Heritage

There are many things wrong with Britain.  Brexit.  The Tories.  James Corden.  But the thing that annoys me most, the streak that runs through this country like a poisoned vein, the thing that is in its own way responsible for a lot of the other ills, is nostalgia.  Nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for your own personal past, nostalgia for a time that existed only in the imagination.  

Look, I get it: Britain is old.  And we've got a lot of history.  Every now and then someone on Twitter will post a really interesting story with "why didn't we learn this in history class?!?!" and my answer is, where do you fit it in?  I did History until I was 14 (I dropped it for Geography at GCSE, got an A, don't mind me) and I know full well that I have massive gaps in my knowledge of this country.  Everything between William the Conqueror and the Hundred Years War.  Most of my knowledge of the Georgian period I get from The Madness of King George and Blackadder III.  Teaching concentrates on the big hitters - the Romans, Magna Carta, the feudal system (those damn crop rotations) and the Peasant's Revolt, the Tudors and Stuarts and the English Civil War, the Victorians, the Second World War.  You've got to somehow cram two thousand years of history into the heads of bored children - go for the interesting stuff; they can learn about William IV or the Anglo-Dutch War in their own time if they're that bothered.

It's World War II: Electric Boogaloo that's got its greatest grip on the country's brain, probably because Churchill came up with Our Finest Hour and gave it a natty tagline.  I stepped out of my hotel in Blaenau Ffestiniog and found a town square made up to look like the 1940s.  There were sandbags and tape on the windows.  There was jitterbug music playing.  There were people who were far too young to have been in the war - far too young to have been in the Falklands War - wearing khaki and with their hair in rollers and dancing around.

Yes, it was a great period for this country, in terms of us helping to save the continent from Fascism.  Absolutely.  But it was also bloody miserable.  People who lived through the war had rationing and doodlebugs and relatives being killed and blackouts and way too much Gracie Fields.  It wasn't a six year party.  And here they were turning it into a theme park, a fun morning for all the family, get yourself a genuine wartime cake from the stall on the right (not actually genuine because it wasn't made with powdered eggs and you didn't have to save up three months of coupons to be able to make it but anyway).

I wasn't in the mood.  I wasn't in the mood to ride the nostalgia pony.  I'm sure everyone on the town council thought it was just a bit of fun, and the tourists probably loved it, but I found it annoying and wanted to get away from it.  I wandered round the town itself.  The brief impression I'd got the night before - that this was a town at the end of the world - felt even more true on a Sunday morning.  The narrow streets were deserted.  The shops were closed.  Above us, raw, grey rock loomed, making every view sinister.

I'd pretty much done the whole village in half an hour, so I wound my way back to the station square, where (unsurprisingly) Vera Lynn was playing, and bought a ticket for the Ffestiniog Railway.  It shares its location with the National Rail station, the two tracks laying alongside one another.  But while the Conwy Valley Line platform is perfunctory and ordinary, the Ffestiniog Railway is full on nostalgia.  Red and cream paint and wooden overhangs, ironwork and men in starched uniforms.  I sighed deeply and plunged in.

The Ffestiniog was built as a narrow gauge railway in the 19th century to carry slate from the mountains down to the docks at Porthmadog.  It soon attracted attention as a tourist attraction, with special passenger trains slotted in between the working trains, but after the war it was declared surplus to requirements and closed permanently.  A band of volunteers immediately sprang up to restore it, carefully bringing its trains and tracks back to life, even digging a new tunnel after the Central Electricity Board flooded the old route of the railway with a reservoir, and now it's one of Wales's biggest tourist attractions.  They even bought the West Highland Railway from Caernarvon, the two lines dovetailing at Porthmadog.  

