Can you find Llandanwg Church?

To Llanbedr

This is a virtual tour of quite a large slice of North Wales though I know it because we used to spend holidays in a cottage called Hedd in LLandanwg which is just down the coast from Harlech. I have started off up by the end of the road up to the Roman Steps above Cym Bychan. If you get here and there are not many people, this place is so quiet it is scary. Even with a few people there, any loud conversation seems to swallowed up. We went there once when we were the only people and we got caught up in some surreal sheep drive. A huge flock of sheep seemed to appear from nowhere and every one stood there just watching us; swivelling their heads as we walked in a small amount of panic back to the car.

The poem "National Theatre of Wales" which I posted some while back was written about the Small Theatre outside Harlech which you may be able to find if you get to Harlech. Directions - down into Llanbedr - turn right onto the road to Harlech - just before you reach Harlech turn down the road towards Porthmadog and the theatre is on your left. I know it's not the National Theatre of Wales but that is poetic Licence - literally. They have a virtual tour as well which is linked from the main tour. I went to see a puppet version of "Hiawatha" there. when I was about fourteen but the poem is really just about the general atmosphere of those holidays. The house we stayed in was a white clapboard house and creaked in the wind. We were told that in the very worst weather, the waves broke over the dunes and splashed the windows. From the dining table we could see a great swathe of the beach and the top of the Lleyn Peninsula. At night we could see the lights of Criccieth which sparkled as the wind moved water vapour about in the bay; my brother and I used to call it "twinkle town". Once a small sailing boat was driven onto the rocks right opposite the house and the family on board had to climb to the safety of the beach. I don't remember what happened to the boat but we found various bits equipment on the beach later. I think my dad found a Stanley Knife which he probably still has. We found a distress flare which we aimed to let off but bottled out when we realised that the Royal Aircraft Establishment across the river at the entrance to the small harbour would probably scramble some sort of rescue craft. We eventually and very foolishly fired the flare into a sand dune. This reminds me that may brother actually climbed through the fence of the Air Station to steal a piece of a crashed Canberra aircraft about 100 yards inside the perimeter. (He once also pinched a small piece of a Jaguar fighter which crashed near Malvern while the RAF team were still digging it up.) I have just found out that the very Canberra is listed here so on the web I have found out that my brother has a piece of either WH887 or WK145. The road to the beach on the other side of the harbour entrance goes across a causeway the middle of which lies at the end of the Air station runway. We once stood right under a Canberra coming into land not quite like Wayne and Garth on the bonnet at the end of the runway but close. It was bright yellow which I thought at the time would make it a very easy target.

There was a debate recently about a Canberra pilot who raised the undercarriage of his aircraft while still on the runway as a protest against the British and French Invasion or Eygpt in 1956. My dad was in Suez. He did his National Service in the Royal Engineers. I used to say that the Army taught him how to blow up bridges and that the council taught him how to build them. I seem to remember him saying that he passed by the Statue of De-Lesseps just before it was blown up. I will have to ask him. Anyway for a description of said event by the man who set the charges, go here.