WALES

 ANGLESEY AND SNOWDONIA

TOURING THE AREA

OCTOBER 2018

When I left Bala I thought it would be a good idea to find a campsite in the heart of the mountains .         There wasn't a wide choice that accepted caravans in the autumn and I settled on one in the forest near Beddgelert.     

The journey down the valley was easy to begin with and then up over the hills and past the site of the Trawsfynedd Power Station whose Reactor Pressure Vessel I had stress analysed in my early years of employment.      

The station was also interesting as an early example of a pumped storage scheme with nuclear generation operating as base load, supplying the grid during the day and pumping water up hill at night so it too could supply hydro-electricity to the grid when demand was high. 

I left the main road soon after Maentwrog for a much narrower thoroughfare that also rose very steeply in places, including one where the road was wet and, with the weight of the caravan to pull, the car's CVT dropped right down to first gear with one of the back wheels spinning freely.      But the all wheel drive came into its own with both car and van continuing uphill without stopping.

BEDDGELERT

There are two campsites at Beddgelert and I chose the second, in the forest on the road towards Caernarfon, mainly because they advertised good WIFI throughout the site.        

This is a very pricy and upmarket site catering mainly for visitors staying in chalets, some of whom stay for "team-building" conferences. The good WIFI has been provided mainly for the latter and was priced at £5/night in 2018!

There is a section of the site for tourers off to one side down deeply rutted tracks and some vans are clearly left there throughout the year - they looked rather sorry for themselves in the damp gloom under the trees in conditions ideal for the promotion of green stains and moss on both vans and awnings.        Mine was the only van that was actually touring.

A violent storm with rain and very high winds blew in from the Atlantic during my second night.        I became a little concerned about a risk from falling branches, or even whole trees, but none did succumb and the van itself was protected from the wind by the forest all around.      

But that didn't apply either to the awning of an adjacent unoccupied van that collapsed completely nor to power pylons on open hillsides.  So there was a power cut and the next day I learned there were many such throughout the region.      

The site's electricity supply came through two separate circuits, one to the communal areas and chalets and another to the touring section.        Supply to both was cut off but whereas the first was reconnected relatively quickly that to the touring site had still not been restored by the next morning.

So my fridge was no longer being cooled and the lights were running off the van's own battery.        As I'd had to use the motor mover to park in a rather awkwardly shaped pitch I became concerned I wouldn't be left with enough charge to get out again if I stayed as originally planned (and paid for), and decided to cut short my stay.       There was enough power left in the battery to manoeuvre the van into a position where I could hook it up to the car and recharge that way but by then I was committed to leaving (the site manager expressed his regret and refunded my unused payment for further nights).

So, I've now experienced two interrupted nights and forced departures due to natural causes - one in France from flooding and one in Wales from a violent storm.

The wind blew strongly all the following day but I found an acceptable pitch sheltered behind a stone wall and hedge on a farm near Llanrug between Caernarfon and Llanberis.

I stayed here for the next week or so using it as a base from which to visit the Menai Straits and Angelesey as well as the mountains of Snowdonia.

Caernarfon (it was spelt Carnarvon in my youth) is famous for its castle.       In 1284 Edward I established a very long tradition by responding to his newly conquered subjects demands for their own Prince of Wales by presenting to them his son Edward who had just been born in this castle.

It is situated in a very strategic spot commanding the sea approach to the narrowest section of the Menai Straits and the land routes along the coast.

The town grew up around the castle and though it has now spread out to surrounding areas the harbour and old town still nestles around the walls.

The Afon Seiont encircles the town on three sides and flows past the foot of the castle where it joins the Straits.       This photo was taken from the opposite side on the Aber Foreshore Road that then, as its name describes, closely follows the Menai Straits shore for a few miles.

The Foreshore Road is completely flat and though it is used a bit by cars its main purposes seem to be as an access road to the local Golf Course and for recreation by walkers and cyclists.     Naturally I was one of the latter and enjoyed a couple of rides whilst based at Llanrug.

Wylfa Nuclear Power Station on Angelsey was built in the mid 1960's and I was deeply involved in the design and construction of its boilers.       Amongst other things that involved attending Monthly Site Progress meetings during which I and my colleagues used to stay at the Treaddur Bay hotel just outside Holyhead.

An exploration from Llanrug confirmed the hotel is still there, on one side of a beautiful bay, though now much extended and in countryside containing many new developments.

I also drove out to the site of the Power Station that was decommissioned and mostly razed to the ground in the early 1990s.       Of course, I wasn't allowed to go into the site but I did enjoy a long chat with the gate guard who told me he should have retired long ago but is hanging on in the hope of a redundancy payment when the site is closed for good.        

He may have a long wait as the site has been chosen for development of a new generation Station supposedly to be built by Hitachi - but as with all large infrastructure projects in the UK when and whether this will go ahead is anyone's guess.

Cemaes Bay is a delightful seaside and fishing town near Wylfa - at least it is when the sun shines as it did during my visit.

The coast between Wylfa and Cemaes is designated as an Area Of Outstanding Beauty and as one of Special Scientific Interest.     Amongst other attributes its geology has been determined to include the oldest rocks in Wales, pre-dating even the slates found in Llanberis, Festiniog and other places.

The Menai Straits separating Angelesey from the mainland were formed by movement of glaciers in pre-historic times.    The resulting waterway is shallow and not very wide and has different times of high and low tide at each end.

So, in common with many other similar configurations around the world it experiences complex tidal flows, fast currents, and many navigational hazards.

Traffic between the Mainland and Anglesey must have been by boat for many hundreds if not thousands of years.      Many megaliths - carved stones from around 10,000 BC and earlier - have been found and when the Romans arrived in Britain Angelsey was inhabited by Celtic priests known as Druids - whom the Romans mostly killed in battles and wars.

The technology and materials to build bridges long enough to cross the Straits was not brought to bear until the 19th Century when two were constructed to make the crossing easy.

The first was designed by Thomas Telford and finished in 1826.      It's still in use and here is a photo I took after crossing it this year.

       

Sight of this bridge and the rectangular channels up the inside of the supporting pillars trigger other memories for me.        

The Site Manager of the firm for which I worked and with whom I had frequent contact during construction of Wylfa Power Station lived in Bangor (on the mainland side of the Straits) so his teen-age son could attend school there.        He was an ex-Regimental Sergeant Major with a keen mind and an interest in how things were built.      I recall he and I found a way to the foot of those support pillars and he explained the channels up them in the following way - 

Telford was faced with the problem of installing the bridge span between the two pillars.       He solved it by assembling the span on barges which then floated up on a rising tide with the ends of the linked barges inserted in the channels.       It must have been a worrying few moments at the top whilst supports for the span were placed under it from the roadways on land at each end - before the tide went out again!

I remember also that on the same occasion the Manager told me his English Speaking son was alone in a class of local children but still came "top of the class" in Welsh because he'd learned it as a foreign language, whereas the others, though fluent in speech,  had no idea of the grammar they should be using! 

The second bridge across the straits only carried trains and was designed and built by Robert Stephenson in 1850.      But it was severely damaged by fire in 1950 and replaced with one built in steel carrying both rail and road traffic.