Wanderings in Wales Part 2

I’m back with part 2 and more museums for your enjoyment!

I wasn’t particularly enthused about going to visit this National Trust house (I’m not a massive fan of Georgian architecture, and I didn’t know anything about the people who lived there), but it was walking distance from our Airbnb so it seemed rude not to.

The house was a bit meh to be honest, but the place as a whole was actually really lovely. I was particularly fascinated by the working courtyard behind the house that had everything the household needed to be self-sufficient, including a laundry, salting room and dairy.

We strolled through the walled gardens to find the farmyard and saw some brand new lambs. There is also a collection of farming and other rural equipment collected by a local couple and bequeathed to the National Trust. The highlight of our visit was making friends with Tomos the cat who made a beeline for us to say hello.

I love a steam train and there are quite a few of them in Wales. I have been strictly limited to one for this trip so I went for the Vale of Rheidol Railway which runs trains from Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge. The journey is about an hour through the mountains and up a 680 foot climb (with a very precipitous drop on one side).

The weather was absolutely dismal (consistent grey drizzle) but we still managed to get some amazing views.

We only had 45 minutes at Devil’s Bridge before we had to get back on the train so we didn’t get a chance to explore much, but we did get some excellent chocolate from Sarah Bunton’s workshop.

The National Library of Wales is in Aberystwyth and it’s a very impressive, and large, building. It’s a deposit library so it has the right to a copy of every book published in Britain and Ireland. We wandered in, half expecting to be stopped and asked what we were doing, but you can walk around freely1.

There were some excellent exhibitions in the Library, which we took advantage of. There was a display of some of the Library’s Treasures, including paintings and rare manuscripts. I detected a distinctly feminist angle to the things on display here.

Peacemakers is an exhibition about Welsh involvement in peace movements in the 20th century. The main focus is on the Welsh Women’s Peace Petition, which was the result of a campaign for peace led by Welsh women in the wake of WWI. The petition was signed by 390,296 women and taken to the USA to be presented to the women of America. The exhibition includes the box in which the petition was taken to the US. I was surprised by how big it was until I thought about how many pages nearly 400,000 signatures would fill!

We also saw Portrait & Power, a really interesting exhibition that invites you to question traditional portraiture and who is represented, and how. The exhibition asks some really powerful questions about how portrait subjects are represented and what that says about them, and about the context of the work. It also includes portraits of people who may historically have been left out of the story. Really thought provoking.

The Aberystwyth Cliff Railway is a Victorian cable car that goes to the top of the cliffs above Aberystwyth beach. It’s lucky there’s a cable car because the path up the cliff is really steep! It’s definitely worth going up there (by rail) for the amazing views.

Technically, we had already been to Devil’s Bridge, but we didn’t have time to see the actual bridge or the famous waterfall. We made a second stop here to rectify that.

There are three layers of bridge at Devil’s Bridge, the first of which was built in the 11th century. The story goes that the Devil agreed to build the bridge for a woman who had lost a cow on the other side of the gorge, in return for the first soul to cross (assuming it would be the woman). The woman sent a dog across and the Devil was left disappointed! More likely, the bridge was built by monks from the nearby Santa Florida Abbey, but that’s a less fun story.

A second bridge was built in the 18th century and then a third in 1901 and the road was levelled out. It’s really cool that the earlier bridges have been left behind so you can see the evolution over time.

The bridge is built over a waterfall and we walked down the path to the bottom of the gorge to get a better look. There is an almost perfect bowl shape carved into the rock by the running water, which is known as the Punchbowl.

And that was March!