Liverpool and North Wales: Day 5

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Monday, 5th May

After breakfast, we said goodbye to the Premier Inn in Childer Thornton in the Wirral and headed for the final leg of our stay – a two-bedroom cottage in the village of, Borth-y-Gest, in North Wales (more about our new temporary home, later).

9.58am: But first, we had to get there! It was almost 80 miles, door-to-door from the Premier Inn, and so we planned to break up the journey along the way. With the news today suggesting that Donald Trump wants to re-open Alcatraz, what better place to to start than with a Gaol?! 🤔

10.09am: Ten minutes later, we officially crossed into North Wales! Bore da!! 🙂

Ruthin Gaol…

10.43am: We’re here at the Gaol. Parking was easy – pretty much on the road directly opposite – and it appeared to be free. Admission was just £9 each to get in (and out!), but no concessions for oldies. For Gaol-Trivia fans, this one is the only purpose-built Pentonville-style prison open to the public as a heritage attraction. Luckily, we’re not staying!

A few other oddities: It’s ‘pet friendly’ (as opposed to prisoner-friendly?) and for the person ‘who has everything’, vouchers are available to purchase to give your ‘friends’ an overnight stay here! The Gaol also won the ‘Visit Wales Hidden Gem Award’ in 2023.

Everything was comprehensively explained – from what they ate and how they worked, and the punishments they endured. There’s apparently a piece about the ‘Welsh Houdini‘ but neither of us could find it (but maybe that’s the point!) 🤔😉

There was plenty to see here, and the prison had been restored to a very high standard.

I’ve not seen that before…. One of the cells was designated for baths. I guess that’s progress but I don’t think I’d want to be last in, given that it wasn’t plumbed-in! 😲

Ruthin Gaol ended being a prison in 1916 when the prisoners and guards were all transferred to Shrewsbury Prison. Ironically, the Council then took over the running inn1926 as offices and an archive space – and for a while, the town’s Library.

Around Ruthin

We were all done inside the hour and felt it had been a very interesting visit. With time on our side, we decided to take a wander around the town itself. Ruthin is a market town and community in Denbighshire, Wales, in the south of the Vale of Clwyd. The town, Castle and St Peter’s Square lie on a hill, skirted by villages such as Pwllglas and Rhewl.

With a population of just under 6000, we’re not sure where everyone was today! Architecturally speaking, it was quite an attractive town, but the whole place was eerily quiet. Given that today was a Bank Holiday AND VE80 Day, we were both surprised not to see more people around.

We couldn’t check into our property until 4pm, so we still had some time to kill and decided to take a small diversion heading for the well-known Bala Lake.

Bala Lake

12.45pm: Bala Lake is almost 6 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide and is also known locally as Llyn Tegid. It’s a large freshwater glacial lake in Gwynedd, Wales and for many, is a popular place for water sports such as paddle-boarding, canoeing, windsurfing and fishing – obviously, that’s why we stopped here! 😉. It’s also a favourite for casual and serious walkers, where a circuit around the Lake covers around 14 miles.

We parked the car in one of the town’s car-parks nearby (costs £1.55 – no change given) and decided to see what all the fuss was about. What we hadn’t factored in (AGAIN!) was the wind-chill. Good grief, it felt like the depths of Winter during our short 10-minute walk to take the above photograph. This has been a feature of many of the days since we arrived. In a word… FFFFFFFFreezing! Looks like the windsurfing will have to wait for another time – we were SO disappointed! 😉

1.20pm: After a quick cuppa in the car to thaw out, we began the final leg of our journey to our accommodation in Borth-y-Gest. Luckily for us there was a high-speed EV charging station en-route. Unluckily for us, BOTH chargers were broken – that’s a first for us! No problem, we thought, there was another in the town. Our bad luck continued as on arrival, one person plugged in his car and walked away, but forgot to switch on the charging process! Meanwhile, the other charging station had a car already plugged, that on closer inspection revealed it was already 100% fully charged – so taking up a space for no reason! (In the world of ET etiquette, that’s considered very bad form!).

3.00pm: We eventually gave up and headed into the centre of town and plugged in at the Tesco in Portmadog, for a small slow charge, whilst we sorted out our own energy needs! That was probably our ‘worst’ EV charging experience to date, but we’ll try again tomorrow. 🙁

The Cottage…

4.10pm: We arrived at our seaside cottage. It’s called Gweithdy Bronafon, (loosely translated, it means ‘another location without a decent mobile signal’). It’s a converted workshop, and we’re staying here for five nights. The journey had been ‘up and down’ (literally!) but with fantastic views across the Welsh landscape – it was worth the journey, just for that! (and reminded us a little of New Zealand).

It looked fairly new and had all we needed for our short stay. It’s literally a minute to the beach and there are plenty of coastal walks here too! Elsewhere, the complete lack of a mobile signal was more than made up for with a decent WiFi connection, so at least the process of posting these Blogs is now a gazillion times easier AND quicker! 🙂👍

Yes, very nice indeed! 🙂

See all our photos so far
HERE

Tomorrow…

On Tuesday, depending on the weather (and the windchill) we’ve got a coastal walk in mind to Porthmadog and maybe a trip on one of the many heritage railways.