Notes on North Wales (August 14-16, 2026)
August 14 (Saturday). Aberystwyth to Dinorwig. 9.30 am: ‘Off!’, on the A487, stopping briefly at the base of Cadair Idris to photograph the fog-bound hills at the southern end of Parc Cenedlaethol Eryri [Eryri [Snowdonia] National Park]. ‘Turneresque!’, I exclaimed. It’s likely that J W M travelled this road to North Wales on his budget-Grand Tour. The Eyri range substituted for the Italian Alps during the periods of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when travel abroad was unsafe.
On, then, to Bangor, where I met my sons once again, and also my daughters-in-law today. It was wonderful to see them all. It’s always too long since the last time. This was our annual weekend family holiday. Last year, we enjoyed East Anglia together.
Bangor Cathedral strikes me as unprepossessing. Approached from the west end, it looks like a standard-size parish church. The length of the nave is what distinguishes it. The last time I was here was on the occasion of a sound and image installation, presented in collaboration with Professor Andrew Lewis, an accomplished electroacoustic musician at Bangor University’s Department of Music, Drama and Performance.
After lunch, we loaded the cars with provisions and headed for our accommodation at Dinorwig. It’s a converted cottage about two hundred yards from Dinorwig Slate Quarry. The site is magnificent, in terms of complexity, scale, and much else besides. Mounds of rock fragments were piled high, like the carcasses of downed German aeroplanes in Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1941). The urge to draw pressed hard on me. I remembered, too, Mary Thompson’s ambitious drawings of the Penrhyn Slate Quarry.
I heard today that the last surviving tutor from my undergraduate fine art studies at Newport Art College, Jack Crabtree, had died recently. He was 87 years old. Jack taught me painting from my first to third years. I warmed to his rich Rochdale accent (when he’d ask: ”Ow are ya, John?’), unnerving intensity, and the way he’d hold his own-rolled cigarette in a cupped hand and cross his legs as he tutored. Whenever I’d ask him for an opinion about my work, there’d follow an excruciatingly long pause … before he replied: ‘That’s alright, John. Alright’. He taught his students the value of objective drawing, and helped me, in particular, connect my working-class background and coal-mining heritage to studio practice. I’m forever in his debt.
Later in my career, one of his paintings hung above the desk in my office at the School of Art.
August 15 (Portmeirion). 8.30 am: A Dinorwig morning.
A visit to Portmeirion. I can never enter the grounds without the theme music from the TV series The Prisoner playing in my head. For the remainder of the day, scenes from episodes were superimposed on the architect Clough William Ellis’s Italianate village (built 1925-75). ‘Oh, this is where ‘Number Six’ (Patrick McGooghan’s character in the series) enquired about a map. And this is where ‘Number Two’ lived. And there’s where ‘Rover’ first appeared, in Episode 1.’
I saw the series on a black and white TV, when it was first shown in 1967-8. I was eight years old. This was television as art. Today, I would situate The Prisoner is a tradition of British Surrealism that extends back to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adentures in Wonderland (1865). The identity and geographical location of ‘The Village’ (as Portmeirion was called in the series) was not revealed until the closing credits of the last episode. That it was in Wales (at Penrhyndeudraeth on the coast of Gwynedd) was a source of joy and wonder for me back then (as it still is today). I recall marking ‘The Village’ on the map of Wales in my school atlas. The fiction was now a reality.
In the 1990s, I gave a lecture on Ellis’s ‘folly’ (surely, not the most appropriate word) in the context of the School of Art’s Art in Wales module. I discussed Portmeirion’s eclecticism in contradistinction to contemporary Postmodernism’s concern with pastiche, referentiality, decontextualisation, and ‘double-coding’.
It’s a photographer’s happy hunting ground. I’ve not been here for many years. The application of the colour scheme (which has remained a constant over the years) had been applied to the buildings’ facades in ways other than I recall. Today, the village was host to a large Scottish/Indian wedding party today. Bagpipe music regaled the couple during the afternoon. I watched an episode of The Prisoner in the evening. The reality returned to a fiction.
August 16 (Sunday). 8.30 am: A Dinorwig morning.
9.30 am: Off to Conwy for the day. I first came here several decades ago, although I’ve no recollection of the ever having done so. Which is strange, because its so memorable. The medieval castle and town walls are bound, hand-in-hand, with the contemporary world. Conwy Castle is huge, sprawling, and magnificent — even if it is a lasting symbol of English colonial rule over the Welsh. Tourists jostled and squeezed on the spiral staircases, peered over the battlements at the boat-punctuated estuary, kept toddlers close, just in case they escaped through the railings and fell headlong down the precipitous walls onto the railway lines below, and clustered together for family photographs.
The town (which is on the UNESCO World Heritage List) abounds with architectural and engineering sites of interest: Elizabethan houses, the smallest house in the world, the oldest town house in Wales, a suspension bridge designed by Thomas Telford, and a railway bridge by Robert Stephenson. Almost as significantly, it has an excellent fish and chip shop. Apparently, a couple from Yorkshire make the journey here just to partake of its fare. As did my family, at lunchtime.
5.30 pm: After a period of respite at our Dinorwig residence, several of us returned to the quarry where we’d walked on Friday, via the Allt Ddu [Dark Hillside] path once again. Under the overcast sky and in the subdued light, the grey-spectrum of the quarry landscape’s tonalities was pronounced. The site is made extraordinary by the action of human industry. It has turned the surrounding hills into a vast layered carving. I scanned the painterly surface of the exposed walls (where, this evening, mountaineers were preparing to climb) and the mossy iron-stained galleries, and thought: ‘Jack would’ve appreciated this’.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice