I walked out to the beach today in the hope that it would clear from the west as it often does in the late afternoon.   It only half did.   A foggy sun and a single boat on the sea:-

After a couple of days in which the mountains have been buried by cloud, I walked down to the river to reassure myself of their continuing existence:-

We went in search of Llaniestyn Church, a tiny little grey church in nearly open countryside west of Llanddona.   We were half helped in finding it by a mysterious nearby signpost wrapped in a woolly blanket:-

Inside the church, I admired the early font:-

The elderly collecting box:-

And the carved description of annual bequests:-

But I managed to miss the carved relief of St. Iestyn, which I now discover is the main point of going there.

Menai Bridge has lost all its banks, but kept its wonderful hardware shop, Evans Bros., and acquired a picturesque antique shop, Hawthorn Yard, which had the spoons we needed:-

I have been reading The Great Level, Stella Tillyard’s recently published novel mainly about Jan Brunt, a Dutchman who is employed as an engineer to undertake the draining of the Fens in the early 1650s: a book which totally inhabits the physical and mental universe of the seventeenth century and the period of the early Commonwealth – its industry, its uprightness, its sense of its own rectitude, and above all, its language, infused at every level with the language of the bible, as the new order conquers the old, more heathen peoples of the Fens, living close to the water. It is a great feat of imaginative inhabitation of someone else’s world, about attitudes to nature and ownership, ending with a poetic description of life in a plantation by the James River in the New World.

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:-