Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Meanwhile we had to get on. South Stack was some miles to the west and as Lloyd pointed out, we hadn’t had lunch yet.

  – TO THE LIGHTHOUSE –

  At some point we transferred from one island to another: Holy Island. I must have missed the bridge on the roadway. We were suddenly simply there, at South Stack.

  I stood on a high cliff looking out over the sea. I was high up again. The top of the lighthouse was way below me. The bare outcrops of the cliff tops were covered with wild flowers and seabirds circled beneath my feet.

  A beautiful staircase led downwards, wheeling in slithering bends, so I took it for 400 steps through smooth-walled ramparts to a rugged, bolted metal-truss bridge, which crossed a sea gorge and deposited me on my ultimate Welsh island in the west: Ynys Lawd. The cover photo for Roxy Music’s Siren album was taken directly below the bridge to South Stack – Bryan Ferry’s idea, apparently.

  This place had been home to keepers as recently as 1984. Now the light is fully automated. The keepers had left the terraced row of whitewashed houses next to the light tower earlier, because the location was considered unsafe for children, but the steep walled rock remained a self-sufficient village, as much as a sea-mark. High walls protected fields once used for crops, and even now they were thick with what looked like overgrown cabbages: a surreal organic element, like a 1940s painting.

  Amongst these burgeoning vegetables and down in the tufts of coarse grass by the approach paths, hundreds of gulls were nesting, within metres of tourists like me. They lay still and beady-eyed. Their mates jumped on the walls and croaked open-mouthed aggression. Like my fish-trap island, the wild and the occupied coexisted here. Men were mere intruders, and just about tolerated.

  Glancing in amongst the glaucous, forgotten house vegetables, I could see the yellow-rimmed eyes and the red-darted heads swivelling to watch me. Close up, the birds were more arrogantly perfect than they appear when they soar in flocks, or bomb rubbish tips. Herring gulls may be scavengers, there may be thousands of them, but they repay close attention. They are wind-tunnel designed: lean, jet-blasted creatures decked out in dazzling white and startling flecks of colour like a painter’s contrasting highlights. I was satisfied already. This was the Galapagos of the Welsh coast. Any puffin was going to be a bonus.

  More steps up the tower, this time on a regular spiral mount to the very top. You don’t get any particular vantage point. The cliff top is higher and the island is closer to the rookeries. But the tower has a magnificence of its own. Built in 1808, following the Act of Union, when a Captain Hugh Evans finally persuaded Trinity House that the increased traffic with Ireland required some sort of protection, the light was secured by preparing detailed maps of all the shipwrecks along the coast. (Archaeological evidence shows that people have been sailing from Holyhead to Ireland for the past 4,000 years.) The tower rises 28 metres and is, again, a dazzling white, like the cottages that surround it, like a gull’s back, like a breaker on the shore: shining with a clean and fresh seaside brilliance.

  At the very top of the utilitarian hollow stack is a giant Fresnel LED lamp, resting on a bed of mercury, dense enough to support its great weight and yet liquid enough to allow its mass to be revolved. It provides a flash every 10 seconds. In 1831 Captain Evans came up with the unique idea of a moveable light that would shine out closer to the sea surface. A track was built, meaning a cabin on wheels could be lowered to within 12m of sea level to give increased visibility.

  On this bright, clear day, with an empty sea ahead, it was difficult to imagine fog. But fog regularly obscured the whole of the headland. Trinity House had felt it necessary to drag another light down to sea level, to put up bells and even to install cannons to warn off shipping. They replaced their oil lights, got bigger gas lights, then bigger electric ones again, with attendant machinery and generators. Today, the ships that pass navigate by satellite and it is only yachtsmen or disabled boats that really need the extra guidance that a lighthouse provides. Instead, the tower has become a beacon for tourists. In the place of keepers there are now permanent guides on watch.

  Martyn was there for me, quite prepared to explain the workings and the daring exploits of the former inhabitants of the islands, but I needed his guidance on another matter. He took me to the lantern room and pointed back the way I had come. There was a knot of people halfway down the steps. I might have noticed them myself, if I hadn’t been taking the stairs three at a time. They were leaning into the balustrade of one of the hairpin bends and peering at something on the opposite cliff. These were the puffin-watchers.

