed in a few hundred years, already ancient before America was a spot on the map beyond "Here be Monsters." Every structure was constructed of the same grey stone, shaped or unshaped, the walls bedecked with flowers and flags, with odd character-filled corners and gables and dormers and towers and I am so discontent with modern architecture right now.

I only noticed later how the stonework on the far left goes from natural uncut stone to squared-off bricks halfway across the building. There's a story there. I wish I knew it.

A few views around the center of town...

We had to get dinner before we could go up to our BnB, which was three miles out of town, so we picked a cozy ground-level coffee house that called itself Y Sospan, and yes I DID choose it as an homage to Dianna Wynn Jones and Howl's Moving Castle. For the uninitiated, "sospan" or "sosban", as it seems more frequently spelled, is exactly what it sounds like in English if you say it out loud, and the song "Sosban Fach" which Calcifer sings to himself in the book, is a real one. To my delight, everyone in the restaurant was speaking Welsh except us. We got some curious glances.

I can't remember what I ate. Probably another Ploughman because CHUTNEY.

After dinner we telephoned our hostess because we couldn't find a taxi, and she graciously drove down and picked us up. Olwen was cordial and professional as she told us all about the area and its attractions, and gave us a brief history of her inn, which turned out to be quite the find: without question, the most luxurious of our accommodations.

Tyddyn Mawr. Those are our bedroom windows on the first floor.

The artist enjoying the view from the french doors.

Olwen's daughter's harp. I hopefully told a few bald-faced lies near it. Strings remained disappointingly intact.

Settled in craggy mountains like a gem among stones, Tyddyn Mawr could not have been in a more picturesque place. The slopes of Cader Idris, the largest mountain in the area, rippled down almost directly to the set of French doors in our room, barred from our wandering feet only by a pasture of grazing cows and a wooded stream (not that either of these would have presented much of an obstacle, but for the rigid "no trespassing" rule drilled into me as a child). The mountain's local legend as the seat of a giant who held court upon it, and that a night spent upon its summit would render a mortal either a poet or madman, added to the romance of the view.

The ruggedness of the mountains reminded me strongly of my family home in Colorado, but no slopes in the arid Rockies bear the green velveteen coating that softened and muted every ridge and edge of these peaks. Patches of purple heather broke up the green, and even on the highest shoulders of the mountain, the stone fences wound their way upward, ceasing to mark off their territory only where the grade became too steep to bear them.

We arrived with quite a bit of daylight still to spare, and after exploring the grounds, the Artist took a nap in a deck chair on the patio and I took a walk down the road, scattering sheep, who waddled away bleating. Strolling between stone walls thickly overgrown with honeysuckle, pausing to pick Scottish thistles and sample wild blackberries, I composed fanfiction in my head and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Dessert.

I walked less far than I would have liked, for knowing it would worry the Artist, and made it back to our room in time to watch the sunset kiss the mountains goodnight from a v-shaped notch in the peaks to the west. Every western ridge blushed gold in the light's embrace as the gorse brush seemed to catch fire, while intermittent patches of purple heather smoldered to near fuschia. I danced around the back yard of the inn, camera in hand, trying to capture the magic. You can't quite catch lightning in a bottle, but sometimes the embers fall in and glow for a while.

The next morning was bright and clear well before 6, but breakfast wasn't until 8:30, so we opened the French doors and pulled the armchairs out onto the patio to enjoy morning cups of Earl Grey. I continued to log the trip while the Artist read a biography of Errol Flynn that Jane had given him, and occasionally read a particularly outrageous paragraph out loud to me.

"Did you know he was a degenerate womanizer? History is awesome."

Breakfast was enough for five hobbits, courses of unlimited carbohydrates and fat in the form of buttered toast, muesli, croissants, three types of homemade jam, local honey, sausage, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit, juice, and tea. I reflected with amusement that I do not see many very thin locals, and comforted my own guilty conscience with the reminder that we were planning a very long hike later in the day.

Before the carnage.

After.

We chatted with the other patrons of the BnB, a mother and daughter on a short holiday, who eventually offered to give us a lift up the road to a walking area around a pair of lakes, which Olwen had recommended as a beautiful spot. Olwen eagerly pointed out on a map that we could walk from there to the seaside town of Barmouth, where we could catch a bus to Harlech. This seemed a good solution, as I wanted to hike some natural scenery while the Artist was keen on visiting another castle, and we had not thought it would be possible to do both.