I bought my ticket and loitered on the platform.  Regular readers will know I'm not really a fan of heritage railways.  The most interesting thing about a steam train is seeing it in full flight, and the problem with actually riding one is you can't see the engine unless you're willing to lean out of the window on a dangerous curve and risk being decapitated by a signal post.  It's nostalgia again, the conviction that steam trains were somehow better and more romantic as they belched out smoke and noise and embers that set fire to the washing of homes that backed onto the line.

The difference between the Ffestiniog Railway and other heritage routes, however, is that it serves an actual purpose as a link across Wales.  The regular railway ends at Blaenau Ffestiniog, so getting from, say, Conwy to Barmouth by train means going out to Chester, changing, heading south, then back through the middle of Wales to work your way up again.  A distance of 40 miles as the crow flies becomes a 150 mile round trip.  Time your journey right, however, and the Ffestiniog Railway lets you cut the corner off Wales.  It's still a faff, but it's an important enough link to get marked on the official rail maps, unlike any other of the heritage routes in the country.

As I stood on the platform I realised I hadn't taken a picture of me in front of the station sign.  I didn't fancy venturing out of the station now I'd bought a ticket in case they didn't let me back in so I'm afraid a platform sign will have to do you.  It's definitely there, you just have to squint a bit.  Complaints to the usual address, where they will be ignored.

A train chugged into the station, tiny but noisy, and we all lined up to respectfully take our pictures.  After a good deal of shunting and shifting it returned with some carriages and the scrum for seats began.

I picked a wooden carriage, rather than one of the sumptuous ones.  I thought I was getting a more "authentic" experience, plus there was a better chance that I'd not have to share a seat.  I installed myself at the back.  In front of me were two compartments, with upholstered bench seats stretching the width of the carriage.  An elderly couple took the very front one, then in the middle, a noisy Brummie family with teen children and a tiny spaniel.  They clattered in as the conductor came to inspect our tickets.  Obviously I couldn't find mine - it had stuck to the back of my phone - but he said "I trust you," and locked the door to the compartment.  There was a triumphant toot of the engine and then we were away, furiously barrelling out of the station and round the back of the town.

"It goes to Porthmadog, apparently," Dad read off the leaflet.

"What's that?" asked the Son.  Dad ignored him, and told them there'd be an hour's wait at the terminus until the train back.  The Son looked stricken.  "Will there be a shop?"  Meanwhile Mum lifted the dog - Oscar - up above the wooden side so he could get a better view.

The train clung to the edge of the mountain, letting us peer down into back gardens.  We poured down the hillside, following roads and rivers, sliding under bridges.  The railway was designed to use gravity as much as possible to help it down to the coast and it felt it, a slightly giddy air of falling as the train moved along.

Slow into the first station and the driver went to fetch his token to proceed.  The Brummies looked confused.  "Is that it?"  They moved to open the door to the carriage, but then the train jerked into life again, and we continued on our way.  The reservoir appeared with its squat brick control room.  There was a waterfall, almost comically beautiful, like it had been laid on by Disney, but I could see that the upper reaches of the reservoir were dry as the summer heat took hold.  Some hikers by the water paused and waved at the train, and then we disappeared into a tunnel.  Historic looking green shades illuminated us, though the bulbs underneath were modern LED; I expect they have received some furious letters from passengers protesting about the inauthenticity.

The route became lusher, harsh mountainsides giving way to thick woodlands barely a foot from our carriage.  Light filtered down through the foliage.  Mum turned to the Son.  "Sean.  Will you take a picture of me and the dog?"

At Dduallt - a name so Welsh it comes with a free daffodil - the line spiralled, turning a tight curve.  Instead of a simple right hand turn it instead did a 270 degree twist until you passed underneath the line you'd come in on.  I'd wondered, as we'd ridden along the line, why they hadn't simply converted it to standard gauge and made it an extension of the Conwy Valley Line rather than closing it completely.  Mad feats of engineering like this made me understand why.

