Porthmadog Accommodation

More About Porthmadog

Slate came down from the quarries and went out from here, over a thousand shiploads in the year 1873 alone. The little railway built in 1836 to feed the port still runs. It leaves Harbour Station at the bottom of the High Street and climbs seven hundred feet to Blaenau Ffestiniog, going round a complete spiral on the way.

You can walk the Cob, drive onto the sand at Black Rock, and reach Portmeirion in a couple of miles. With both steam railways starting in the middle of town, the car can stay where it is for a day. Criccieth is five miles west, and the pass up to Beddgelert starts behind the town.

Madocks was reclaiming land for farming, not building a port. The Cob went up between 1808 and 1811, the sea took it back inside a month, and the repairs finished his finances. He laid out the village of Tremadog on the reclaimed ground as well.

The accident made the place. The sea forced through the breach and scoured a deep channel, so ships could get in. By 1873 more than a hundred and sixteen thousand tons of slate were going out through Porthmadog in over a thousand ships a year.

The Ffestiniog Railway was built in 1836 to bring that slate down from Blaenau Ffestiniog. The German market for slate collapsed during the First World War, the last cargo went in 1946, and the line carries passengers now instead.

T. E. Lawrence was born a mile up the road at Tremadog on 16 August 1888, in a house his family called Gorphwysfa. He became Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who fought with the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire. The house is private today, so you can see the plaque from the street but not go inside.

Portmeirion is two miles away: a village of pastel-coloured Italianate buildings put up on its own private peninsula, and quite unlike anywhere else in Wales.