Tommy eats razorblades or so people say. Tommy also drinks meths – diluted with White Lightning, naturally, in order to make its drinking marginally more palatable but no less likely to reduce your innards to a tangled rotten mess – but in this there is nothing contentious. Especially if you move in such circles as Tommy is known to move in.
For four months he had managed to elude me despite all I’d heard, but he sat next to me now, dressed in his camouflaged combat trousers tucked into black leather boots, a green woollen jumper beneath knee-length green parka on top, as we bumped along the M56 towards Wales. He was ex-army as he’d later explain and he clearly hadn’t outgrown its customary fashion. He’d also clearly gotten himself a good way on the shitfaced-side of sober before we’d all met at the centre around an hour earlier. He was telling me in his slurring Salfordian gruff that he’d had two businesses before the drink and lost the lot. He’d had a few knocks over the years, he said. He’d done some things he wasn’t proud of. But he wasn’t to know it’d end up like this. I nodded as if I could ever understand the position from which he spoke.
There were twelve of us altogether, including myself, the centre co-ordinator, and Dave, the centre manager and designated driver for the duration. The rest of our ragtag group were users of the centre, that is, homeless or ex-homeless individuals, each with his own combination of alcohol, drug or mental health problems who make use of the supportive environment that the centre offers. Our trip was part of the centre’s objective to provide its users with positive experiences in order that they may look forward to a future in which they can move on and contribute to a society of which they feel a part.
We were on an expedition to take photographs primarily. That was the raison d’être of the trip. A drive across to the tip of Wales for the day, a youth hostel in Snowdonia overnight, before heading back the following afternoon with a few choice stops along the way.
Our first destination was the RSPB nature reserve at South Stack on Anglesey, home to some 4000 pairs of nesting seabirds at its summer height and some of the oldest rock formations in Wales. We arrived mid-afternoon, tumbling out of the bus under a rare cloudless sky onto a windswept car park, before heading along the winding coastal path atop the 600 million year-old, Precambrian cliffs, as even those that hadn’t held a camera since the digital age had dawned were busy aiming lenses at anything that’d keep stationary long enough.
Tommy, though seemingly sobering up at this stage, seemed no steadier on his feet. Indeed, as he teetered rather too hazardously for comfort along the open cliff edge, peering over at the crashing waves two hundred feet below, he demonstrated with the aid of a fist-sized rock he’d acquired – as if anybody doubted – the less than attractive end a man would meet if he were to topple into the abyss as he himself was close to doing as he attempted to negotiate the muddy precipice. He flung the rock into the void and turned an ear to listen to it smashing as it fell, turning back after it had splashed to deliver the verdict: ‘No chance.’ Then he was off again, trudging up the adjacent hill, disappearing every so often into the purple scrub as he tripped, hands outstretched to break his fall, while the rest of us thought it best to follow up the steps to meet him waiting on a rock at the summit.
The majority of birds had flown by early September having put up with the drabness of another British summer long enough. From the vantage point of the visitor centre which looks out towards the lighthouse, there was no sign of the puffins, fulmars, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes or choughs that were said to nest on the cliffs opposite as we trained binoculars and telescopes upon them. Nor could we spy any of the porpoises or dolphins that are said to frequent the waters, just a couple of bobbing buoys attached to submerged lobster pots and a recorded video of a pair of puffins doing whatever puffins do that make them so appealing to a certain bent of mind. There were a couple of peregrine falcons hovering and diving, the odd seagull and some coastguard helicopter action as we ambled our way along the cliff path. The Hollyhead to Dublin ferry also made an appearance from around the head before disappearing ghost-like into the haze sometime later. On a less hazy day the distant Irish mountains are said to be visible in the West, but their hiddenness and the largely absent birdlife didn’t detract from our walk as we spent a productive couple of hours filling our lungs with sea air and snapping away rather indiscriminately. In the cold and rain I’m sure it all could have seemed rather more bleak. But under sunny late summer skies, the middle of Manchester couldn’t have been further away.
After taking an hour’s lunch break at nearby Trearddur Bay we meandered back from Anglesey – via a brief stop at Caernarfon to photograph the castle – towards Snowdonia and our hostel for the night. The journey would take us through the Llanberis Pass and some of the most breathtaking natural beauty the British Isles has to offer. Rock-scattered and scarred by slate mines, the pass scores between the massifs of Glyderau and Snowdon itself, while the glacial lakes of Llyn Padarn and Llyn Peris mirror the mountains at their feet. It was a spectacular drive as our little bus wound its way beneath the jaggedness, while eyes peered half captivated, half concerned, upwards out of windows, lest the latest of that boulder-strewn landscape’s ten-ton bus crushers came rolling down the crags.
Whereas the rain-sodden Wales of my childhood had seemed more like a caravan-entombed sentence than a holiday, the scenery that had loomed shadowy on the horizon and now imposed upon us from each side made me realise the magnificence I’d been missing for so long. Quarried mountainsides littered with scree passed by on either side. Electric Mountain – a huge hydroelectric power station built within the rock itself, whose main turbine and generator chamber is said to be the largest underground chamber ever excavated by man – lurked concealed somewhere to our left. While climbers, walkers and assorted gawkers were out in force, their vehicles abandoned in laybys as they each took to the rocks to be overawed in their various fashions. We decided to do the same, piling out onto the side of the road in a hum of cameras starting up and lenses extending at the ready to capture the vastness.
