Babs versus the Blue Bird

Not far from the beach at Pendine in Carmarthenshire is a small museum called the Pendine Museum of Speed, a modest and infrequently open establishment which pays tribute to Pendine’s history as a venue for land speed records attempts. The main feature, albeit one that is often absent from the museum’s otherwise very modest collection, is one of the cars that featured in a couple of those attempts, a white-painted monster of a vehicle that dates back to the 1920s when the boundaries of speed were being pushed by specially-built racing-cars that were fitted with aeroplane engines. The car is called Babs, and back in 1926 she became the fastest car in the world, and she did that on Pendine Sands.

By the 1920s, the land speed record had got to the point where it was no longer feasible to use roads or race-tracks due to the straight-line distances that were required, for as well as the one-kilometre length along which the cars were timed the cars also needed space to accelerate and brake before and after said flying kilometre (it was a kilometre rather than a mile because the record’s first regulators were French). Long and straight stretches of sand beach were being sought out, and the one at Pendine is six miles if you don’t count the bit at the eastern end that curves round towards Laugharne; with the tide out and in fair weather, it was and for that matter still is an ideal venue to drive a car in a straight line as fast as it can go. Twice within the hour, for from the beginning the land speed record had to be an average of two runs, one in either direction in order to negate any benefits that gradient or the wind might give.

The first land speed record attempt at Pendine Sands was made by Malcolm Campbell in September 1924. Campbell, who’d got into motor racing prior to the First World War, set the record in a modified Sunbeam racing-car that he’d called Blue Bird due to his habit of racing in cars painted blue (as opposed to British racing green). Powered by an 18.3-litre aircraft engine, it had been raced at Brooklands and indeed used to set a land speed record at that circuit before Campbell acquired, repainted and renamed it. Before arriving at Pendine, Campbell and Blue Bird had already made two attempts at the land speed record elsewhere, although they were deemed invalid due to the use of unapproved timing equipment. At Pendine, though, his team were using the proper equipment and Blue Bird set a new land speed record of 146mph. The following summer, they were back and the record was raised to 150mph.

Campbell had been keen to break his own record because he’d heard that someone else was preparing for a land speed record attempt in a more powerful car. John Parry-Thomas was a Welsh engineer who, in addition to having made a name for himself racing at Brooklands in the early 1920s, had been involved with the development of the car that came to be known as Blue Bird. This had motivated him to try for the land speed record for himself, which led to the purchase of a large racing-car called Chitty IV from the estate of Louis Zborowski, an aristocratic racing driver who’d been killed at the 1924 Italian Grand Prix (he had designed and built four powerful racing-cars called ‘Chitty’ or ‘Chitty Bang Bang’, which years later would provide Ian Fleming with the name of his fictional vintage car). Built for racing at Brooklands, Chitty IV was powered by a 27-litre Liberty aircraft engine and was in fact the largest capacity car to race at that famous old circuit. Parry-Thomas, who actually lived in a house located within the Brooklands circuit, not only substantially modified the car for his land speed record attempt; he also gave it a new name – Babs.

In April 1926, Parry-Thomas and Babs went to Pendine. They didn’t just break Campbell’s record – they smashed it, raising the bar to 170mph. Conditions hadn’t been ideal, though, and Parry-Thomas reckoned that with some modifications Babs could do much better.

Campbell’s reaction to this was that he clearly needed a bigger car. A new, more powerful Blue Bird was built, powered by a 22.3-litre Napier aircraft engine (hence this one’s full name, the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird). Although the engine had a smaller capacity than that of Babs, it was the more powerful and as a result this Blue Bird was reckoned to be capable of breaking the 200mph barrier. In February 1927 Pendine Sands would once again be the location for a record attempt. In the event, though, Campbell was only able to raise Parry-Thomas’s record to 174mph; the new Blue Bird had achieved a top speed of 195mph but it was the two-way average speed over the one-kilometre course that counted.

Parry-Thomas, meanwhile, had not been idle, having spent the winter of 1926-27 rebuilding Babs’s bodywork. His work complete, Babs was ready for another record attempt and a month after Campbell’s new record had been set, Parry-Thomas was back at Pendine. On 3^rd March 1927, he set out to win back the land speed record but he would end up going down in motorsport history for a very different reason.