We passed through Campbell's Platform, a private halt, without stopping, and got a glimpse of a castle on the horizon.  Or was it another power station?  It was hard to tell.  The trees twisted then thinned as a frothing white stream.  The valley was astonishingly steep, almost vertical, and the cars below looked tiny and insignificant.  The Brummies broke out the crisps.  They seemed confused by the concept of intermediate stations; I think they had it in their head that this was like a theme park ride, a very long rollercoaster on its way to Porthmadog.  Another tunnel, another lake - smaller, but natural - then we were pulling into Tanybwlch station between a rock face and a wall.

The bearded guard strode the platform, calling out the name, as we paused.  It was a rare strip of double track so this was where trains heading north could cross trains heading south.  Oscar the dog let out an impressive fart that made Mum giggle as the other train pulled in.  It was the David Lloyd George, red and shiny, far more impressive than our pootling little truck.  The engineers began refilling its engine with water as a woman walked along the platform with a box of Magnums, selling them through the window.  

We set off again through more woodland.  Below us in the valley were hikers on a path and I wished I was down there instead of up here.  After a while a train journey becomes a blur, just a load of magnificent scenery and a slowly numbing arse.  I pulled a peanut butter KitKat Chunky out of my bag and chewed on it as yet another impossibly scenic river rolled beneath us.  The Dad leaned out the window to take a picture, and revealed a good few inches of unnecessary buttock cleavage.

For a while we sped along at a breakneck pace, passing tiny sidings and the odd cottage.  We were moving out of the mountains now, into more tame farmland, as a herd of sheep appeared, grazing on wild grass.  The trees looked domesticated and maintained.  There were the outskirts of a village, then a level crossing, and the Son exclaimed "we're here!".  He was quite wrong of course; this was Penrhyn station.  His sister, incidentally, had been virtually mute the entire trip; the reason became clear when she began rooting around in her mum's handbag for travel sickness pills.  Meanwhile the two old people at the front finally broke their silence to admire the flowers on the platform. 

We were above the rooftops, lodged in the mountain still, but compared with the isolated Blaenau this felt almost suburban.  We moved on down the line, smoke steaming past our noses and filling our lungs, and then we were at Minffordd.  I broke into a grin.  This was familiar territory; I'd been to this station before, in 2012, when I'd worked my way along the Cambrian lines.  I'd got off there and walked to Porthmadog, but this time I rode the train, past the noisy clatter of a quarry and the works for the railway.  Acres of sidings and steel.  The volunteers paused to wave at us as we approached; some of them were barely teenagers.  Another generation of railway nerds.  We paused before the sweep across the Cob at the entrance to the bay and the Son looked around him forlornly.  "Is this it?"

Then we moved across the water, barely above the surface, and into Porthmadog station.  I unfolded myself from my seat.  I could barely feel anything below the waist - I hoped my legs wouldn't collapse as I climbed out.  The teenagers disembarked and looked around them with barely disguised disgust.  This was it, kids; enjoy your one hour until you have to do the whole thing again in reverse.  Hope you can at least find something in the gift shop.

Porthmadog remained as charming as I remembered it, a little touristy perhaps, but that's the problem with being beautiful; you attract admirers.  Blaenau Ffestiniog didn't seem to attract overwhelming quantities of tourists, put it that way.  I was glad I'd finally ridden the Ffestiniog Railway, but also glad I'd never have to do it again.  Nostalgia can be exhausting.

Time/Travel

There's a rift slicing through Minffordd.  You get off at a perfectly normal, ordinary Arriva Trains Wales station.  Platform, road bridge, turquoise shelter.  It's even got a semi-ALF.  I was sharing the train with a load of schoolchildren, and they bundled out onto the platform, yammering into mobile phones and with iPods in their ears.  Traffic noisily passed by.

I followed the kids up the ramp to the exit, pausing for a couple of photos and letting them get ahead.  Then I passed through a dark archway and went back in time.

