On our June 2005 trip we stayed at a caravan park in Morfa Bychan, Porthmadog. It's a stones throw from Portmeirion and the location was ideal for exploring Snowdonia National Park.
Snowdonia National ParkThe name of the park comes from Snowdon, the highest mountain in England and Wales. The Welsh name of the park is Eryri National Park. Eryri means
place of the eagles. The National Park covers 823 square miles of the most beautiful and unspoilt countryside in NW Wales. Snowdonia is home to just over 26,000 people, who live and work in its towns and villages, and on its hill farms.
An estimated 6-10 million visitor days are spent here every year! If you imagine that spread evenly over every day of the year that's an average of nearly 22,000 people per day - 26 people per sq. mile... if I've done the math correctly :o)
Even some of the youngest rocks in Snowdonia are more than 400million years old. The Ice Age changed the landscape (the last of the glaciers did not disappear until fairly recently in geological terms, about 10,000 years ago) leaving behind the valleys, rocks, boulders and glacial lakes that we see today..
The following websites will give you more information on the National Park and it's attractions and history:
Snowdonia National Park Authority websiteClick on
USEFUL INFORMATION on the right hand side and you will get exactly that, from tourist information to doctors surgeries and so on.
Snowdonia Wales NetNational Parks in England Wales and Scotland website The Welsh Language You will find that the Welsh language is used widely. It is also useful to know the meanings of a few words of Welsh so you can discover the meaning of a lot of place names. For example, the word
Betws means
house of prayer and
Coed means
a wood so the place name
Betws-y-Coed means
prayer house in the wood. This
website is
very good and gives common prefixes to place names and examples.
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