  – PUFFIN AND PANTIN –

  Only eight pairs had returned to South Stack that summer, members of the twitcher group told me when I finally got to them. Perhaps more would come. Someone loaned me his binoculars. I gazed across at the cliff outcrop beyond, following their minute directions. “Come across from the big rock that looks like a triangle.”

  They all looked like that.

  “But you can see that there is a ledge of grass.”

  I could.

  “You need to get on that, then move to the left and across to the guillemots.” As usual there were dozens of other birds fussing about. “Now, go up and you see the four black birds…”

  I did.

  “Stay on them. There’s a burrow just in the shadow there and he seems to have gone in there. If you wait…”

  But I didn’t have to wait. Almost as I brought my binoculars to bear, a puffin casually hopped out of the dark area and skipped over into the light. I was looking at a bird about the size of a carton of milk. There it was, with a white chest and, clear and perfect, a stripey, multi-coloured beak. It looked so childish and innocent, and we have so readily adopted it as a symbol of the nursery, that it is difficult to accept that this small creature, bobbing about in the pinks, now obviously gathering strands of grass to line its summer nest, was one of the hardiest sea birds, able to live on salt water, consume huge quantities of fish and ride out the boiling ocean storms for months, with far less sustenance and support than the average lighthouse keeper required.

  But I had definitely seen it. I stayed to watch it launch itself off into the chasm and hurtle down to the blue water 200 feet below. And all on this perfect seaside day. I envied the puffin the swim and their agility and resilience, except that I was enjoying my own human holiday of sun and sea and breeze on Holy Island. The puffins and the gulls, the razorbills and the guillemots would stay there when the night rain slanted in and a front arrived off the Atlantic to drench Anglesey and reassert its wildness.

  –8–

  CONWY

  THAT RIVIERA TOUCH

  – GATEWAY TO THE STARS –

  When I finally went into Conwy, across the Telford bridge, the middle way, between the ghastly modern car-crossing and the Stephenson-designed grey-boxed railway bridge, (boxed, alas, so that the passengers don’t even glimpse the eye-popping castle guarding the town), I marched into an open gate with an audible “dong”.

  It was metal. My head slammed into it. The pain was immediate and excruciating. Blood started flowing. Two gardeners, prostrate on their carpet-like sward, jumped up in alarm. Although they had noticed I was that bloke off the telly, they had been quite discreet about it until I hurled myself into a solid object with unexpected force. They gave an audible gasp.

  “Are you alright?” one asked.

  He meant my mental state. How could anybody walk into a 10-foot high black tubular metal gate of their own volition? You know, just march into it. I am accustomed to being seen as a ninny by the practical classes. I was a representative of the imbecilic celebrity type now. Only a twat off the telly could do anything so naff.

  I was doubly hurt. I was in pain and embarrassed. And I was certainly no longer Welsh. I had reverted to “nurture not nature”. I was behaving like an English berk, who, on losing a leg in a tragic, limb-severing accident, pretends tha
t nothing has happened. “No, no. I’m fine. Don’t make a fuss. Yes I’m quite alright,” whilst spurting arterial blood and hopping off to die privately behind a bush.

  On this National Trust property (they own bridges too), I merely throbbed and staggered about a bit. But it was symbolic of my visit to the land around Conwy. I was always gawping and never concentrating. There is a lot to see and marvel at. But don’t walk into any gates while doing it.

  – PREVIOUS FORM –

  Conwy was miles ahead. I began in my own past. I hoped this jaunt to north Wales was going to join up the dots for me. I had been in the region in bits and pieces. I had never bothered to study any maps. Now I hoped to see the whole picture.

  Come to think of it, I think I must have done Llandudno with Top of the Form, in my scoop-neck sweater days in 1976. I recalled walking on the fine pier and taking a funicular. I was twenty-four and worked for BBC Radio. But I had no recollection of anything more other than that Llandudno was the “Queen of Welsh resorts” or the “Naples of the North” and it is the largest seaside resort in Wales. (And a few other “Top of the Form” facts.)

