Don’t go to Portmerion. The best way I can describe it is like a theme park for old people, where the only ride is “getting a coffee”.
Honestly, it’s the most gayly decorated village I’ve ever been to. Like walking thru a cartoon, with all the houses painted different pastel colours, surrounded by flowers and perfectly trimmed topiary. It’s beautiful like a freshly painted theme park is beautiful. It’s a pastiche of Italy, in drizzly Wales, with sequestered bits of English architecture smeared in there.
The vision of one man, Portmeirion was designed and built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1975. It’s built to be an attraction, a folly village, in his idealistic style lifted from the Italian Riviera. Always intended and operated as a hotel, the majority of the houses are hotel rooms or self catering cottages.
Perhaps this is why I felt so weird wandering around the place. It’s so garish, in my mind it doesn’t fit in the brutal slate heart of Wales. It’s so perfect, it looks wrong. Like the perfectly practised smile of a Hooters serving girl; nice to look at, until you really look at it.
We arrived late in the day having walked all the way from our hotel, into Porthmadog and then out across The Cob before climbing a small hill over to Portmerion. It was lunchtime and so we tried to head for a cafe (there are lots to choose from) but were distracted by all the colours. Eventually having reached what looked like the main building, we first thought we had walked in on the staff setting up for a wedding, but apparently that’s just how they leave their chairs set up. It was so surreal, I can only imagine the fairytale bubblegum wedding you could have here. But we found the cafe and had some pretty basic cafe food and machine spaffed coffee.
Setting off for a walk, too soon for Aimi’s tummy, we head out of the theme park village and up the hill. There is a large woodland garden dotted with things to see. Mostly they are tinny gazebos painted bright colours, sticking out of the canopy like sore thumbs, but they do have good views. The most frustrating one was the Japanese Bridge. It was just a bridge. Painted red. Perhaps to the Welsh or French tourists who have never been to Japan, this might be exciting, but I was left thoroughly underwhelmed. The lily pond it crossed was pretty.
And then you get to the fact that because it’s a hotel, pretty much all the cute little alleys, or staircases or arched doorways are blocked by a polite sign saying “Residents Only”. Fucks sake, I’ve just paid £20 each to get into this watercolorists wet dream, and now you’re stopping me from exploring it all!
As you can probably tell, I was operating at a low boil the whole afternoon. But I kept it together because Aimi was having a good time, and honestly, other than the seething rip-off rage below the surface, I was too. I love walking thru woodlands, looking at views and getting coffee while chatting and holding hands. Its a theme park for adults. You get to pretend to be in a soap opera where everything is beautiful and romantic. Its a completely inauthentic place and once you grasp that, it’s quite fun. But I’d sooner look at rusty metal discarded beside an abandoned mine on the side of a drizzly mountain. It means more.
Speaking of drizzly mountains, the walk to Porthmadog from the hotel had a great view of them. It’s dead flat on the reclaimed land of the estuary. You get a wide view of the world before it all shoots up steeply to the rocky peaks of Snowdonia. And because it’s so flat, you can see weather coming a mile away. It would envelope the nearest mountain and you’d know you needed to button down the waterproof trousers and coats because, yep, here comes the rain.
As heavily as we got rained on, surprisingly, my jacket stayed nearly waterproof. Again, here I have a jacket that’s done far too many miles and should be retired. So it’s become my dog walking jacket and because of boring reasons, I’ve brought this one instead of my good waterproof. But the only water it let in all day was likely because I didn’t do up the zip all the way to my chin and water dribbled down and soaked the front of my shirt. But 10 minutes later and the sun was back out, drying me off.
We took a sensible route back into the hotel grounds. Not the stupid red trail that ended in a sketchy and slidy descent to the road. As much as I enjoyed seeing Aimi impersonate a mud-crab, there was no way we could climb that. Instead we followed the path along the stream up to the hotel, finishing our round trip at 28,749 steps and 20.54 km.
Usually my knee starts hurting around the 16km mark, but today’s walk was majoritively flat. I had hoped that the train waiting at Porthmadog station would be going our way, but no luck. I was really looking forward to riding it, but that will have to wait for our next trip out this way.