Today we headed straight for Llanberis to take the Snowdonia Railway to the top of Mount Snowdon, one of my top goals for this trip. I hadn’t, however, planned on the popularity of this plan, so the tickets we got were for the noon train (the only rack-and-pinion passenger train in Britain. Whatever that means.). I knew the weather wouldn’t be perfect, but I didn’t really have a concept of how misted over it could be. As in, by the time we were halfway up, the train was moving through a fog bank through which we couldn’t even see the side of the mountain. At the top, you could see about 15 feet, I think. It was gorgeous and spooky. We shared a truly awful hot dog with onions (all boiled to the point of tastelessness) before catching our train back down.

We explored nearby Dolbarden Castle, another of Llewellyn’s. It’s mostly just a plain circular tower left. The most interesting thing was the spiral staircase. Now, most of them go clockwise from the bottom, because it’s harder to fight left-handed going up the stairs—it’s a defensive thing. (In cathedrals, they go anti-clockwise, because they’re in places of peace.) In this castle, however, the stairs from the ground to the first floor went anti-clockwise, and then they twisted and went clockwise from the first to second floors. Very strange, and I’m curious to discover why. I didn’t like the second staircase, and let Ken go up alone. I was right in assuming that the next floor wasn’t any different. The views even from the first floor were beautiful, though.

We had a late lunch in a café (I had a jacket potato with garlic butter and cheese, and tea), and then drove to Bedgelert to visit the Llewellyn House, which had nothing to do with Llewellyn (it’s much later), but has displays about the local history and wildlife. Alas, it turned out to be one of those places that’s only open on odd Tuesdays when the moon is full and a pig comes by playing a banjo…

At Ken’s suggested, we visited Gelert’s Grave, because we were there. I didn’t care—the legend is a Victorian invention to attract tourists. We stopped in some craft shops and bought a few gifties, and sat by the beautiful river and relaxed for a while.

On the way back to Betws-y-Coed, we stopped briefly at the mis-named Ugly House. They say that there was a time when, if you could build a house between sunset and sunrise and have smoke coming from the chimney, you would own it and the land around it (as far as you could throw a rock in each direction) free and clear. The place was closed, but I got a charming picture through the gate.

For supper, I wanted to have a tart of black pudding and Welsh cheddar as a starter, but they were out of the black pudding, alas. So I had goat’s cheese and then chicken with a cheese-leek cream sauce, which was quite nice.

Sleep happened fairly soon after all of that.