Goodness knows what I was thinking, but when it was suggested to me that I had been both unfortunate in my experience and perhaps just a touch churlish in my assessment (I know, it hardly seems possible), and I was invited to try again — indeed, to spend three full days sampling the delights of Wales by rail — I agreed to give it another try, particularly after it was established that I could start the experience with dinner in a superb hotel in my favourite of all seaside resorts.
And so it was that I found myself, one warm early autumn evening, strolling along Llandudno's grand and sweeping promenade to the small and stylishly discreet St Tudno Hotel. From without St Tudno's is largely indistinguishable from the other hotels that line Llandudno's sweeping front, but step inside and you find yourself immersed in a honeyed glow of Victorian elegance and smothered with kindliness by Janette and Martin Bland, the proud owners, and their attentive staff.
St Tudno's comes with history as well as comfort. In the summer of 1861, Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, along with his wife, five children and four servants, took over the whole of St Tudno's for a summer holiday, beginning a long relationship with the resort. Liddell was a great literary figure of his day, but he is largely remembered now for being the father of Alice, the eponymous heroine of Through the Looking-Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
According to local lore, it was at Llandudno, along this very front, that a shy young Oxford mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson began telling Alice the stories that he would eventually produce under the pen name Lewis Carroll and which are now rather better remembered than his other classic work, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.
Martin and Janette Bland bought St Tudno's nearly 30 years ago when it was an anonymous and declining B&B and have invested a lifetime in building it up. It has won a flock of awards, including Best Seaside Resort Hotel and — twice — Best Hotel Loos in Great Britain. I never scorn a spotless loo, but in fact it is the snug bar and outstanding restaurant that will bring me back again and again. Chefs Stephen Duffy and David Harding produce exquisite dishes night after night, much of it locally sourced. I had a saddle of lamb that was simply unimprovable.
I'd have loved a chance to waddle off some calories the following morning with a tramp up Great Orme, Llandudno's sheltering mountain, but I had a train to catch — in fact a series of trains to catch. It has to be said that if you intend to cross Wales from north to south by train, you need a little ingenuity and an excellent timetable — not to mention a willingness to return to England from time to time. Most trains seem to have a curious and irrepressible urge to take you to Shrewsbury, which is very nice but is patently not Wales. The payoff, however, is that you can enjoy magnificent scenery without the exasperation and hassle of driving and you get to ride on some of the best trains around.
My goal for the day was to ride on possibly the very best, certainly the best known, the much-treasured Ffestiniog Railway, which runs for 13½ miles from the old slate-mining village of Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog, along the southeastern slopes of Snowdon. To get there I caught an early-morning Sprinter train from Llandudno to Blaenau, and there transferred to a neighbouring platform where a couple of hundred trippers were eagerly filling the snug and rattling wooden carriages of the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway.
WALES, YOU soon realise, doesn't lock up its lunatics. It just puts them in charge of steam trains. "Oh, yes, you have to be a bit mad to get mixed up with all this," agreed Paul Davies, who was our driver for the day — and who invited me to ride along with him in the locomotive to see if I could get my clothes as oil-soaked and grubby in an hour as his were from a whole summer. (I could!)
The Ffestiniog Railway prospers because of the devoted efforts of 500 volunteers like Davies. To say that they come from all walks of life is to put it mildly. The conductor on our trip was a happy young man named Jonathan Leithead, who was just about to go off to read classics at Oxford. The fireman was Jean-Claude Laboreau, a wine merchant from Bordeaux, who was spending his 12th successive summer holiday on the railway. Davies himself is so consummately off his head that he gave up a good job in England and moved to Penrhyndeudraeth in order to be able to play on the trains more or less full time. With his wife, he runs a guesthouse, which — and this so goes without saying — overlooks the Ffestiniog line. The rather unnerving thing was that within five minutes I could see why people commit themselves so wholeheartedly to the enterprise. The ride, high up one side of the broad and leafy Vale of Ffestiniog, is unrelievedly majestic, with its long views and ever-changing backdrop of field, forest and tumbling brooks.
"It's worth it for the views alone," Davies shouted at me over the train's laboured chuffing and I could hardly disagree.
The Ffestiniog line was built in the 1830s to haul slate from mountain quarries to the coast, but I stopped a mile or
so short at Minffordd for a visit to Portmeirion, the colourful, endearing, architecturally frolicsome hillside village built by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis over a period of 50 years last century.
Williams-Ellis was obviously a touch mad himself — there must be something in the air hereabouts — but gloriously so, for there is nothing in the world to match Portmeirion for inspired and joyous whimsy. A piece of Italy set down on a wooded slope overlooking Tremadog Bay, it is a literally fantastic creation, woven together from architectural odds and ends.