Beyond that arch it's no longer the 21st century; it's sometime in the Thirties or Forties.  It's a time when men wore hats, and women wore hats, and people were casually racist and smoked like chimneys and had tuberculosis.  It's a world of repressed emotion and cinders in eyes and almost but not quite throwing yourself under the express train.

Minffordd is part of the Ffestiniog Railway, probably the biggest of Wales' "little railways", and certainly the most well-known.  The crossing lines form a sort of interchange in time, like a particularly odd episode of Goodnight Sweetheart.  It was charming, a little museum piece to remind you that train travel used to be a pleasantly homely experience.

The narrow gauge train had left just before my train arrived; I suppose the timetable's been built to accommodate people heading home in the afternoon, rather than arriving for a trip.  I walked outside and got the station sign, making sure to get both the old and new versions in one shot.

The road heads down the hill from the station, threading above and below the railway to Porthmadog.  I passed the entrance to Portmeirion on the way.  I have to admit I wasn't particularly tempted to look round.  I knew from a previously aborted visit that it was pretty expensive, plus I didn't think I'd have enough time to give it justice.  In addition, I have never seen a single episode of The Prisoner (I can hear Jamie gasping in horror at this point).  I haven't avoided it, but I just haven't got round to watching it, so I feel that I'd miss an extra dimension of the Portmeirion experience.

To my right, the mountains were being torn apart by machines, systematically quarried for the slate.  Tall terraces marked the progress of man into the side of the solid heft of the earth.  It was awesome and a little frightening.  As I walked I thought about all that rock being chipped, mined, shipped out, never to be recovered.  All those bits of the earth that we'll never get back.

Porthmadog is reached via The Cob, a long embankment built across the estuary of the Glaslyn river.  For decades this was the main route into town, but a newly opened bypass further north means that it's been relegated to a local road.  The Ffestiniog Railway also uses the Cob to get to the town, on its highest point, while pedestrians are walled off on the interior.

It gives you wonderful views across the estuary, to the mountains beyond.  Tired cyclists, baked in the sun, passed me on the road.  Lagoons formed in the reclaimed land, filling with sea birds.  I could see the low profile of the new bridge in the distance - clearly it was built to try and be as unobtrusive as possible.  That disappointed me.  A good piece of engineering and design can enhance a landscape.  Though admittedly, improving this landscape would be like putting lipstick on Angelina Jolie - you had a pretty good start.

At the end of the Cob, there's a bridge to give access to the river, and the station of the Ffestiniog Railway.  There were several portly men with grey hair sunning themselves trackside, leaning against the wall and drinking tea.  I imagined they were all retired BR engineers, who'd taken all their knowledge and pushed it into the volunteer railway.  Their poor wives, imagining that after forty years they'd be able to wash their husband's shirts without presoaking it to get the oil out.  I was tempted to shout up to them and ask if they knew where the proper train station was, but I feared being beaten to death with a sleeper.

I was three metres inside the town when something suddenly hit me: "Porthmadog" and "Port Madoc" were the same place.  I don't know how this fact sailed over my head for so long.  Probably because my uncultured English lips had assumed Porthmadog was pronounced as it was spelt, with a soft "th" and a "g" on the end.  I felt thoroughly stupid.

I liked Porthmadog less the more I got to know it.  At first, it seemed thoroughly enchanting, with its pretty harbour and that heritage railway.  As I walked round I realised that it wasn't so much a town as a tourist fleecing machine.  The presence of "Cymru Crafts" and, oh Christ, an Edinburgh Woollen Mill spoke volumes.  This was the kind of town where the coach parties are frisked on exit for their small change.

Having to make an escape from a drunk didn't help.  He lurched towards me on a side street, an alcohol soaked zombie seeking out change from a tourist.  I stowed my camera and made a quick getaway before he could spit out his request.

I'm not sure where he got drunk, though, because I couldn't find a pub.  I'd decided to treat myself to a pint, but the only places I could spot seemed to be gastro first, pubs second.  I didn't fancy a sneering waitress when I explained all I wanted was a bitter, not an overpriced plate of fish and chips, so I finally fell into the Cafe Portmeirion.  It was part coffee shop, part kitchen shop, but it had free wi-fi and good lattes so I installed myself in a corner by the cake decorations.