  Thirty years later, I returned to the region, to Betws-y-Coed, with BBC’s Mountain. Did I spell that correctly? The Betws-y-Coed tourist website found that there were 364 misspellings of the name of the town by people searching for the website, including variations like ‘Betsy Cowed’ to ‘Bwtsy Code’. Anyway, we had been based there for days, heading off for Snowdon and buying fluorescent adventure gear in order to look silly on the train up to the summit.

  I had also gone to the Conwy valley with Restoration, and had looked at Gwydir Castle and its amazing sitting room walls. But as I passed through each of these places at the behest of a BBC remit (each of the projects mentioned was required to “do” a programme in Wales), I had marvelled at the scenery. I remember phoning my wife with great excitement and telling her that the Conwy valley was exactly like the Rhine, with hummocks of green hills on either side of a river clothed in woods and meadows. This was a little rich. I have never been to the Rhine, but clearly I felt a great affinity with this place. And then, thanks to Who Do You Think You Are? in 2010, I discovered that my great, great-grandfather on my father’s side had come from Penmachno, just a little further into Snowdonia.

  So that was it. I was coming home. Ah.

  – A LIGHTHOUSE IN DISGUISE –

  Llandudno sits between two rocky outcrops of land, the Great Orme and the Little Orme. I began my journey on the Great Orme, which was named by the Vikings. (You can get at the original Viking sound if you pucker up the mouth and try your “Norwegian chef” accent: “Orrrme” easily metamorphoses into “worrrm”.)

  It does resemble a mammoth sea slug curled up on itself. I doubt that the Vikings were ever really menaced by huge sea worms, except in their imaginations, but I suspect that coming across the bay in a fog this gigantic limestone rock looked terrifying. It’s a wildish, winding, smoothed-out place, especially up top, where a herd of Kashmiri goats ramble about the grassland. A supposed gift from Queen Victoria, all 160 of them are said to descend on Llandudno in bad weather and skulk about the streets – like displaced tourists looking for the cinema.

  We started in the lighthouse on the tip of the headland. It is now a bed and breakfast. I had to throw a charming Australian woman out of her digs. She was visiting her ancestral home and staying overnight in the lamp room but we needed this glass house, banged onto the front of the fortress, for our filming. The original landowner seems to have been the only romantic in history who found lighthouses disfiguring, and so in 1862 he disguised it as castle, with a “conservatory” strapped on the side where the light sat. This was where I found my “challenge”. I was ordered to “find a Welsh dresser”.

  The castle was a cosy place to holiday in. It must have been for the keepers too. The corridor was lined in planked wood like a boat, and it was decorated with posters from the Mersey Harbour Authority. They seemed to have had an appealing no-nonsense attitude to their business. “Danger. Do not enter,” one read. “If not drowned you will be prosecuted.” But there were no dressers there for me to examine.

  I set off for Llandudno, on a coach. It was a lovely veteran coach. It was painted with a chestnut-coloured stripe and covered with chrome. It undertook a recurring trip around the Great Orme. Jon, the driver, kept up a commentary, pointing out the theatre that had burned down, the tollgate to enter (which when it first opened had cost 1p for a horse and carriage), the windfarm in the bay and the lighthouse bed and breakfast, where it stopped to pick me up.

  As we rumbled around the headland and across the surprisingly narrow neck of the Great Orme into Llandudno itself, I decided I had better quiz my fellow passengers. “I have been tasked with finding some proper Welsh furniture,” I explained to a sweet old lady with white hair. (Probably younger than me.) “Do you have any inherited furniture?”

  She looked blank. “No, I don’t have any old furniture at all,” she said.

  I asked the others. They shook their heads. I had assumed it was universally Welsh to hang on to heavy oak bits from old farmhouse ancestors. Perhaps it was just me.

  “Jon,” I called up the bus. “Can you take her on a long route?”

