Andrew Galloway unlocks the secrets of Llanfrothen
IN THE EARLY HOURS of 10 December 1951, the architect Clough WilliamsEllis and his wife, Amabel, were woken by the pungent smell of smoke. Rushing to the ground floor, WilliamsEllis discovered his beloved Welsh terrier, Pennant, lying dead at the door of the family library, the room beyond engulfed in flames. The blaze having consumed the household’s only telephone, a messenger was sent to the village to alert the fire brigade at Porthmadog, some 10km away. When the operator finally put the call through to the on-duty fire officer, the messenger was informed that his appeal
for help had not been needed. Fed on bone-dry 16th Century timber floors, panels and partitions, and fanned by a ferocious gale, the flames had quickly engulfed the entire building and were clearly visible against the night sky, even from Porthmadog fire station.
Despite the attendance of five fire engines and the heroic efforts of their crews, by morning light it was evident that the fire had consumed nearly everything of the 17th Century four-storey central block of Plas Brondanw, the Williams-Ellises’ ancestral home. The timber-framed roof having collapsed, little but the exterior stone walls remained standing, and these alone by virtue of the Jacobean architects who had built them a metre thick.
The restoration of Plas
Brondanw was no simple task, not least because of postwar rationing. Construction materials were both in short supply and subject to strict cost limits. Nonetheless, Williams-Ellis, practical and principled as ever, was able to scrape together an assemblage of second-hand artefacts, including dressed stone, roofing tiles, antique timber doors, stone mantelpieces, and other fixtures and fittings. He added more from his own reserves held at Portmeirion, the Italianate village located on the Penrhyndeudraeth peninsula, which he conceived and built during the interwar period. A nationwide shortage of steel joists was overcome by the use of old tramway rails recovered from long abandoned slate quarries located where the Plas Brondanw estate extended into the Moelwyn Mountains.
The restoration of
Plas Brondanw took two years to complete and is commemorated in stone in the shape of a flaming urn, positioned high above an artificial cascade located in the woods to the south of the property. From this viewpoint the eye is draw beyond the topiary avenues and pollarded symmetry of the gardens to the alluvial salt flats of Traeth Mawr, about which the andesite spires of the Welsh mountains gather on all sides in majestic splendour.
Following his death in 1978, Clough Williams-Ellis was cremated. His ashes were added to the chamber of a marine rocket, which on New Year’s Eve 1998 was shot into the night sky, high above the Glaslyn estuary to the south of the village of Portmeirion.