Again, I was the only English person in there.  Ahead of me a schoolboy sat with his Granddad, shouting conversational Welsh at him and getting the occasional nod in return.  I imagined his mum thrusting a tenner in his hand, telling him to take Gramps out for a cup of tea and letting him keep the change.  I had no idea what they were talking about until "Everton" was suddenly there in amongst all the weird phrases.

Outside I saw some familiar faces.  On the train that morning I'd been sat behind The Most Middle-Class Family In Existence, and there they were, taking photos in the street.  Dad had a wispy hairdo and a thin beard; he wore a t-shirt with Thai characters on it, no doubt bought in a really genuine street market somewhere untouristy you'd never have heard of.  Mum was pregnant, and wore a tight black frock with a flatteringly simple cardigan that probably cost a silly amount.  Their two adorably tousled children played around their knees.  The family had caught my attention because of their choice of entertainment on the train; Mum and Dad had pulled workbooks out of their wicker beach bag, a sort of "I Spy: Seaside Edition", with illustrations of what they might find in a rock pool.  "Look at this x-ray of a mollusc!" Mum had exclaimed, and I'd sniggered behind my hands.  When I went on a trip with my parents I was bought a Beano Summer Special to keep me quiet; it wouldn't have occurred to them to give me homework.

This wonderful Art Deco Coliseum cinema was on the way to the station; I was sad to see that there was a banner asking for help to save it.  Even more depressingly it was opposite a Tesco superstore roughly the size of Bristol.  When did shopping become a leisure activity, a way to pass your time?  And when did going to the supermarket become part of it?  Wandering round looking at clothes or shoes or DVDs in your spare time I can sort of understand, but where's the entertainment in staring at Cup-a-Soups?

In one last frustration, it turned out that Porthmadog's station building has been preserved.  As a pub.  If I'd just walked a couple of hundred yards more, I could have had that pint, inside the proper station.  I was extremely annoyed.

It was a passing annoyance, though, a momentary anger with myself.  Standing on that platform, it was hard not to smile.  I was on the final stretch of the day, and I just had a couple of trains and a little bit of walking and I would have finished the whole of the Cambrian Coast Line.  Or so I thought.

Places of Worship

I'd just eaten a joyless pork pie.  I didn't know such a thing existed.  The fusion of hard pastry, thick pork and a layer of shaky jelly is one of the most wonderful food combinations there is.  It's one of the great British food inventions.  On top of that, I was still dieting, so the pie was tinged with the subtle taste of illegality, a stolen pleasure I wasn't meant to be enjoying.

It just wasn't doing anything for me though.  I munched through the perfectly adequate pastry, consuming each piece until all that was left was greasy fingertips and crumbs round my mouth, and I didn't enjoy any of it.

I blame Llanbedr.  My lengthy trek round Shell Island had left me tired and defeated.  There should have been another five stations on the horizon for the rest of the day; because I'd missed that train, I was going to have to drop the last two of the day, Tygwyn and Talsarnau.  Which meant I'd have to do them another day, which meant another station would drop off the end...  One train every two hours restricts your routing, particularly when you want to explore around the stations and not just spend all your time waiting for buses.

I was sat on the floor, hiding from a cold wind and the rain shower that had finally turned up.  It was another of those shelters they didn't want passengers to be comfortable in, making the hard concrete preferable to the narrow shelf above.  Occasionally a big truck would rattle past, out of place in the countryside.

I was glum.  I was down.  I was miserable.  I needed cheering up.

I took out my iPod and put on some Kylie Minogue.

