Pamela Goodman travels to north Wales in a rusty Land Rover Defender, where long walks, wild swimming and a visit to the 'eccentric' town of Portmeirion are on the cards. The time of year has come for us to pack up the rusty Land Rover Defender and head to north Wales. Once there, our favoured holiday spot is an old farmhouse with commanding views of Cardigan Bay and the Llŷn Peninsula, to which friends and family come and go, ready and willing — most of the time — to be marched up mountains and dunked in lakes and rivers whatever the weather.
Those who are new to this corner of Snowdonia are then rewarded for their endeavours with a trip to nearby Portmeirion, the bizarrely picturesque Italianate village built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1976 on a peninsula, which juts finger-like into the wide Dwyryd estuary between Harlech and Porthmadog. Sir Clough has long been a hero of mine, not least for his attire. This was a man who believed no time should be wasted each morning deciding what to wear, so he acquired a selection of tweed suits, each comprising jacket and breeks, and paired them with a yellow waistcoat and yellow knee-length socks to become his own distinctive uniform.
Eccentric, you might say, and I couldn’t disagree, but much of Portmeirion’s charm is rooted in eccentricity and this is why I love the place. Long before Sir Clough had settled on this spot to create his extraordinary explosion of architectural whimsy, much of the land was o.