 
We re-packed our backpacks with necessities like my Eilonwy wig and costume and neglected the luxury of bottles of water, because priorities, and hitched the offered ride.

I took a lot of pictures from the car window. Our driver was amused.

The area around the lakes was as lovely as Olwen had insisted; undulating hills and ridges and peaks moving off in every direction, with two good-size lakes mirroring the sapphire sky.

Yes, there are two lakes, I can count. Only one of them made it into this photo.

On the way up we drove past a monolith and I almost hyperventilated. According to the map there were several in the area, and I had goals of getting near one. As soon as we were out of the car and had spent a few minutes orienting ourselves to the lay of the land, I insisted on going back to it. The Artist protested a little about the long walk ahead of us and the fact that there was a castle at the end of it, but I set my teeth and he relented, admitting that Harlech was not going to get up and move while we shot. We hiked around a small hill, trying to avoid the omnipresent sheep poop, along the edge of one lake and back to the stone I'd seen from the car.

Here I am. Hullo.

It rose steady and immobile, straight up from the ground, a single finger pointing to the sky. There were several other large stones nearby, though it was impossible to say whether they were part of the  arrangement or just a piece of the landscape.

Though the car park (this is British for "parking lot" - see how well I acclimated?) and its surrounding area had been moderately crowded with other sightseers, this side of the hill we were on was devoid of human life other than a lone fisherman by the lake. Nevertheless I still used my now-perfected method of modest quick-change artistry to get into my dress, and the Artist laced it up and helped me place the wig. I dug through the bottom of my backpack.

"Oh, s**t. I forgot my bauble."

Artist smirked. "Is that what Eilonwy would say?"

"She would swear like a sailor. She probably said all kinds of things you can't put in a children's book."

He laughed. "I wonder how you say 's**t' in Welsh."

"Probably 'swyt'. Just add some y's and w's."

We were both laughing at our silliness at that point, which is the only way to handle standing around in a medieval gown and obvious costume wig in a public space without feeling like an utter fool.

 

To the great delight of the locals, it was brilliantly sunny and clear with almost no wind. Unfortunately for my pictures, these are the worst possible conditions for photography. (All right, except for actual gales or tempests, thank you, smart alecks in my audience.) I had expected, not without grounds, a more mysterious, misty setting, and had spent a crazy amount on raingear - so was disappointed at a certain level, but Nature does as she pleases without consulting my playbook. We made the best of it.

And even Mother Nature can't conquer Photoshop. This is the only shot from this spot I did some post-editing on.

It's also pretty hard to be disgruntled about anything when this is your view.

The Artist made sure to capture local flora as reference shots. Here we have thistle...

...and gorse. Milne was not BSing about those prickles, man. Poor Pooh. 

We snapped pics for an hour or so before I switched back to my civilian clothing and we headed back to the lakes. On the way, we met up with a group of about eight white-headed ladies hiking down the road and chattering away in Welsh to one another. They noticed our accents and began asking questions, and we had a sweet little dialog. I know we took some photos with them, but sadly, have not been able to locate them in the mountains of digital data we returned with. It appears most of the shots from the Artist's iphone from this day were lost, somehow.

When we asked where they were heading they laughed blithely and said they didn't know. I hope when I'm a crazy old faery crone I can still hike around in the mountains with the same motto.

"That's the great thing about wandering...

...You start out and wherever you end up...

 - there you are.' (Fflewddur Fflam, paraphrased).

The Artist and I headed northwest and began descending. The moment we stepped through the gap between two hills, the sea became visible, a swath of blue bay far off, with the white specks of architecture freckling the bluffs on the near side. I could see the bridge to Barmouth crossing over to them; it looked like an insurmountable distance to cover on foot in two hours, which was what we had left to get there in time for our bus to Harlech. Nevertheless, as we had no "plan B", we stepped out, thankful for that hobbit-sized breakfast.

That grey line across the blue inlet is the bridge. Just a stone's throw. If you have a missile launcher.

Descending past old stone huts, half tumbled-down, surrounded by grazing sheep and white stones jutting like broken teeth through green velvet gums, I thought of the hero's journey in Taran Wanderer, and had to keep stopping to take more pictures of these perfect settings. If Disney defaults their shooting of the potential film to New Zealand, the fantasy film location du jour, they will have passed up some golden opportunities here (particularly as I would imagine it would be much cheaper to film here, unknown and unspoiled by the moguls of Hollywood industry, but what do I know).