I can hear your judgement from here, but you know what?  I don't care.  Dame Kylie of Erinsborough is a joy.  She sings perfect pop songs that are clever, fun, interesting.  She's got an amazing back catalogue - if you don't believe me, put on her Ultimate Kylie album and just listen to it all the way through.  Count how many songs you know, enjoy, tap your feet to, despite yourself.

I put on Aphrodite, her latest album: not my favourite (that's probably X, controversially) but one whose newness meant I was less familiar with it.  Soon I had the elegant All The Lovers in my ears, and things didn't seem so dark.  The rain stopped.  Moments of brightness shone through the clouds.  By the time the third track, Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love), came on, my arse was shaking, my fists were bouncing, and I was singing along.  Thank God Llanbedr is in such an isolated spot.    

Does all that make me a big old gaylord?  Yup.  I don't care.

The train arrived with the last song, the first moment of good timing that day, and soon I was crossing the bridge over the river Artro and disembarking at Pensarn station.  On my journeys in Wales last year I'd visited Abergele and Pensarn station; coming here felt like a strange link to the last journey, a passing of the torch almost.  While that station had overlooked clean clear sand, this one was close to tidal flats and grey water.  Its position was less beautiful, but equally inspiring.

I crossed the railway line and passed through the boatyard of the Christian Mountain Centre.  This was a new one for me.  I didn't realise that outdoor pursuits were an activity that required religious guidance.  I suppose dangling off a rope thousands of feet above the ground is when you would want God to be on your side.

I was now following the Welsh Coastal Path, which follows the edge of the whole principality, and which took me across the sheepfields round the coast.  The ground was soggy and wet, releasing my boot only after a struggle.  I tried to stick to the path, but sometimes I was forced to dance around in the grass just to stay upright.

Sheep watched me approach with intensity.  They ran it through in their head - friend or foe?  Fight or flight?  Every time, I thought I might have a challenger, but then they'd suddenly turn and leg it, moving to a safe distance, their lambs following behind.  It was hard not to be insulted.

After a couple of stiles, the soil firmed up, and the grass became more trim and managed.  I saw a woman standing in the middle of the path, perfectly still; at first I thought she was just taking in the majesty of the scenery, then I saw the backside of a mongrel in the grass up ahead of her.  She wasn't the last dog walker in this particular field, and I was back to dancing around, this time to avoid the little heaps of mess left behind.

The chapel at Llandanwg has become famous as the "church of the dunes".  Built in the 13th century, it's proved to be rather less mobile than the sands around it.  What was once an inspiring spot on the coast has become a sand-bound hillock, and the church was soon finding itself buried.  Regular worshipping had to be stopped as it became impossible to get the grains out of your cassock.

It was a lovely idea - this old building succumbing to the forces of nature.  Unfortunately, man had intervened again, in this case in the form of the Prince of Wales.  As usually happens when HRH intervenes on matters of architecture, he'd made it much more boring than it could have been.  His organisation had paid for the church to be rescued, the dunes shored up, fencing put in place and a path laid around it.

It revealed that the Parish Church of Saint Tanwg was, at heart, just another church.  Take away the mounds of sand and it was revealed to be no different to churches all across Wales.

I did a circuit, but the building was locked up, so I couldn't even go in and look round.  I peered through the barred windows and saw little hints of religious miscellany, but it was too dark to see anything.  The only fascination was the high walls of sand above my head.  I reflected that these protective efforts wouldn't be enough to hold them back; in the end, this church was doomed to be reclaimed, and it was just a question of when.

The plus side of Charles' intervention, and that of the National Trust, is that the church is now being promoted as more of a tourist attraction.  It's also lead to the opening of a small cafe, the Maes, by the car park.  Thank goodness it was there, because as I left the churchyard, the cloud above me collapsed, hurling water down over the bay in a violent storm.

I ducked inside and ordered a tea from the Brummie woman behind the counter.  She'd obviously retired here with her husband, a Frank Butcher-alike who was hiding in the shed outside, and she had the smily, optimistic look of someone who can't quite believe her luck in getting to live in such a wondrous place.  Or perhaps she was just glad to get out of the West Midlands.