Quite what happened once Parry-Thomas had got Babs up to a speed of around 170mph has been a matter of debate; some reckon that the drive-chain snapped, although it’s more likely that there was a failure regarding one of the back wheels. What we can say for certain is that the car went out of control at high speed and rolled over, killing her driver who became the first person to die while attempting to break the land speed record.

That was the last time Pendine was used for a land speed record attempt; later that month, Henry Seagrave topped the 200mph barrier at Daytona Beach in Florida, and it was to this location that Campbell would take the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird for his next (successful) land speed record attempt the following year.

As for Parry-Thomas, his body was buried in a churchyard not far from Brooklands; Babs, however, was buried underneath the dunes at Pendine Sands, and she would remain there for over four decades.

Looking out for seabirds off Tenby

To Tenby, where the weather was glorious last week and where I was very keen to go on one of the various boat trips. You can go on one to Caldey Island, which is just over half a mile south of the mainland and which is home to a monastic community (thus making it one of Britain’s holy islands, for there has been a monastery there since the sixth century; admittedly it was closed down during the Dissolution, but an abbey on the island was rebuilt in 1910, originally for Anglican Benedictines although it’s now occupied by Cistercians). You can go mackerel-fishing or seal-watching. Or you can go on an island cruise which lasts for about an hour and doesn’t land at Caldey, although it does take you to see the bird sanctuary on the smaller, neighbouring St Margaret’s Island which has no public access.

I chose the latter as I was very keen to see the seabirds; the Puffins especially appealed, mainly because I think they’re fascinating birds but also because there was a big feature on them in the most recent issue of the RSPB members’ magazine Nature’s Home. Also, it has to be said, Allison had seen loads of them on a boat trip when she went to Newfoundland recently and yes, I was feeling a little bit jealous about that (what we in Britain know of as a Puffin – which, as it happens, is the provincial bird of Newfoundland & Labrador – is known internationally as the Atlantic Puffin, for there are two other species of this diminutive yet very distinctive seabird that can be found in the northern Pacific Ocean).

I bought my ticket from one of the wooden booths by the Harbour that sells the tickets for the variety of boat trips on offer. I was advised that, as the tide was low, the trip would be setting off not from the Harbour but from the nearby Castle Beach which has a mobile jetty which is used by the various boat trip operators at low tide, and which is manoeuvred into position by a tractor. The boat was due to sail from there at 3:30pm but the booth-lady reckoned I should be there ten minutes beforehand. Castle Beach is one of the four golden-coloured beaches that adorn Tenby and which are key to this walled Pembrokeshire town being a very popular holiday destination. There’s a tidal island there, St Catherine’s, which you can walk out to at low tide although it’s closed to the public. On it is a fort, one of the Palmerston Follies that were built in the 1860s when there was a war threat with the French; never used for its intended purpose, it has at various times been a private house and even a zoo. Nowadays it is apparently open to the public on a very occasional basis (according to a series of posters that can be seen on the walls of several of the town’s hotels and B&Bs) and two years ago it appeared on TV as the high-security ‘Sherrinford’ prison in Sherlock. But I digress.

Anyway, at the appointed hour of 3:20pm I and a couple-of-dozen others who’d paid their £14 were there on the beach, forming a reasonably orderly queue by the tractor amid the holiday-makers who were simply there to catch the sun and occasionally go and cool off in the sea, and very nice weather it was for that. Come 3:35 I was wondering if our boat was going to actually show up, for the only vessels that had come along to the jetty had done so to unload passengers and none of them even remotely resembled the yellow catamaran that had adorned the Tenby Boat Trips board that I’d seen when I’d bought my ticket. Then, said yellow catamaran (“designed especially to cruise the beautiful coastal water around Tenby … unique shape makes for a very comfortable, stable ride”) hove into view and we passengers dutifully trooped on board.

After the safety announcements we were off, heading out into Carmarthen Bay. While we weren’t going to be landing at Caldey Island, we did go past the jetty on our way to St Margaret’s Island, which is where the main seabird colony is located. Although it’s uninhabited by people now, St Margaret’s Island bears the evidence of human activity in the form of some disused housing for workers who quarried limestone on the island until 1851. Nowadays it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) as well as being a part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park (as is Tenby, for that matter). 