We entered a wooded area as our altitude dropped; very different woods than we'd encountered in the north. Those had been very brushy with undergrowth, very dark and thick-canopied; these were "cleaner", the trees a bit thinner, filtering light down through many green dappled layers onto a ground carpeted in moss and fern.

Moss. MOSS, MY FAERY SOUL. I WANT TO ROLL IN IT.

Makeshift bridge of sidewalk slab and stone.

The ubiquitous stone walls still barred us from leaving the road most of the time, and as we got further towards civilization, it was occasionally broken by doorways or gates, always locked, or nearly-hidden stone stairways, covered in a year's worth of dead leaves, leading to nowhere or....anywhere.


























Once we came upon a sharply peaked, dark rooftop standing ghostlike under the trees, its upper portion just clearing the visibility of the fence. Its gothic, pointed window frames identified it as a church, and as we got closer we could see that several of the slate roof tiles were broken and missing. Through the hole we could look down into the empty hall. Shafts of pale light filtered in from the empty doorway opposite our viewpoint, illuminating rows of empty pews. The growth of everything around it suggested that nobody had used this building in half a century or more. No signs or markers identified it. It just stood - an empty shell, monument to a faith dead or moved on.

Selfie on the trail, because now and then you have to prove it was really you taking the pictures. 

The road going ever on...

Down and down and down some more - first hour up, I realized how foolish we had been not to bring water; we were both sweating and hot, even in the now ever-present shade. Blackberries grew thick alongside the road and I picked and ate them continuously; I wasn't hungry, but the juice was mildly thirst-quenching. We finally got into the village at the foot of the mountains, a rambling, unorganized collection of cottages bearing the odd name Arthog. There, our quiet mountain road joined a somewhat busy thoroughfare, though at the moment the traffic was being held up by a road re-surfacing crew. We paused to watch them lay gravel for a few minutes; the Artist took some pictures and one of the workmen, noticing this, grinned, turned around, and favored us with a cheeky dance.

Get it? Cheeky? You see what I did there? 

We confirmed with one of the workers that we were still on the right road to Barmouth since at this elevation we could no longer see miles ahead. The road became less pleasant to walk at this point; the usual stone walls bordering it meant there were no shoulders to walk upon, and every time a line of traffic approached, we had to stop and squish ourselves apologetically against the wall, trying to avoid the blackberry brambles and stinging nettles.

This stretch seemed interminable. There wasn't much of a view as we were down amongst wooded lots, and though the scattering of cottages in rows, with their jumbled messes of roses and hydrangeas and lavender gardens, were charming and picturesque, there wasn't too much variety. We were hot, tired, and thirsty, and beginning to realize we weren't going to make our 2 o'clock bus from Barmouth. There wasn't anything else to do but go on, however.

At one point a small lane pulled off to the right from the main road, so small it looked barely more than a driveway, and had no signs marking it as anything particularly important, so we skipped it and continued on while I stuck my nose in the map, trying to find something that looked like it matched. About a quarter mile later we realized we'd gone too far. That unassuming lane had been our turn. The Artist said some choice words and wanted to turn into the field on the other side of the wall; the constant anxiety of avoiding traffic was making him cranky. I refused to walk anywhere but the road, on the basis that it was impossible to tell where you'd come out if you started cutting through fields, and that often the wall bordering them was too high to climb over if you suddenly found yourself needing to escape...say, from angry Welsh bulls...or angry Welsh farmers on whose land you were trespassing.

He said some more choice words and forbade me to post them on Facebook. I laughed and ate blackberries all the way back to the lane, where we turned and headed west at last.

In less than a mile we emerged from the woods, and an open bay stretched before us, water glimmering between vast sand flats bordered by rows of dunes. A footbridge spanned the distance, leading toward the village of Barmouth, which from here was clear was a beach resort town somewhat gone to seed, but still quite busy and crowded. Rows of multi-storied apartment buildings in the bright pastel colors typical of seaside resorts layered themselves up the slope of the hills behind. Sailboats were thick in the deep part of the bay, and families were playing by and in the water on the far side. People were biking and walking over the bridge by the dozens and we quickly started across.

Despite being the shortest part of the journey in mileage, that bridge felt like it would never end. The sun beat down and there was no wind at all; it can't have been more than low 80s in temperature but between our jeans and backpacks we weren't getting much air circulation. When we finally got to Barmouth, we headed straight for the nearest pub and downed two glasses of ice water. It was dark and cool inside, an old place lined with beer-bottle candles, ceiling strung with faux greenery and fairy lights. The Artist ate lunch and I picked at his chips.