The tables and chairs were still new, spotlessly clean and comfortable, if a little bland.  A tiny underfed  girl came in while her boyfriend held the dog under the awning outside.  She ordered an orange juice - fifty pence - and then befuddled the lady behind the counter by asking for a receipt.  After three attempts, she managed to wrestle the till into issuing one, leaving me to wonder who wants a 50p receipt.  I pictured her at the end of the month, totting up every purchase against her bank statement.  Her boyfriend then came in, a giant Welsh rugby bear, to get himself a hot chocolate.

Outside, his mobile rang, and he effortlessly switched into speaking Welsh.  It was the first time I'd heard anyone speaking it since I'd arrived, and I enjoyed the sudden alien-ness of it.  It made this rather ordinary cafe seem exotic and foreign.

Warmed by the tea, and with the rain subsiding to a mere drizzle, I headed up the hill to Llandanwg station.  It's another dinky platform, the length of a single carriage, with a wooden shelter and a plant pot with some insipid Bizzy Lizzies in it.  I installed myself in the shelter, took out my now shattered schedule, and tried to use the timetable on the wall to plan the alternatives.

Something was wrong.  Something didn't add up.  My route was based on a pattern of station-train-station-walk-station, and it should have fitted the remaining trains perfectly.  I always ended up with one left over though, an odd, rogue station that shouldn't have been there.  I couldn't work it out.  I ran my finger down the timetable, getting frustrated that the lateness at Llanbedr had thrown me out so completely.

Then it hit me.  Porthmadog was missing.

I checked again and, yes, there was no Porthmadog on the timetable.  My first thought was that it was closed for some reason - engineering works, or refurbishment, or something.  I finally spotted a sticker, artlessly added at the bottom: Train times from Porthmadog.

Yup, Arriva Trains Wales had managed to print and issue all the timetables, and no-one noticed an entire station was missing.  If I were a passenger at Porthmadog I'd be feeling pretty aggrieved.  Clearly they're not high on the train company's priorities.

I figured that it was more hassle than it was worth trying to make this broken timetable work, so I took out a book from my bag and read that until the train arrived.  I'd have put on some more Kylie, but I didn't want to violate the by-laws:

I'd left a space on my schedule to explore Harlech.  It does, after all, have a castle, plus a famous song named after it.  And when I got off at the station, there was an impressive riot of colour and facilities - even a footbridge.  The northbound platform's shelter had been illustrated with colourful imagery from Wales, a pleasing splash of brightness.

The southbound platform was - how can I put this - shit.  It had been decorated with a mural, and a sign boasted that it was "painted by the ladies of the Harlech WI".  I suppose I should admire their honesty in confessing to their crime.

It apparently tells the story of "Taliesin: How the legend of the chief of Celtic bards was born".  It was a mish-mash of New Age, semi-mystical, wibbly-wobbly Earth mother nonsense - all fire giving birth to animals and flying stars.  Of course, because it tells a story, we're meant to overlook the dreadful representations.  It looked like it had been drawn by schoolkids, though at least you'd forgive them for their naive artistic style.  It was just horrible.

Worse, there were far better things the ladies of the WI should have been devoting their time to.  A plaque on the wall said they'd adopted the station in June 2010, but they'd devoted all their efforts to the awful mural and a rowing boat full of flowers.  The station building stood on the platform, boarded up, abandoned, ignored.  I'm not suggesting that they should set up a full ticket office, manned by women in sensible hats and serving cream teas, but they could have spent some of their paint budget on giving it the odd lick.  Perhaps cover up the graffiti, or deal with some of the flaking parts, or knock down the burnt out wooden porch.  Not major structural work, just a bit of a touch up.  As it was, I got the impression that they did their mural then buggered off.

Station adoption is admirable, and I have to give props to Harlech WI for even bothering.  I just think they should have concentrated on the quick fixes first.