By the time we reached the hostel in Capel Curig, a couple of miles outside Betws-y-Coed – the so-called Gateway to Snowdonia – it was early evening. After allocating ourselves rooms and claiming our bunks, we spent an hour or so downloading the hundreds of photographs taken during the day before heading out again, into the dark and clear-skied chill, to treat ourselves to the chipshop supper our bellies had been growling for for hours. A chit and a chat when we got back complimented by a plateful of cheese-on-toast that we couldn’t refuse after Frank had prepared it so thoughtfully despite our straining stomachs, then it was up and off to get some sleep before whatever the following day would bring.
There had been a general hubbub in the room overnight, my sleep being interspersed at turns with Don’s gravel-dragging snoring, Howard’s general moaning and Geoff’s full-scale conversations with himself, chatting and chuckling away on the bunk below, though what was actually being said I could never make out. After I finally had dragged myself up and into the same clothes as the day before, before making my way to the dinning room for breakfast, I stepped outside to take in the morning view of a cloud-shrouded Snowdon in the distance and the hills surrounding the hostel as the morning mist lingered. Tommy and Ed were out there having a pre-breakfast smoke.
“We used to hike up hills like that with hundred-pound rucksacks when I was in the army,” Tommy said. Ed told him that they’d hiked up hills like that last time they’d been to Snowdonia. ‘Almost fucking killed me!’ he said, dragging on the last of a shakily held cigarette before coughing up and spitting out a not exactly healthy looking gob of discoloured phlegm.
A young climber was busy loading up his roof rack for an early start as we stood admiring the yellow early-morning sun and the shadows it cast upon the ridges back along the pass. It was prime outdoor activity territory. Capel Curig itself is home to the National Mountain Centre, catering for every outdoor taste from hillwalking and rock climbing, to kayaking and mountain biking, while Betws-y-Coed marks the start of the Marin Trail, a 25 kilometre, multi-ability, mountain biking route that takes in the most spectacular parts of Gwydyr Forest.
The more I contemplated the cloudy slopes in front of us, the more the urge to set off hiking towards their summit intensified within me. A brisk bit of pre-noon fell-walking to make myself feel suitably insignificant surrounded by such timeless emptiness, a fleeting dot on those multi-million-year-old, glacier carved rocks, would work up just the appetite before lunch, I thought. But such thoughts of food and appetites resulted in little more epiphanic than a vague realisation of my grumbling stomach. We reflected some more about the natural majesty of it all then headed back inside to break our fast.
Our primary destination for the day before heading back to Manchester was the village of Portmeirion, most famous perhaps for being the location for the 1960s cult television series The Prisoner. The village was designed by architect Clough Williams-Ellis who bought the land in 1925 and constructed the village between 1926 and 1976. It stands on the estuary of the River Dwyryd and is modelled on a Mediterranean piazza, its buildings having been dismantled and transported from Britain and abroad and rebuilt on site.
Clough Williams-Ellis died not long after the village’s completion, but Portmeirion stands as a lasting epitaph to its architect. The grounds and seventy acres of woodland that surround the village are listed as a conservation area and are home to an assortment of exotic flora – including rhododendrons, Himalayan Firs, Palms and Redwoods – which thrive in an unusually mild climate warmed by the Gulf stream, while the village has attained listed building status. Whitewashed and pastel-painted buildings of various styles sit oddly comfortably next to each other; archways, statues and other architectural oddities abound. It is every bit the set of the surreal nightmare in which Patrick McGoohan’s character found himself imprisoned in the Sixties.
We arrived not long after the village’s daily opening, able to stroll the streets leisurely before heading down to the rapidly rising waters of the estuary and taking to the woodland paths, but by the time we’d retuned to the village an hour or so later, the coaches had arrived and we were confronted with a taster of the supposed 3000 visitors the village receives each day during summer. The place seemed overrun by tourists of a certain cousinly nation thinking the whole thing was simply adorable in its Cymru kitsch and camcordering the place in order to prove it all to the folks back home.
When we were safely winding again, passing more road signs of that seemingly voweless Welsh language identifying Llanuwchllyn, Cwmtirmynach, Ty Mawr Cwm and Cwrt – as if written by the indiscriminate keyboard tappings of some errant child -we decided on a brief stop at The National Whitewater Centre outside Bala in the hope that we would catch a raft or two hurtling down the dam-controlled rapids. By the evidence of the wetsuits being taken off and the rafts being carried away from the water, however, we’d arrived marginally too late. There were a few photographs taken and a pair of buzzards that seemed to have followed us from Portmeirion could be seen circling above. But after a brief stroll around the grounds it was back in the bus for a final time. It was time to leave Snowdonia behind and head on back to Manchester, vowing that it wouldn’t be as long again before I returned west.
Links:
- Snowdonia: Places to Stay and Things to Do
- RSPB Guide to South Stack Cliffs
- The Official Portmeirion Village Website
- Plas y Brenin – The National Mountain Centre
- Six of One: The Prisoner Appreciation Society
- BBC Guide to The Prisoner
- Crisis – National Homeless Charity
- Shelter – The Housing and Homeless Charity
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Glad to read your travelling account of Holyhead South Stack, Llanberis Pass and Capel Curig YHA and hopefully you got some good shots with your cameras.
I am sure that if you planned a trip in Mid summer you would see many more sea birds nesting.
Come again into beautiful Snowdonia but not on a day like today where it has done nothing but teem down with rain all day.