I don't know if it's really the last Inn, but we'd have gone in anyway.

The Artist attempting British manners. He was better at this than the accent.

There was another bus to Harlech within the hour so we hopped on. Thus began an adventure into feats of wizardry unlike anything I have ever encountered, as the bus driver, weaving in and out among the cars parked on both sides of the town's narrow streets, made the vehicle do things that were physically impossible for any bus to do. It wound like a snake between its obstacles, as though it were made of multiple rotating sections instead of a 50-foot solid frame. It was instantly obvious where J.K. Rowling took her inspiration for the Night Bus, the magical antics of which no longer seemed quite so outrageous - obviously running up on sidewalks and forcing entire buildings to squeeze out of one's way being all in a day's work for these drivers.

We made it to Harlech miraculously in one piece, and took another hike up a hill to visit the castle, another of Edward's impressive fortresses. Built on a ridge right upon the water, where it could be supplied directly from ships on the bay, it now stood high and dry as over centuries the waterline had receded to its present state a mile or so away. Between castle and sea, a swath of very green, rippling dune-like low ridges marched down to the water.

There was a short film playing in the visitor's center, and I peeked in and watched the first five minutes or so. Thrillingly, it began with an image of a smoking cauldron, glowing in red firelight, boiling and trembling until it cracked. The next image was the mountainous coastline, with a huge, crowned and disembodied-but-alive head resting upon it and smiling benevolently out at the sea. I recognized both images as references to the Mabinogion legend of Bran the Blessed, the son of Llyr - confirmed by a plaque outside that explained that this was the very bay where he had greeted the king of Ireland, and agreed to the ill-fated marriage between said king, and his sister Branwen. Typical of all such legends, it ended it tragedy and war, because Celts.

Less massive and less well-preserved than Conwy, the castle was still a great place to explore - and this time I had brought my costume. We were there only about an hour before closing so it was, thankfully, not very crowded. We found a relatively secluded spot - probably the original kitchen - for me to change, and went out to get some pictures, drawing the usual bemused looks from onlookers. One woman, however, was full of friendly interest, and began shouting posing tips to me as I ran around the walls. She came up and started asking about what we were doing, and before long her whole family was there and I was showing them images from my Facebook page; she was writing down my screen name and the Chronicles titles to look them up at home - my second apparently successful evangelization of the Prydain books among the Welsh.

Castles are just prisons where they make you wash your hair and curtsy all the time.

Our good camera had a dead battery so we had to rely on the iPhone - God bless the people at Apple who keep making those phone cameras better and better quality. The Artist bravely conquered his vertigo to follow me up to the highest walls and get some shots of Eilonwy looking out to sea, pining for freedom. If I had to pick one castle for cosplay, I thought this one particularly appropriate, given the location. It made a perfect stand-in for Dinas Rhydnant.

Unfortunately most of these also seem to have been part of the collection that was lost that day, and only these two shots have survived (and only because I edited them on my phone and posted them to various social media while we were still there.)

"Carrickfergus" would really just be excruciatingly appropriate here...if only it were Welsh instead of Irish. BOO!

When we finally left the castle it was closing; we rushed out to the bus station only to find that the last bus had left over an hour before. Plan B? There was none. We trotted down a road lined with BnBs and the Artist suggested asking a local proprietor the number for a taxi service. We turned in at the next place and the hostess, a lovely woman named Bridget, kindly called one for us.

Our taxi driver was thrilled to find herself transporting a Disney costume designer, and spent the time sharing stories of her family experiences at the Orlando parks and the undying thrill of that most American of experiences: shopping at Wal-Mart. We made Barmouth just in time to catch our bus back to Dolgellau.

Dinner in a local pub called the Unicorn:

Hamhock, chicken, and leek pie. American pot pies are sad, depressing replicas of these.

We called another taxi to bring us back up to our lodging, thankful not to have to walk another quarter-mile on our aching feet, and were back in time to have a cup of tea on our deck and watch another sunset bid goodnight to Cader Idris.

I found out the following morning, while chatting with another couple who had stayed that night, that Tyddyn Mawr is one of the most highly-rated BnBs in Wales, consistently rated top of all the "must-stay" lists, and almost always booked months in advance, they'd had an awful time trying to get a room and asked how on earth we'd managed it. I'd had no idea when I booked it on AirBnb; just had loved the look of the setting; one more happy "accident" in the arrangements of what was turning out to be a series of such.

On to Cardigan!