We were fascinated by a picture of The Penrhyn Slate Quarry, the source of George Dawkins-Pennant’s great wealth, painted by Henry Hawkins (otherwise unknown) in 1832, the year of The Great Reform Bill, which Dawkins-Pennant opposed.   It’s like a John Martin, but real:-

The wet weather drove us to Penrhyn Castle, the neo-Norman pile designed by Thomas Hopper, a hard-working and eclectic Regency designer in whatever style was suitable for a particular commission and who on this occasion based his design on a mix of Castle Hedingham and Rochester Castle.   His client was George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, who had inherited a fortune made from sugar and slate from his father’s cousin, Lord Penrhyn.

The interior ornament and carving is undeniably impressive.   This is the Grand Hall:-

Hopper’s oak chairs:-

And the stained glass windows:-

Next door, the library is equally impressive, with its elaborate carved chairs and slate gramophone:-

Most amazing of all is the range of rich carved ornament in the monumental Grand Staircase:-

I walked out to the beach again this evening:  always the same, but always different:-

I have now discovered that the bright purple plant which we were unable to identify in the big west-facing border at Cadnant is called Dianella and is normally found in the far east, Australia and the Pacific Islands:  so named by Lamarck in 1786.   The berries may be poisonous:-

Given all the discussion about the problems of the privatised railway system, it gives me pleasure to say that I went to meet the 11.57 at Bodorgan Station, which must be one of Britain’s more obscure stations, opened, I assume, only to serve the local country house, but with a service every two hours, halting on request and arriving on the dot:-

We love Beaumaris:  a very English outpost in the southeast corner of Anglesey, as if it belongs to Liverpool or Bournemouth, more than Bangor, and with M Jones a’i Fab Antiques, one of the best antique shops anywhere, always a cabinet of Welsh country curiosities, collected on expeditions across north Wales and full of treen:-

It’s also now acquired an Italian/Welsh delicatessen which sells sausages, fruit and frog’s legs:-

We had our annual trip today to Plas Cadnant, the garden in a steep valley just above Menai Bridge, which was washed away in floods just before Christmas 2015, but has now been restored to its pristine immaculacy:-

I was worried that the reason why the water level on the River Afon was so low was owing to the long hot summer which had drained the river of water.   I was quite wrong.   It is owing to the height of the tide at this time of year, which produces a low and correspondingly high tide, such that this morning the river had become a lake:-

By the way, not being a bird expert, I assume that the bird is an elderly cormorant, but am happy to be corrected.

While I’m on the subject of Mari Lending, the author of Plaster Monuments, she has also just published a conversation with Peter Zumthor, A Feeling of History, beautifully produced in austere sans-serif script, which discusses Zumthor’s approach to history, principally in his two Norwegian projects – most of all, in his Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum, completed in 2016, but also his Steilneset Memorial in Vardø – and with reference, too, to the Kolumba Art Museum and his ambitious plans for the Los Angeles County Museum.   I particularly love Zumthor’s distinction between “history-history” – ‘an intellectual system that works from document to document, from paper to paper;  ten papers become 100, and so on’ – and ‘the history that is accumulated in landscapes, places, and things’.

The sad news of the death of Colin Amery has reached Anglesey.   I liked and admired him.   He was a key figure in the early days of the Spitalfields Trust, in the picture behind the gate in the sit-in at Spital Square and tall and bespectacled when a group went to protest at the offices of British Land and co-author with Dan Cruickshank of The Rape of Britain in 1975.   Then he was important also in the Lutyens revival, involved with Gavin Stamp in the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery held in 1981.   He was recruited – I assume by Jacob Rothschild – to advise the Trustees of the National Gallery on the choice of an architect for the Sainsbury Wing and he helped to organise the trip to America to look at the work of American architects.   He wrote the book on the Sainsbury Wing.   But his architectural tastes were broad.   He advised Sainsburys on their choice of architects, which included Grimshaw’s in Camden Town and Dixon Jones outside Plymouth.   How significant was he as an advisor to the Prince of Wales ?  We may never know.