{"id":729816,"date":"2026-08-06T23:08:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T23:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729816\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T23:08:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T23:08:27","slug":"making-tracks-minffordd-for-portmeirion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729816\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Tracks: Minffordd for Portmeirion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Portmeirion. Image: Johnckarnes (CC BY-SA 4.0)<\/p>\n

Jon Gower\u00a0<\/p>\n

Never was an architectural salvage yard so ineffably beautiful. You walk from Minffordd station and, as you approach Castell Deudraeth along the half mile long drive, you catch bright glimpses of colour among the trees.<\/p>\n

This is architect Clough Williams Ellis\u2019 \u2018home for fallen buildings,\u2019 where bits and pieces of buildings were transported from elsewhere and then reassembled as part of the architect\u2019s jig-saw vision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He also designed and erected new buildings, too \u2013 a dome as the answer to what Clough saw as \u2018severe dome deficiency.\u2019<\/p>\n

The iconic campanile or bell-tower \u2018was obvious enough \u2013 it was imperative that I should open up my performace with a dramatic gesture of some sort.\u2019 Indeed, the whole of Portmeirion can be seen as one, great beautiful performance, where the ghost of a visionary, knickerbockered architect is always taking a bow. In The Pleasures of Architecture, which Clough wrote with his wife Amabel, he set out his stall thus: \u2018I wanted to show that one could develop and indeed, exploit even a very beautiful place without defiling it; that if you did things with sufficient care and skill, you could even enhance what was given as a backdrop.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Portmeirion village. Photo Jon Gower<\/p>\n

The village of Portmeirion, hugging the edge of the river Dwyryd, certainly adds bright dabs of colour to the Meirionnydd coastscape, to the backdrop of tawny sands at low tide where cormorants muster.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

There are splashes of Portofino white, like Ligurian sea-spume and that rich cobalt blue so prevalent in the Mediterranean. The cottages of Chantry Green are pale pink, apricot, light blue and swamp green while gold paint adds lustre to the Balinese Dancers in the Piazza and to the eagle adornments, giving the birds an imperial authority.<\/p>\n

As Roy Strong suggested, \u2018Clough, one knows from Portmeirion, was never afraid of colour. The buildings are colour-washed ochre, terracotta, primrose, a dusky blue. The greeny-turquoise of his ironwork in the garden recurs on houses.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clough was not one for a fresh lick of paint, however. He liked his buildings to look weathered: buildings were painted with four gradations of colourwash, \u2018the deepest at ground level \u2013 to stimulate the picturesque effects of age and weathering, of damp creeping up an old wall\u2019 which was very much in keeping with his love of the patterns of mould and damp.<\/p>\n

Sarah Baylis, author of the newly and lavishly illustrated\u00a0 Portmeirion: The Architecture of Pleasure tells me \u2018Clough was observed in the 60s actually doing the painting himself, painting something darker at the base and then getting lighter. And he was always experimenting with paint effects. He liked old things, he liked the patina of age, he wanted to reproduce that. Anything where both the elements and time are interacting with the paint.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Portmeirion village. Photo Jon Gower<\/p>\n

Much as a gannet builds it nest from chance materials \u2013 seaweed, drifts of discarded fishing line, stalks of sea-campion \u2013 so too did Clough slowly build his coastal village, a fantastical village accreting like an oyster shell to cling to Meirionnydd rocks.<\/p>\n

His antennae were well-tuned to hear about stuff coming under the auctioneer\u2019s hammer: the inter-war years saw many country houses being knocked down so there was ample choice. He picked up a turret clock from a demolished London brewery; rescued a colonnaded portico from Hooton Hall in Cheshire and salvaged masonry from all over.<\/p>\n

Busily, Clough bought a seventeenth century plasterwork ceiling depicting the Labours of Hercules before Emral Hall in Flintshire was demolished, along with its entire ballroom, \u2018knocked down to a derisory thirteen pounds\u2019 and consequently rebuilt as Portmeirion\u2019s Town Hall.<\/p>\n

A cupola was made from an upside down copper boiler which had once been used to store pig swill. Waste not want not might well be his watchwords \u2013 rescuing a colonnade before it was turned into a public lavatory by Bristol Corporation or moving a green bronze sculpture of Hercules all the way from Aberdeen, a Herculean effort.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Image: Mike McBey (CC BY 2.0)<\/p>\n

