Castles, Slate, and a Barbecue
I can hardly believe this incredible adventure is halfway finished. My first three weeks in Wales have been more exciting and beautiful that I ever expected. It has been hard to keep up with blogging because it seems that our days are so full that by the time we get back there is only time for a shower and a few hours of sleep before we start again! So there are a few things to cover from this last week. After our challenging? hike in Snowdonia our next days were filled with flashbacks to the period of Edward I as we visited many of the castles that were built in the 12th and 13th centuries to subdue the Welsh, but which now serve as reminders of the resilience. As the castles now crumble the Welsh people remain resilient and proud. We started our trip at Beaumaris Castle, the last of the Edwardian Castles to be built (1295), and made a quick trip to Penmon to visit the Penmon Lighthouse and Puffin Island (Yes! There really are puffins!).
The next day, we continued our medieval adventure by visiting Caernarfon Castle and Criccieth Castle. These two were in stark contrast to one another. Caernarfon Castle is a very popular tourist site and a ticket counter and gift shop are built into the entrance of the castle. While still beautiful, the grand castle seemed to lose some of the romance aspect due to all the preservation efforts that had been put into maintaining it as a functional museum and national monument. Criccieth Castle, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. This was a Welsh castle rather than English; it was built in 1230, and captured and burned down in the early 15th century. A skeleton of the castle remains perched high, overlooking Tremadog Bay in Gwynedd, with nature seeming to reclaim the few stones that form the castles shape. The floor of the castle is thick and green, graced with wildflowers dotting the paths. Where walls once stood there is now a seemingly endless view out over the water onto the horizon. There was sadness in the falling of the castle but also a beauty in the peace it has found with the land it occupies. Criccieth Castle was beautiful in a way that is nearly impossible to describe, and though the photos do not begin to do it justice, they are the best I can hope to do in illustrating the romantic beauty of the fallen castle.
Later that afternoon we took a tour of the Llechwedd Slate Caverns, which were beautiful and in stark contrast to the coal mines we had visited during our time in Cardiff. Some of the areas of the slate mine towered high over our heads 250 feet, while in the coal mines (and some areas of the slate mines) it was impossible to stand straight up because of the low ceilings. I cannot imagine having to work in the conditions the men suffered through, and even more distressing to imagine are the health problems they faced as a result of their work in the mines, such as silicosis, a lung disease caused by slate dust. There is no cure and the disease that has claimed many miners’ lives, with 103 silicosis-related deaths in South Wales between 1934 and 1941 alone.
We finished the evening with an incredible barbecue at the home of Bangor University’s Vice-Chancellor. While the itinerary said “barbecue,” it was the first one I had ever been to that was fully prepared by a French chef. This was some of the best food I’ve had in any setting! It was an honor to talk to the representatives of many diverse academic departments and having heard about all of the opportunities at Bangor I’m sure that I’m not going to be ready to leave in a week. I hope that I will be able to come back and maybe even take a course or two with some of the incredible individuals I met at the barbecue! Bangor is a wonderful little city, filled with the loveliest of people!
