I must apologise to the subscribers to my blog. Because I am on holiday service is severely intermittent. I have no internet access, which is partly a blessing and partly a curse. So, I have to wait until we are sitting in a café to send backdated posts, which are gradually accumulating unsent.
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Bangor University
We had been tipped off that Bangor University has a botanical garden so went to enquire at the main university building. I had never actually been up the road which leads to Henry Hare’s grand set piece of monastic monumentalism which overlooks the city. In my five minute, self guided tour, all I was able to appreciate was the grandiosity of the detailing:-
Owen Chadwick (1)
For some reason I missed the announcement of Owen Chadwick’s death on 17th. July aged 99. He was the chairman of Trustees at the National Portrait Gallery at the time that I was appointed, although he stood down the day I started in order to allow a new chairman to take over. To this day I don’t know what role he played in the appointment, but he remained a benign and sympathetic presence. I had been brought up to regard him as a great man: Cambridge to his fingertips; the longest serving Master of Selwyn; always refusing a bishopric because it would take him away from Grange Road; a blue in rugby football. He was appointed Regius Professor of History above Geoffrey Elton and Jack Plumb, much to their annoyance, and, as Vice Chancellor, defended the rebellious students by contrast to the boorishness of the rugby-playing undergraduates of his youth.
Fields
To the north of the cottage we look out towards Newborough. Some evenings the mist rolls in over the fields:-
Bangor Pier
I may have done a post about Bangor Pier before because it’s a convenient place to hang about whilst waiting for a train. It was opened in 1896 and stretches a long way across the Menai Straits with views to the east of onion domes and Great Ormes Head:-
Snowdonia
We face the hills: the long line of mountains and low peaks which stretch westwards from above Conway along a line which includes Snowdon itself towards the Lleyn Peninsula and the Atlantic beyond. They are often visible only in outline, like the background of a Japanese print, only occasionally so clear that it is possible to see the smoke from the narrow guage railway.
This is them in the evening:-
Halen Môn
Not all of Anglesey is prosperous. But Halen Môn has gone from strength to strength since it was first established twenty years ago. This year it has opened a grand new factory and shop, where it is possible to buy sea salt in all its varieties, with garlic and in chocolate:-
Menai Bridge
If one walks along the Belgian Promenade towards the town from Church Island, one rounds a corner and there is Thomas Telford’s great suspension bridge, first mooted in 1785, authorised by parliament in 1819, and opened to traffic in January 1826:-
Church Island
We had a picnic lunch down on the Belgian Promenade overlooking St. Tysilio and, in the distance down the Straits, the long distance lorries crossing Britannia Bridge. The church is charming, small, dating mostly from the thirteenth century:-
It is approached through a churchyard with a handsome and presumably elderly yew tree:-
Crûg Farm
We spent the afternoon at Crûg Farm, in the gardens of an early nineteenth-century villa just north of Caernarvon, where the Wynne-Joneses have collected plants on expeditions throughout the world, including the Himalayas and South America.
This is where one buys plants:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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