The way from the station to the town is via an impossibly steep, pavement less road that curves and twists up the hill.  Staggering, wheezing, realising that I still need to lose a whole load more weight, I dragged myself upwards, jumping into people's driveways to avoid the cars coming the opposite way.  At the top I was presented with the castle.

I was surprised by how small it was.  It's impressive to look at, but it's not the giant fortress of, say, Conwy.  This is your starter castle, for your first time dominator.  I walked around it, but it was 4:30 and so I wasn't going to pay to go in and get half an hour of wandering before I was turfed out.  Besides, a castle is always most impressive and fearsome when you're on the outside.

I turned instead to the town, and walked the main street.  Everything was closing or closed.  Not much of a loss, if I'm honest.

There are some places that lazily recline on their history.  They almost challenge the visitor with their past: "We've got an eight hundred year old castle.  What have you got?"  Chester does it, pointing at its walls and daring you to say it's not worth visiting.  Harlech did the same trick.  It had got its castle and then stopped bothering with anything else of interest.  The high street was banks and newsagents and chip shops and a few tacky "antique" shops flagging up Portmeirion china.  The houses were ordinary working class stock, scattered across the hillside like dropped Monopoly pieces; nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing special either.  The town didn't work for my attention, and I didn't grant it.

I reached the other end of town, where an alien spacecraft had landed and been pressed into service as the theatre, and passed one of the most horrible buildings I have ever seen.  It was quite easily the worst building I have seen in Wales (and remember, I've been to Rhyl) - a slab of beige concrete towering over the coast.  I turned back, shielding my face from its hideousness, in case I got concrete cancer from looking at it for too long.

Twenty minutes, and I'd seen everything I wanted to see.  I went back on myself and found a pub, the Lion Hotel.  It was warm and had wi-fi.  I bought a pint of bitter and hid in a corner, beside a stack of board games that had obviously been pressed into service in the pub once the kids grew out of them.  There were four men at the bar, rough, gnarled, talking about shagging and drinking and saying "fucking" with every other sentence.  One man held forth about his experiences in the Navy - getting locked up in the brig for desertion, getting his wife pregnant before starting another tour - before asking for another glass of "medicine - and not in a warm glass, neither".

Across from me were two Goths, pierced and blackened, sipping Cokes.  They murmured in Welsh, unlike the men at the bar, and sipped their drinks thoughtfully.  I wondered what was the Welsh for cthulhu.

And behind the bar - be still, my beating heart - was an astonishingly beautiful barman.  Through the chat I worked out he's the landlord's son, a student, and he's so attractive I had problems ordering my drinks from him.  He had enormous blue eyes and a shy smile, and I was struck dumb.  He wandered around the bar, bored by the old men's complaining ("America's awful.  Especially Disneyland - what a fucking dump."), and threw a few darts into the board with a languorous swing of his arm.  I reminded myself that I was a married man.  And that it was rude to stare.

Two pints later and I was heading back down the hill towards the station.  I wondered if I'd just misjudged Harlech.  If it wasn't lazy, but instead, overawed.  It was perhaps just a normal Welsh town that happened to have an enormous piece of Medieval masonry plonked in the middle.  I thought it would be like Caernarfon; I'd had expectations that hadn't been fulfilled.  Or perhaps the barman had just given me an urge to revisit the town.

There was a boy walking up the hill towards me, singing to himself.  He was about eleven, old enough to still sing without embarrassment, a rucksack over his shoulder.  He was also, quite clearly, lost in a world of his own.  He saw me approaching and did something unexpected.  Instead of shying away, blushing at being caught, he smiled at me and said, "hello!".  Cheery and polite.  I was taken aback, but mumbled a hello back as he passed me, still singing.

I realised I was grinning.  He'd charmed me.  The town wasn't up to much, but the people obviously were.  I mentally upgraded Harlech and headed home.