  “The four-and-a-half mile Marine Drive road we had just taken was used as the climax of the 2013 Welsh Rally GB”, Jon told us on his public address system, but it wasn’t long enough for me; I needed longer.

  The coach dutifully swung off along another avenue of suburban seaside villas. As we passed the Llandudno lifeboat station, Jon told us that it is the only lifeboat station in the UK to have its boathouse located in the middle of the town. (It was built in 1861 and positioned there so that it was equidistant from each of Llandudno’s main shores.) Meanwhile, I was stalking the aisle like a witless terrorist demanding that the poor tourists identify their racial origins. They cowered away in their plush seats, denying Welsh connections, day-trippers from Walsall or the Wirral all, except for a couple at the back.

  “I have a spinning wheel,” one woman finally told me. “It’s up

  on a shelf.”

  “Did you inherit it?” I asked.

  “It came from a junk shop. But you won’t find a lot of antique stuff in Llandudno. We are far too sophisticated for that.” She gave a merry laugh.

  A man on the other side of the aisle laughed too. “You might find some antique shops up in the valleys, in countryside beyond the front,” he told me.

  We eventually parked up just near the pier and I walked off along the prom. It was just after the school holidays had finished but it was still busy. Thousands of white-haired visitors were enjoying the sunny gentility. Eventually I joined a few still sitting out on deck chairs. They were not facing the sea, but had turned towards the town and the slanting sun beaming over the slate roofs of this perfectly preserved Queen of Resorts.

  Hired deck chairs were the only thing you could pay for along the entire bay. “There are strict rules,” my attendant told me. “Nobody can sell candy floss, or rock, or kiss-me-quick hats on this prom.”

  Llandudno is autocratic. It is still largely owned by the Mostyn family, who, having decided that sea-bathing could replace mussel-fishing on their beach, purpose-built most of Llandudno in the 1870s. They were so successful that Bismarck and Gladstone came to stay. Other British Prime Ministers followed (if only to bore everybody at conference time). Queen Elisabeth of Romania set up shop in the local hotel. Streets were named after her literary pseudonym: “Carmen Sylva”. She went to the Bangor Eisteddfod and watched a classic Punch and Judy show. Lewis Carroll came and met Alice Liddell, widely believed to be the inspiration behind the fictional Alice. Unlike Rhyl and Prestatyn, further along the coast and therefore closer to the great cities of northern England, Llandudno was up itself. It thought of itself as better than the average and, as a result, it was.

  There is nothing particularly dra
matic about the wide, grid-like streets. They largely remain as they were intended to be: would-be-uniform terraced houses occasionally sporting the flamboyance of national seaside frivolity, mostly in wrought iron. There may be “iconic” buildings and listed “architectural gems”, like the Grand Hotel, which, when opened in 1901, was the biggest hotel in the whole of Wales, but the secret of the place is its uniformity.

  Unlike so many fading British seaside towns, there is no evidence of council panic; no one has swept away a dilapidated front to build more accessible car parks or huge leisure centres (though something ominous seems to be going up in the unexpected swathe of green fields that still close the bay on the eastern side). Llandudno is unmodernised.

  “We have people all year round these days,” Jon the coach driver had told me. “They used to stop coming when the summer finished, but now we are a destination.”

  And not a destination ruined by its own commerciality. The shops are shops. Llandudno has no mammoth retail centre that becomes deserted at night. Inhabited houses stand shoulder to shoulder with the commercial premises.

  In the widespread loss of confidence that followed the package holiday boom, few British seaside towns have shown a matching confidence. Everybody I talked to in Llandudno was in favour of this. That’s why they were there, and using the place. Welsh seaside, when it is good, is the best in Britain.

  – WELSH OAK –

  My challenge on this visit was to find “a beautiful Welsh dresser”. There were side issues to this furniture hunt. I hoped it would get me close to woods and woodcraft. There were questions to be answered. Why was every dresser of note called a Welsh dresser? What was a dresser anyway? Was there anything particular about dressers in this region? And why were the Welsh so obsessed with furniture?