Cil-y-Bont, Llanrug, Gwynned

It rained through the night and was still raining when we rose. The forecast suggested it would ease mid-morning so we delayed our touring itinerary until after a mid-morning cuppa. Our first destination was about eight miles away by road or about half as far as the crow flies, a fact that always frustrates when comparing the initial distance advice on-line and then planning the route on the sat nav.

Penryn Castle is a vast neo-Norman castle, a faux-castle, really a country home built to blow the socks off the neighbours and whanau. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In 1438, Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate, the precursor to a council building permit, and he founded the stone castle and added a tower house. In the 1780s Samuel Wyatt reconstructed the property, but all the while it remained the same simple manor house albeit expanding.

The castle as it is today was built for George Hay Dawkins Pennant by the famous architect Thomas Hopper, who convinced  his client this neo-Norman design would  be far better than the fashionable Gothic style. Started in 1820, it took about twenty years to complete, and almost as soon as it was finished, Pennant died leaving Penrhyn to his daughter Juliana. 

Our guide book is particularly scathing of the structure, labelling it a “vulgar testament to the Anglo-Welsh gentry’s oppression of the rural Welsh” and there are good reasons for many thinking it so. I would say that one should not visit today’s moral standards upon those of the past, because it is the stain of slavery that is most blamed for this attitude.

Richard Pennant, the 1^st Baron Penrhyn, was a slave owner and anti-abolitionist. The money he made from slave plantations in Jamaica was crucial to the development of the slate quarry in Bethesda and Penrhyn Castle. But George, labelled “self-aggrandising”, a great great nephew could hardly be held responsible for the “sins” of his ancestors.

My own personal impression of the castle was one of great admiration; it is as if all the best of stately homes and castles about the country, even limiting one to those under National Trust administration, were extracted and melded together in this one re-imagining here near Bangor. It is a very grand architectural masterpiece in which one could very comfortably reside.

Juliana married Edward Gordon Douglas, who became the 1^st Penrhyn of Llandegai and so the line carried on albeit sideways and jumping a few hoops. In 1949 after the death of the 4th Lord Penryn, the land and title separated, the title following Frank Douglas Pennant, now the 5^th Lord Penryn, and the land went to the 4^th Lord’s niece, Lady Janet Harper, who obviously found this all too much and passed it in to the National Trust. 

Housed in one corner of the castle precinct, in what was once the stables is the Industrial Railway Museum, which in the first instance seems rather bizarre. In 1962 the National Trust was approached by The Industrial Locomotive Society who were looking for a suitable home for a gasworks locomotive which had recently been retired from service. Given the intimate connection between the Penryn Quarry at Bethesda and the narrow-gauge steam train it operated in the grounds of the Penrhyn estate, the idea of an industrial railway museum seemed appropriate.  A survivor of the nearby Penrhyn railway, which closed in 1963, was donated to the museum and other locomotives were added representing several locomotive builders, and so it has grown.

The little museum did hold our interest longer than we had anticipated, particularly the stories relating to the slate quarry. At the end of the 19^th century it was the world’s largest slate quarry; the main pit nearly a mile long and 370 metres deep. Then it was worked by over two thousand quarrymen but since it was sold back in 1964, the work force has reduced to nearer two hundred.

The Penrhyn Quarry has another skeleton apart from its original funding coming from Caribbean business ventures; it was the site of two prolonged strikes by workers demanding better pay and conditions, the first lasting eleven months in 1896 and the second, lasting three years beginning in November 1900. Known as the Great Strike of Penrhyn, this was the longest dispute in British industrial history and cast a shadow of unreliability on the North Welsh slate industry.

We had arrived two early for the castle opening so spent some time wandering about the grounds, through the woods, down to the walled garden and the bog, not a very wet affair, although later rain might have offered some relief. Unfortunately we were not as relieved to find the rain had set in by the time we emerged from the castle, and spent the rest of the day dodging surprisingly heavy showers.

Our second destination was yet another National Trust property, this on the island of Anglesey, across the Menai Strait. The Plas Newydd House is the ancestral home of the Marquess  of Anglesey and sits on the shore of the Straits with fabulous views of Snowdonia on a clear day, but certainly not today. The gardens and woodland walks are apparently wonderful but we were not keen to linger outdoors, so headed straight to the house. I was very disappointed that we did not have the opportunity to go hunt for red squirrels; signs told us that six reds had been introduced to Plas Newydd in 2008 and there were now around one hundred on the estate and Menai corridor.

The Paget family acquired Plas Newydd by marriage in the 18^th century and the mansion became their favoured holiday home, whilst their official permanent residence remained at Beaudesert in Staffordshire, which was the historic seat of William, 1^st Baron Paget, a Tudor statesman. The house has its origins in 1470, owned successively by Griffiths, Baylys and the Pagets, above mentioned, and since 1976 the National Trust.

The stories told in the house today related to the series of Pagets who passed parts of their lives here. Much of it as told through the “voice” of fourteen year old Henry Paget who later became the 7^th Marquess  and spent much of his life researching and writing military history. He died in 2013 having passed the ownership of Pas Newydd to the National Trust in 1976, with a right to occupy. 

His son has chosen to live elsewhere, but his grandson, Ben Paget, the Earl of Uxbridge, lives in a corner of the house with his nose-ringed wife. It must have been a very generous arrangement that Henry negotiated with the Trust, and I do wonder how many generations will benefit from the continuing residence of this very comfortable home. 

Henry’s father had inherited the property from his cousin Henry, the 5^th Marquess who was an irresponsible queer wastral. He paused long enough in his flamboyant exhibitionism to marry a cousin, a token move toward establishment, however the marriage was annulled within two years. Unsurprisingly he died without issue hence the sideways inheritance.

It was this Charles Paget, who inherited from the blacksheep in 1905 who decided the family should move permanently to this spot on the Menai Strait in an effort to consolidate the family’s finances.  In the 1930s Charles and his wife Marjorie installed electricity, plumbing and en suite bathrooms, as well as commissioning Rex Whistler’s famous dining room mural, which is by itself a draw card for many visitors.

Aside from missing the squirrels, I was disappointed we were unable to wander about the waterfront; everything was so very wet and I was cold and ready for us to head home. Back at camp we found the grass starting to green up and the washing looking like dead ducks in a row.