As we approached it, we saw plenty of gulls (three types of those – Herring, Lesser Black-backed and Greater Black-backed) circling and calling ahead, quite a few Cormorants and some low-flying birds, dark on top and white underneath, which it took me a minute or so to realise were either Guillemots or Razorbills, depending on what their beaks looked like!

The boat hove to underneath the cliffs so we could all get a good view of the birds. Atop the cliffs were the Cormorants, St Margaret’s being home to one of the largest Cormorant nesting-sites in England and Wales. Below them, perches on the ledges on the cliff-face, were the Guillemots and Razorbills – both members of the auk family and thus related to the Puffins although they are larger; the Guillemots are the largest with their slender heads and pointed beaks, whereas the Razorbills (black rather than brown) are more stocky-looking with thick, blunt beaks that have a white line on them. They and the Puffins have similar lifestyles – they spend much of their time at sea and only come to land in order to nest.

Alas, despite much looking with the binoculars I didn’t see any Puffins (I’m reminded of an old postcard which has a drawing of a Puffin on top of a cliff next to a drawing of the same cliff-top without the Puffin, captioned ‘nuffin’). They nest at the top of the cliffs in burrows, and their numbers at St Margaret’s are much smaller than those of the other birds (no more than a couple-of-dozen nesting pairs) because of the rats. St Margaret’s can be accessed from Caldey at low tide, and the rats on Caldey make their way across and eat Puffin eggs and chicks. Apparently there are plans afoot for dealing with Caldey’s rats, which is good news for the Puffins’ future.

And they need some good news. At the moment, their numbers are in decline in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and Norway as well as the British Isles. They are currently designated as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) while my RSPB field guide has them as an amber species. Getting rid of the rats on Caldey Island to help the Puffins on St Margaret’s may be a small step but it’s a step in the right direction; they managed it on Lundy Island, which is some thirty-odd miles due south of Caldey.

As well as two out of the three possible auk sightings, there were plenty of gulls. As well as the usual species – Herring, Lesser Black-backed, Greater Black-backed – I was delighted with a much rarer sighting, that of a Kittiwake. Much more of a marine bird, this one is hardly ever seen on land except when it’s nesting. When did I last see one of those? To be honest, I’m not sure if I ever have for most of my seabird-watching is done from the land. I really should do these boat trips more often! Down by the sea, a small Cormorant turned out to be a Shag (cue the jokes; sometimes bird names do birdwatchers no favours!).

Cruising along by Caldey, after seeing plenty of Cormorants fishing out at sea, we stopped by a rocky outcrop which is home to a Herring Gull colony, where we were able to see the chicks, almost but not quite ready to start flying, wandering around. Oystercatchers also abounded, but in between them I noticed a small brown bird, similar-looking to a thrush but smaller, which I was happy to identify as a Rock Pipit (“breeds along the rocky shorelines and on small islands around the coasts of Britain and Ireland … avoids sandy beaches … rare inland”). I saw a couple more before we moved on.

It’s possible to see seals in the sea off Tenby, but today wasn’t our day for that. We did see a few jellyfish towards the surface, though; later, while walking along the beach, I saw one that had quite literally been left high and dry by the tide. As the boat made its way back to Castle Beach and the old fort on St Catherine’s (home to quite a few Jackdaws if nothing else), I scanned the surrounding area with my binoculars once more, and was rewarded for my efforts with the sight of a Gannet diving head-first into the sea.

Even though I didn’t get to see any Puffins, I found the trip to be most enjoyable and was able to add a fair few species to my ‘seen in 2018’ list.

The cathedral in Britain's smallest city

To Pembrokeshire, where the smallest city in Britain can be located. There are villages that are bigger in terms of population (it has around 1,800 inhabitants), but this place can claim to be a city because it has a cathedral. That’s not always the case, by the way; Southwark has a cathedral but it’s a London borough (not a city), and Derby had a cathedral for fifty years before it was given city status. And the city I’m talking about hasn’t always been a city – it became one in the early 1540s, when Henry VIII founded six new dioceses in England Wales, issuing some letters patent as he did so declaring every town that had a cathedral to be a city. Then it lost its city status in 1888 when the link between cities and cathedrals was abolished, but it was given said status back in 1994 at the request of the Queen (who conferred the letters patent in person in a ceremony in the cathedral in 1995).  

