The Last Word: 'Portmeirion’s charm is rooted in eccentricity and this is why I love the place'

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 owned by one Adelaide Haig, who resided in the waterfront manor house, later to become the Portmeirion hotel.

Hers is the tale I like to tell in Portmeirion’s eerie pet cemetery, lost in the vast tangle of paths entwining the densely forested peninsula, where a collection of gravestones record the lives of dogs well loved:

My dear dear dog gone before To that unknown and silent shore Shall we not meet as heretofore Some summer morning

Thus reads one, inscribed by Haig to one of her many dogs — she was reputed to have up to 15 at a time — with whom she shared her home. She was a recluse by nature, preferring canine to human company, and a devout Christian. The story goes that she would conceal herself behind a screen in the beautiful Mirror Room where the dogs were housed and read the Bible out loud to them in the hope of securing their passage to a better world once they were tucked up in the woods.

By the 1960s, Portmeirion was all but complete, with its assemblage of grand porticos, loggias, domes and spires rescued from the rubbish tip of demolished country houses — and then along came The Prisoner, the next great eccentric episode in Portmeirion’s history. This famous science fiction-cum-spy series, starring Patrick McGoohan as prisoner Number Six, tells the story of an ex-spy held captive in ‘the Village’, where he is routinely manipulated through dreams, indoctrination and hallucinogenic drugs and pursued by a big, white weather balloon that bounces around trying to kill him.

Inevitably, our trips to Portmeirion end up back at the house with supper in front of The Prisoner for old time’s sake and a glimpse of Sir Clough’s masterpiece in days gone by. I like to round off the evening with the tale of his final eccentric act when, 20 years after his death and in accordance with his will, some of his ashes were loaded into a firework and blasted into the night sky over Portmeirion’s estuary. A marvellous end for a marvellous man.

Credit: Simon Brown

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