The chimes of the village bells, nowadays digitally generated, drift across the mudflats to meld with the piping calls of waders. The German playwright Goethe is reputed to have said that architecture is frozen music, to which the 1950s British sci -fi writer Michael Moorcock replied music must therefore be defrosted architecture. Which prompts the question what sort of music does Portmeirion produce?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sarah Baylis suggests light opera. \u2018Portmeirion is a performative space. It\u2019s not passive, it\u2019s interactive. It\u2019s not about sitting back and admiring. It\u2019s being there, walking through it. But I think there\u2019s also musical theatre, because an awful lot of people with those skills came here in the early days? I suppose the singer Ivor Novello is the quintessential one, but he\u2019s certainly not the only person from world of musical theatre who found Portmeirion absolutely what he needed and wanted.<\/p>\n

Clough actually said in an interview, I wanted to show people a sort of light opera approach, using false perspectives and so on that architecture could be fun, entertaining, interesting, intriguing. And so it has proved to be.\u2019 This light opera approach might well be traced back to a production of John Gay\u2019s The Beggar\u2019s Opera, cram-full of colourful sets and costumes which Clough saw many times over at the Lyric, Hammersmith in 1920.<\/p>\n

Which also helps explain the general theatricality of the place. Sarah Baylis thinks \u2018That comes from the idea that this is a stage set, but also he wanted Portmeirion to look rooted in the earth and to look as if it had been there a long time.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

This very much chimes with the opinion of Christopher Hussey, who wrote an early guide to Portmeirion and extolled its virtues in the magazine Country Life. \u2018Theatricality? Why of course \u2013 but whereas the scene painter does it with canvas and the actors themselves are but half conscious of their background, here one lives in these little perching houses and makes one\u2019s own play out of the sea and mountains and idyllic surroundings. Mr Williams-Ellis\u2019s object has precisely been to create, out of stone and concrete, a village of that fairy land across the footlights, where prosaic city dwellers can take rooms, or a complete house, for their holidays.<\/p>\n

The village was also a propitious place to actually write plays. Noel Coward visited in 1941 and recalled, \u2018On Friday, May the 2nd, Joyce Carey and I caught a morning train from Paddington, bound for Port Meirion in North Wales. For some time past an idea for a light comedy had been rattling at the door of my mind and I thought the time had come to let it in and show it a little courtesy\u2026We arrived on a golden evening, sighed with pleasure at the mountains and the sea in the late sunlight, and settled ourselves into a pink guest-house.\u2019<\/p>\n

The idea blossomed into Blithe Spirit, the hugely successful three-act \u2018improbable farce\u2019 about seances and clairvoyance Coward had completed by the time he left a week later.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Portmerion Hotel. Image: Tom Parnell (CC BY-SA 4.0)<\/p>\n

Over the decades Portmeirion attracted creatives by the score, with Clough as both presiding and resident spirit. There was so much to see. Rachel Hunt, Portmeirion\u2019s archivist views Clough as a deft-illusionist as well as a skilful architect. \u2018There are things like trompe l \u2018oeil windows \u2013 literally deceptions or tricks of the eye \u2013 and little cutaway sheet metal mermaids and chariots. Quite often one fa\u00e7ade will be completely different to another, it might be a totally different building. It\u2019s like he wanted to have as many variances as possible.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sarah Baylis concurs: \u2018I think it\u2019s to do with the fact that they are just fa\u00e7ades. You walk behind the back of Chantry Row and there\u2019s nothing there. You think you\u2019re looking at a terrace of Georgian houses and you go behind and it\u2019s an illusion. Everything is an illusion to some extent but it does it seem much bigger because of this. It is extraordinary how small Portmeirion is and yet how utterly lost you can feel at times. I can still feel completely lost when I come out of a house or turn a corner. I just don\u2019t know where I am. I have to find the sea to get my bearings.\u2019<\/p>\n

That sea is actually an estuary which fills or empties with the tide, yet there\u2019s a thoroughly marine theme to Portmeirion. There are small copper galleons and the Amis Reunis, a Porthmadog trading ketch once converted into sleeping quarters. This almost sank after a storm and is now anchored in cement outside Portmeirion\u2019s hotel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clough\u2019s first enchantment with the place started when he approached Aber I\u00e2, the \u2018frozen estuary\u2019 \u2013 as it was then called \u2013 by boat, coming in from open water to dry land.<\/p>\n