I am talking, of course, about St Davids (which in this context could refer to the city, the cathedral or indeed the diocese; the apostrophe would appear to be optional). The cathedral is the last resting-place of the saint that bears its name – Dewi Sant, as he’s referred to in Welsh (the Welsh name for ‘his’ city is Tyddewi, which literally means ‘David’s house’). The only one of the Home Nations patron saints to have been from the country of which he is the saint, St David was born in or around the year 500, just to the south of what’s now St Davids but which apparently used to be called Mynyw or Menevia. His mother was St Non (a nun), and the priest who baptised him may have been St Eilw (in English, St Elvis). A holy man who appears to have lived mainly on a diet of bread, water and leeks, he founded several monastic communities during the Dark Ages – a time when escaping from the troubles of a troubled world was all the rage throughout Christendom, as witness St Anthony going out into the desert in Egypt, St Benedict setting out his monastic rules in Italy and numerous holy people making their way to Cornwall. St David attracted a reputation that spread beyond Wales for ascetism (he had his follower renounce personal property to the point where referring to a book as ‘my book’ was forbidden) and preaching. His most famous miracle occurred when he preached at the Synod of Brefi (later renamed Llandewi Brefi in his honour) – everyone wanted to hear him but hardly anyone could see him, so the ground rose up underneath him so that they all could (more than one historian has been moved to comment that, as miracles go, the creation of a new hill in Wales is a bit on the superfluous side). He was declared to be a bishop by popular acclaim. He died on 1^st March, a date to be forever after commemorated as St David’s Day.

In the city that bears his name, and which started out as the settlement surrounding the first monastic community that he founded, the focal point is of course the cathedral which lies in the valley of the River Alun. Said monastic community was renowned for its men of learning – Asser, one Alfred the Great’s key advisors, was originally a monk at St Davids, and the twelfth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales is also associated with the place (an archdeacon, he hoped to be the Bishop of St Davids, like his uncle before him, but he never achieved that aim; tellingly, his statue in the cathedral has a mitre at his feet, not on his head).

Much of the current building dates back to the twelfth century, and it’s made of grey and purple-ish sandstone which was quarried locally. For some reason it has a distinct slope, east to west, which I have not encountered in any other cathedral I’ve ever visited. It was an important place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages – two Kings of England, William the Conqueror and Henry II, came to pay their respects and the Pope at one point declared that two pilgrimages to St Davids served as the equivalent of one pilgrimage to Rome.

Although the shrine to St David was done away with during the Reformation, in recent years it has been restored – it was rededicated in 2012 (on 1^st March, of course) and to be honest I can think of no other saintly shrine in Britain. Not in an Anglican place of worship at any rate, St David’s Cathedral and the diocese that goes with it being Church in Wales (the C of E having been disestablished in Wales in 1920).

Also buried in the cathedral are a few notable men from Welsh history. From the twelfth century, there are the afore-mentioned Gerald of Wales and the Lord Rhys, ruler of much of south Wales (although he was a prince and his name was Rhys ap Gruffydd, he’s always called the Lord Rhys, always with the definitive article); well, there are in any rate two effigies in the south choir aisle that claim to be the effigies of those two. Close to St David’s shrine is the tomb of Edmund Tudor, the half-brother of Henry VI (same mother) and the father of Henry VII who died in 1456, before the birth of his son (who was born the following year in Pembroke Castle).

I rather like St David’s Cathedral, which has an unfussed air when compared to a few other cathedrals I could mention. Perhaps the fact that it’s located in a valley, and is therefore not a prominent landmark on the skyline, might have something to do with it. Maybe it’s the rather plain-looking west front, or the wooden ceiling over the nave that, but for its size, looks more like the ceiling of a parish church than that of a cathedral.

