Inspiration
PORTMEIRION FESTIVAL NO 6
Portmeirion Festival No 6 is coming to Snowdonia for the third year running and is set to be the best yet. The festival has made the Daily Mail’s the top 10 UK Festivals as well as being voted Best New Festival and Best Small Festival. It is magical – hard not to be when the location is Portmeirion Village in North Wales. Clough Williams-Ellis created this little piece of the ‘Italian riviera’ in wales during the earlier part of the 1900 – a true visionary. A visit here transports you to a fantasy world of beautiful buildings and gardens. So what is it all about? They say its an intimate, bespoke weekend of music, arts and culture….it doesn’t disappoint. This year sees the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, Kellis, Beck and Nineh Cherry take to centre stage and the DJ line up is pretty good too with legendary Laurent Garnier, nordic disco king Todd Terje,…
Top 5 Mountain Biking in North Wales
Nothing comes close to the feel of a rugged tread plunging into the fresh soil of an undiscovered path, rushing through undergrowth, scaling up a rocky trail and emerging, triumphant, to be greeted by a breathtaking vista of endless coastlines and rugged, forested mountains – unless you have found your way to cosy pub at the end of it all as well, of course. With some of the world’s most beautiful untouched territory at hand, the North Wales has just about everything that an avid mountain biking enthusiast can possibly thirst for – and we’ve got five fantastic routes that you’ll just have to put on that 2014 itinerary. Coed y Brenin Meaning “King’s Wood” in Welsh, this spectacular piece of land rolls out in true Welsh regal style, imposing and supernatural in its scale and presence. Part of Snowdonia National Park, it features several single-track courses as well as a dual-slalom course, and is a…
Horse whisperer tames Carneddau ponies in Snowdonia
This story really caught my eye. I’ve been fascinated by the wild horses of the Carneddau mountains in Snowdonia since I was a little boy. I was lucky enough to see three of the ponies whilst walking with an elderly aunt near Sychnant. We came upon them unexpectedly one cloudy morning. The encounter caught us and them by surprise. The horses stopped to look at us for half second before charging off across the fields into the mist. My auntie went on to explain how they had never been tamed and how the English king, Henry the VIII, had failed in his attempt to have the horses “exterminated”. They were truly magical and lived in the imagination of this 9 year old boy for a long time afterwards. But as ever, their future in our modern world is far from certain. So, in an effort to make the breed more commercially viable for Snowdonia farmers, efforts…
