Road trip A prisoner to peace in Portmeirion

LAST time I took my father for a test drive it was tough going as he had serious mobility problems. Having gently shoehorned him into the passenger seat of a Discovery I drove down to

Cornwall to visit old holiday haunts. It was our last but one outing together, and what a jolly time we had.

This time it was rather easier as I was carrying his ashes to scatter on the Mawddach estuary at Penmaenpool, at the foot of Cader Idris, before heading up to Portmeirion with my mother. We used to come to North Wales to walk the forbidding mountain and visit the tearooms of Dolgellau, Barmouth and Fairbourne. Or dad would scuba dive in the Blue Pool while I beachcombed with my mother at Friog.

We swung into the George III hotel, an 18th Century riverside coaching inn, past which the Cambrian Coast line connected the Midlands with North Wales in the days of steam. The great Welsh poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was inspired to write the short poem Penmaen Pool in the visitors’ book when he stayed here in 1876.

It was outside the George in the summer of 1966 that an old pleasure cruiser, overwhelmed by a tidal surge, was broken against the spars of the toll bridge, with the loss of 15 lives.

It was a bright day and we took a plastic cupful of dad to scatter on the Mawddach