Or it could be the fact that you don’t really see the cathedral until after you’ve walked through the gatehouse, when it and the picturesque ruins of the Bishop’s Palace are laid out before and below you (the Bishops of St David’s haven’t actually lived in St Davids since the sixteenth century; maybe that explains it!). When you enter, there’s no cash-desk confronting you – just a friendly person, sporting a cassock and a dog-collar more often than not, ready with a leaflet, an answer to any questions you may have and very little by way of the hard sell concerning ‘voluntary’ donations.

There is, I’ve found, invariably something interesting going on in St Davids. The last time I was there, it happened to be on Ascension Day which is the day when the cathedral plays host to an activity day for all of the local primary schools. At the moment, all of the lamp-posts and bollards of the city are sporting colourful knitwear, as is the market cross and quite a few of the railings and benches. This, I am reliably informed, is to commemorate the Cathedral Festival, an annual music festival that’s taking place there at the moment (as it does during the May half-term week every year).

Also sporting a distinctly knitted appearance is the altar-cloth in the cathedral’s Chapel of St Nicholas (behind and to the left of the high altar); I think it looks great, and wouldn’t it be fantastic if such a style caught on?

The castle at Aberystwyth

The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth is somewhere I’ve had cause to visit a few times recently. As well as a university and a funicular railway (which goes up the cliffs to the north of the town; there’s a park and a camera obscura at the top), Aber (as it’s known locally) has its own castle which dates back to the late thirteenth century.

It’s a ruin now, but unlike a lot of castles it has the advantage of being free to access at any time of day. It dates back to reign of Edward I as part of his campaign to conquer Wales; like the better-known castles to the north at Caernarvon and Harlech, it was the work of one James of Saint George, one of the greatest castle-builders ever to have lived (he’s also known as Jacques de Saint-Georges d’Esperanche; until the mid-twentieth century, historians had assumed that James et Jacques were different men from the same place – a village in south-eastern France – who both happened to be castle-builders, but it’s now accepted that they were the same person).

In the early 1400s, the famous Welsh rebel leader Owain Glyndwr (whose name is sometimes anglicised as Owen Glendower) captured Aberystwyth Castle and made it his headquarters, which probably explains why this castle was the first to have cannons fired against it when Henry IV attacked it in 1408. Over two centuries later, the castle was briefly a Royal Mint during the reign of Charles I but, like many a British castle, it was slighted (rendered unusable as a military installation) on the orders of Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, going to the seaside was becoming popular with those who could afford to do so; the previous fashion had been for spa towns like Bath, Cheltenham and Royal Tunbridge Wells, but after it became known that George III preferred sea-bathing the trend shifted towards seaside towns. This was also a time when, thanks to various wars with France, rich Britons who would previously have travelled to Europe for the Grand Tour looked to domestic destinations instead. Aberystwyth proclaimed itself to be the ‘Brighton of Wales’, and the castle became a popular picturesque ruin with those who visited the town. The late eighteenth century was very much the age of the picturesque, thanks mainly to the Rev. William Gilpin and his 1770 trip along the Wye; he defined ‘picturesque’ as ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, and this had a great impact not just on late eighteenth century tourism but on the Romantic movement that was to follow.

A picturesque ruin is very much what Aberystwyth Castle is today. I rather like walking over the wooden bridge from the war memorial to the old D-shaped tower with the gateway in it, and then either passing through or around it (there being not much left by way of walls) and then wandering among the ruins. I clamber up onto some parts as, quite a few other people do. You can, if you’re confident, make it up to the circular tower on the northern side; the views from there are pretty good. I’ve even spotted students having an evening barbecue up there! To the east, the ruins of another tower with plenty of jutting-out bricks could present more of a challenge; perhaps the casual would-be climber-of-ruins should give this one a miss.

Amid the ruins, there’s something you don’t see in many, or even in any other, castles – a stone circle. A puzzle, but not for long (there are plenty of information boards around, even a series of mosaics about the castle’s history down by the road that skirts around it down on the seaward side). It isn’t anywhere near as old as the castle, and it wasn’t added to make the place more picturesque back in the eighteenth century. The stones were in fact put there in 1916, to celebrate the Eisteddfod (Welsh literature and music festival) that took place in Aber in that year – the symbolism is that there are 13 stones, one for each of the 13 historic counties of Wales.

