We stopped on the way back to London at Rug Chapel, the private chapel of Colonel William Salesbury, the Governor of Denbigh Castle. It’s an astonishing and ecclesiastically extravagant display of carved and painted woodwork, dating from 1637, just before the Civil War.
This is the painted decoration on the roof trusses:-
Cow parsley at the front of the cottage:-
The white wall provides an intense background to seashells:-
After a day spent lounging about doing nothing except reading and eating hard boiled eggs, I thought I would go explore the less familiar south bank of the River Afon down towards the mussel beds and the Menai Straits:-
There were geese on the river:-
We managed to book with the utmost difficulty a table at The Marram Grass which till quite recently was the café at the local caravan site, but once it was listed by the Good Food Guide became wildly popular.
One sees what one about to eat en route:-
We like the atmosphere which is as much middle America as north Wales:-
We have escaped to Anglesey for the bank holiday weekend where our cottage is thick with cow parsley.
This is the view out of the back door:-
Before breakfast, I walked out to the beach to see the sea:-
I’m very delighted to see that our local hostelry in Anglesey, the Marram Grass, has made it into the Good Food Guide. It’s the café on the local campsite and does pig roast on Saturday evening with music which floats across the fields. I would love to say how much we enjoyed it this year except that the only time we arrived for supper at about 7.30 one evening it was absolutely packed with happy and noisy diners and we were looked at as completely mad expecting to have dinner without booking. So, I can only recommend their excellent cooked breakfast, including Eggs Benedict, and the fact that one can sit out on the porch and feel that one might be in Wyoming.
It rained all through the night. It was raining as we left Aberdaron and it rained most of the morning and the afternoon, too. We ended up wading across a river. I found it hard to appreciate the landscape because I was concentrating on surviving, but half registered that the northern coast of the Llyn is softer and more agricultural, less tourist-y, much of the coastline owned by the National Trust which avoids too many of the caravan parks beloved as a source of income by the small farmers.
I took photographs of stone walls for Mariana Cook:-
Aberdaron feels, as indeed it is, a bit end-of-the-line, the last town on the Llyn Peninsula where R.S. Thomas was vicar from 1967 to 1978 and taught the local youth to play croquet. The church of St. Hywyn is where pilgrims assembled before the crossing to Bardsey Island.
This is the churchyard:-
It rained most of the morning as we walked along the long beach of Hell’s Mouth, up past Plas yn Rhiw, where the Keating sisters developed the garden and preserved the local landscape, then over the hill to the manganese mines in the gullies beyond and on along the coast and across the green fields and farmland of westernmost Wales to Aberdaron.
Looking down from Penarfynydd to Porth Ysgo:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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