The Imagined Village

[shewhomust]

In 1925, Clough Williams-Ellis borrowed "a modest amount" from the Midland Bank, and bought the estate of Aber Iâ on the coast of North Wales. The name means 'glacial estuary', but the first thing he did was change it to Portmeirion: 'port' for the coastal location and 'meirion' because it was in the county of Merioneth. On this site he set about building his village - his very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar village. It isn't fake, exactly, because there's no pretence that it's anything other than one man's dream, take it or leave it:

If you take it - if you step through those inviting gates - you accept the sense of unreality as part of the deal. For those who (like three of our foursome) had first met Portmeirion through The Prisoner, there's something sinister about this: just enough to add spice to all that prettiness. We discussed something that hadn't occurred to me before, whether some genius came up with Portmeirion as a location when The Prisoner was being planned, or whether it was Portmeirion that shaped The Prisoner; and on no evidence other than what seemed more likely, inclined to the latter. Back home, the internet provides evidence for this several episodes of Danger Man, the precursor to The Prisoner, were filmed here.

It's a gated village - doubly gated, in fact. You pass first through the Gate House:

then through the Bridge House:

If you look carefully at this picture, you may see not only that the shrubbery is in glorious bloom, but that the colours of the flowers have been carefully matched to the paintwork of the building (or vice versa, of course). The timing of our visit was determined by the date of my birthday, but if we had been selecting for optimum floral display, I doubt we could have done better. Can you also tell from the pictures that this is not a walled town? The road which passes under the gates run along the hillside, which plunges down to the estuary on your left. Nothing I had seen ahead of my visit prepared me for how beautiful Portmeirion's coastal location is, and how ever-present: the camera looks into the village, to the built environment, but the eye is constantly drawn out to the coast.

The first building I noticed as we walked on into the village was the Toll House:

Which is odd, because it means that on this first visit I completely blanked Battery Square. Not that the Toll House isn't eye-catching, with its many decorative details:

My guide book says that the reading figure is Saint Peter, but its illustration doesn't quite match, so maybe there has been a shift change among the toll collectors; the sheep was originally designed by Susan Williams-Ellis for the Welsh Wool Shop, which is logical. Again, this is not the original; I admire the 'nothing goes to waste' spirit of Portmeirion.

On down to the central square - it would be the Village Green if it weren't so very clearly the Piazza - represented here (because I am not good at photographing open spaces) by a mere taste of the spring flowers:

More surely deliberate colour co-ordination, that purple bush resplendent against the yellow paintwork of Arches, once home of Angel Arcade antique shop, and still proudly announced by a painted angel, although the name on the scroll has been updated:

And here's another angel, this one on the house called 'Angel':

One of the first houses to be built, and now, like so much of Portmeirion, a self-catering cottage.

Downhill again, until you can go no further:

Amis réunis is "moored" right outside the hotel - at least, it was once. Almost as soon as Portmeirion opened, Clough Williams-Ellis bought an old Porthmadog trading ketch and converted it for use as a houseboat: the idea seems to have been that it was a very visible way of announcing that the port was open for business. Eventually it was carried away in a storm and wrecked (full story here), but the bulwarks were salvaged and incorporated into the quay. Hence 'the stone boat'. Here's the view from on board:

This is as far as we went on our first day; we turned back uphill and went to the café at the Town Hall for lunch. But I was tantalised by that distant tower, and the next day we examined the map, and established that it wasn't the lighthouse but the Observatory Tower. It was an easy walk there along the shore, and not much more difficult to continue to the lghthouse, and circle back through the woods. So that's what we did:

The skies were threatening, but never did anything worse than add a little drama to the photographs...

The estuary was under water all the time. This was a bit puzzling, because surely there should be an expanse of sand, maybe not at the highest tide, but not just at the very lowest. The beach played a large part in boybear's memories of his long-ago visit, and the Prisoner's repeated attempts to escape took him onto a beach which certainly seemed to be adjacent to Portmeirion... There is talk of shifting sandbanks, but even so, this remains a mystery.

Round the headland and up into the woods:

There's a lake, surrounded by blossoming bushes. The red flowers were much more vivid, and the white a more dramatic contrast, than the picture shows. Nor can you see the chinoiserie pagoda that GirlBear is admiring, beyond the red bridge. Meanwhile, I was distracted by some very strange flowers:

And boybear found a good place to run through his tai chi form:

It's no surprise that the Village is surrounded by such very decorative woodland: but once again, this unreality masks another illusion, because much of the planting was here before Clough Williams-Ellis arrived. He created Portmeirion, but he didn't create it out of nothing: part of the appeal of the estate was that the hotel could be renovated and opened rapidly (more historical background here). Despite which, the man is everywhere:

A plaque - beautifully lettered, of course - under this sculpture explains that it was a 90th birthday present to Clough from his friends. The lion's face is so expressive, so human, that my initial suspicion was that the friends had commissioned a sculptor to create a disguised portrait. But no, the sculpture is apparently seventeenth century. So now I am looking at pictures of Clough and wondering, is there a real, if distant, family likeness, or am I imagining it?

Now we are heading back up through the village; one last detail of the buildings:

because I like the almost abstrct juxtaposition of shapes. I think it's a corner of Battery Square; the house on the right might be the Round House, which was number 6's house in The Prisoner (now the shop where you can buy Prisoner-themed t-shirts, and the Portmeirion edition of Monopoly). Or it might not...

durham_rambler had one last ambition: he wanted to visit the Belvedere:

I was lagging behind, taking pictures, and by the time I cauht up with him, he had plunged down a steep and narrow path, down which I was not inclined to follow. He reported back that there was a fine view of the estuary, and I replied that the view through the magnolia was also pretty good:

and before we knew it, we were passing under the Gate House and out of the village.

Because it is only too easy to escape from the Village; the car park lies through that tunnel...