Life of Brian: the Aberystwyth sub-plot

With Good Friday coming up, our thoughts turned to movies – how about a suitably Biblical film? We were thinking of going to see Mary Magdalene, but it would appear that that’s not showing anywhere near us (apart from a midday screening with subtitles down at the Phoenix), so perhaps not. I then thought that it would be fun to dig out a DVD from our collection – Life of Brian or, to give it its full title, Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

We’ve seen it loads of times, of course. The 1979 Monty Python film is a classic and I can quote quite a few of the lines should I so desire (“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”, “I’m Brian and so’s my wife”, etc, etc). I can tell you a few random facts about it, too: George Harrison put up the money for it (thus leading to the formation of Hand Made Films, through which the ex-Beatle also funded movies like Mona Lisa and Withnail & I);Spike Milligan made a cameo appearance after the Python team found out that he happened to be on holiday down the road from where they were filming; and Michael Palin later revisited the scene of his ‘crucifixion’ in Tunisia when doing his 2002 travelogue Sahara (or to give it its full title, Sahara with Michael Palin).

Life of Brian is about one Brian of Nazareth, an ordinary guy living in first-century Roman-occupied Judea who was born in the stable next to the one in which Jesus was born and who gets mistaken for the Son of God. Due to its content the film was highly controversial at the time – to many, it was seen to be blasphemous although that may well be based on the mistaken assumption that Brian was meant to be a send-up of Jesus. They are actually shown to be two different characters in the film (when Jesus is shown – as a minor character, like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – he is played with respect in the Sermon on the Mount scene, with the humour coming from the people in the crowd who mis-hear what he says). This in turn leads one to assume that some of those who protested against the film, by way of picketing outside cinemas that were showing it, had not actually seen it. Michael Palin, by the way, was highly amused by the fact that the protesters included banner-carrying nuns, which makes one think of that episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal stage a half-hearted protest outside their local cinema when it shows a blasphemous film that’s been banned everywhere else, which only serves to let everyone know about the film and draw in the crowds. Certainly in the real-life case of Life of Brian, the protests did serve to give the film more publicity than it might otherwise have had.

Terry Jones, who directed Life of Brian, has always denied that it was blasphemous. He said that it was doubtless heretical, because it poked fun at religious dogma and the interpretation of religious belief, but not blasphemous as it didn’t attack religious belief itself.

Be that as it may, it’s reckoned that over 30 local authorities in the UK either banned it outright or insisted that the film carry an X-certificate, which amounted to the same thing (prior to 1982 in this country, an 18-certificate was called an X-certificate; Life of Brian had been given an AA-certificate, meaning that it could be seen by anyone who was 14 or over, and the distributors said it couldn’t be shown unless it had the original certification that had been given to it by the British Board of Film Censors). It’s been claimed that some of the councils which banned it didn’t actually have any cinemas within their boundaries, so as with those protesters who hadn’t seen the film there may well have been some righteous (or perhaps self-righteous) jumping-on-the-bandwagon going on. A few counties – most notably the Republic of Ireland and Norway – also banned it. Some of the bans lasted for decades, and it is arguable that the film got as much free publicity from the bans as it did from the protests.

One British local authority that banned Life of Brian was Torbay. It wasn’t until 2008 that the council permitted the film to be shown in the borough (which covers the Devon coastal towns of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham), and even then it was only because the film won an online vote at the English Riviera International Comedy Film Festival. A similar story followed in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth. Like many a British local authority, Aberystwyth Town Council works on the ‘Buggins’s turn’ principal when it comes to the question of who gets to be the mayor, meaning that it’s done by rotation – if a councillor on the ruling party (or ruling coalition) is there for long enough, chances are that he or she will at some point get to serve as mayor for a year, after which it’s someone else’s turn.