Sarah Baylis explains, \u2018When he started, he was selling Portmeirion to people with boats. When it opened you could sail a yacht up here, you could moor it, you could even dive off Fort Henry. The estuary has changed, it\u2019s not what it was, and I think that happened fairly early on. I think that was probably a big disappointment to Clough, that it stopped being focused on the sea and that it didn\u2019t attract people in boats because it just wasn\u2019t viable. When it opened in the 20s it was all about families and sea and sun and it was in every way peddling that idea of a Mediterranean resort.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mermaid from Liverpool Sailors\u2019 Home. Photo Jon Gower<\/p>\n

To underline that marine connection, mermaids are everywhere. Clough sketched his first one in 1927. Rachel Hunt suggests \u2018He was inspired by the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles, whom he visited and asked to borrow his mermaid as a symbol.<\/p>\n

Milles\u2019s home was a sculpture garden by the sea so that was probably an influence as well.\u2019 Sarah Baylis in her book sees it as an essential image: The \u2018vigorous two-tailed mermaid \u2013 encapsulating the vitality and energy of the sea \u2013 designed by Clough as the original founding emblem of Portmeirion and still (though somewhat altered) its defining brand.\u2019 Clough\u2019s daughter Susan produced a more contemporary version while still keeping mermaid in the family.<\/p>\n

Rachel Hunt agrees mermaids recur all over, from the designs of Portmeirion ashtrays to railings around the village, which incorporate ones salvaged from the Liverpool Sailors\u2019 Home.\u00a0 \u2018There are shoals of them. One is by Ralph Ellis, who was famous for painting inn signs. Clough opened this pub hotel in Shropshire called The Mytton & Mermaid so that his London visitors \u2013 because Portmeirion was two days\u2019 motoring away, back then \u2013 would have somewhere to stop overnight. It\u2019s two miles outside Shrewsbury, in Atcham, near Attingham Park. The Mytton in the name was Jack Mytton, an eccentric, bibulous squire. The pub sign shows the mermaid rising out of the tankard belonging to the drunken Jack Mytton and then you have the reflection of Jack Mytton in the mermaid\u2019s mirror.\u2019<\/p>\n

The sea was also a great source of inspiration for Clough\u2019s daughter Susan, who even went as far as to create way of painting under the water. She was planning a book called The Compleat Mermaid, taking its cue from Izaak Walton\u2019s The Compleat Angler.<\/p>\n

Rachel explains this was ironic, \u2018because when she learned to swim as a twelve-year old she had a terrible experience. It was in a stagnant pond, where she ended up clinging to a log. She got mastoiditis and was in hospital for weeks on end. Afterwards she could walk again, but she could never run. She\u2019d grown very quickly, but was like a weak piece of celery. She wasn\u2019t really a land animal but when she was in the water, I think she felt at one.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"Underwater self-portrait by Susan Williams-Ellis, c.1940s-50s. (Courtesy of the Susan Williams-Ellis Foundation.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a marvellous self-portrait Susan produced for The Compleat Mermaid, complete with mask, oxygen tanks and an aqualung. The artist is swimming underwater using coloured oil pastels to sketch anemones and flowering blooms of jellyfish on plastic tracing film. In the portrait, painted in the Dartmouth estuary, Susan\u2019s hair floats upwards like golden seaweed as her strong hand guides a purple crayon.<\/p>\n

Rachel Hunt thinks there\u2019s a psychological element to this \u2013 \u2018escaping a skin or adopting a skin \u2013 finding an element that you feel more comfortable in. She\u2019s the world\u2019s first mermaid artist, she does become a mermaid.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the portrait Susan Williams-Ellis is both pragmatic and fantastical, wearing breathing apparatus to enter another element.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an experience not entirely unlike stepping into Portmeirion, a bright\u00a0 island of buildings conjured up by a veritable Prospero, who placed all the colours of a coral reef brilliantly into place.<\/p>\n

You can visit Portmeirion<\/a> as a day visitor, dine in the castle or even stay in one of the historical buildings.<\/p>\n

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