In Aberystwyth in 2008, it was the turn of Cllr Sue Jones-Davies. Before going into local politics, she had been an actress – and, among other things, she’d been in Life of Brian as Judith Iscariot (a member of the People’s Front of Judea – not the Judean People’s Front – who becomes Brian’s love interest). On becoming the mayor, she found out that Life of Brian was apparently still banned in the town. Naturally, she decided to overturn the ban by showing a charity screening. As it happened, she had remained friends with Terry Jones and so invited him along; his response was to ask if he could bring Michael Palin along too, which was of course agreed to! The screening happened in March 2009 and a fun time was had by all (how could an event attended by Terry Jones and Michael Palin not be fun?), and as well as raising money for good causes it also had the benefit of generating some publicity for Aberystwyth.

Funnily enough, though, there’s a little twist. As Aberystwyth was getting ready for the screening and the visit of two ex-Pythons, someone at the university did a bit of research and found that Aberystwyth Town Council had never actually banned Life of Brian. Council records show that they discussed banning it, but in the end they didn’t enforce a ban. Life of Brian was in fact shown in an Aberystwyth cinema in 1981. Still, the story of an actress-turned-mayor overturning the decades-old ban of a film she was in is a good one – perhaps too good to let the facts get in the way. Actually, it brings to mind a quote from a different film entirely – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

Harlech Castle

To Wales, where among other place to visit was Harlech, a small seaside town in Snowdonia best known for its castle which, by virtue of its cliff-top location, really dominates the surrounding area. It was built at the orders of Edward I during the 1280s, a time when that king also ordered the construction of the castles at Conway, Caernarfon and Beaumaris in order to secure his hold on North Wales; today, those castles (along with the town walls at Conway and Caernarfon) are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, described (by UNESCO) as the “finest examples of late 13^th century and early 14^th century military architecture in Europe”. It was the work of one James of Saint George, a master mason from Savoy who became Edward I’s castle-builder-in-chief.

If you’re coming down from the north, Harlech can be approached by two roads. There’s the high road – the B4573, which takes you into the town at the top – or you can stick on the A496 to approach it from the bottom. The latter, I reckon, gives you a better idea of how well the castle is situated as you approach the place, which I was very keen to explore. Well, it is one of the finest castles in a country which is renowned for having many, many castles! It just so happened that I was there on a quiet day, meaning that after I’d paid my entrance money at the café and visitor centre (the castle is run by Cadw, the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage) I basically had the place to myself. That doesn’t happen very often but it really is the best way to look around a castle!

From the top of the south-west turret of the gatehouse, the view is spectacular – across the bay (the tidal estuary of the Glaslyn and and Dwryd rivers), over places like Porthmadog and Portmeririon and towards the mountains inland – Snowdon, the tallest of the lot, can be seen from Harlech on a clear day. 

The bay itself used to be much bigger; nowadays, the castle is some distance from the sea but when it was built the sea came up to the cliff on which the castle stands. Harlech is not the only place to bear witness to the fact that coastlines change over time.

I had fun climbing the towers and exploring those narrow stone passages, some of which end rather abruptly at wooden barriers which look out onto courtyards where there were once floors (generally speaking, back in Medieval times the higher-status guests got the higher-up floors). 

A walk along the battlements, with more scope for the views of the coast and the mountains, was something that had to be done. At the gatehouse, I noted the grooves for the portcullises (Harlech Castle had three) and the murder-holes above the passageway and even arrow-loops to the sides, so that the castle’s defenders could fire on any attackers who got that far.

There were plenty of attackers over the years. Harlech Castle was besieged not long after it was built, during a Welsh rebellion against the English in 1294, and again during Owen Glendower’s rebellion in the early 1400s; after he managed to capture it in 1404, Glendower (or, as his name is written in Welsh, Glyndwr) used it as his headquarters for four years – it would fall to the English forces under the command of the Prince of Wales (the future Henry V) in 1409. It was also besieged during the Wars of the Roses, when it was held by the Lancastrians during the 1460s, becoming the last major Lancastrian stronghold to hold out against the Yorkists before it finally fell in 1468 after a seven-year siege; it was this event which inspired the song ‘Men of Harlech’. It was besieged again during the Civil War, becoming one of the last major Royalist fortresses to hold out before it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1647.

It was a cold day at the castle, though – it was December after all – so I eventually made it back to the café for a cup of tea and some lunch; I needed something warm, and thought it appropriate to order something Welsh; it turns out that the café does a good Welsh rarebit (they even make the cheese sauce themselves)…