Portmeirion Village Stamp

April 23rd, 2012

Pretty as a Picture

For our guests and customers that have been to Portmeirion, it’ll be no surprise that this beautiful and bizarre village will feature on a Royal Mail Stamp Collection.

The Stamp Collection will celebrate British Heritage and Culture, and features 26 unique location across the UK – each letter of the alphabet representing an iconic place around the country. Any guesses for which letter Portmeirion will be for?

And if you haven’t yet been to Portmeirion, then now is definitely the time to visit. Springtime is when the lush gardens start to bloom and the wilderness of the landscape behind the village really comes to life.

It’s just a 10 minute drive from the Oakeley Arms to Portmeirion, so why not visit during your stay with us?

Wonderful, weird, unsettling or idyllic? Welsh or Italian? Portmeirion is Wales’ village with a double identity.

Precariously balanced on the Welsh coast edge, and looking as if buildings from a quintessential Italian village have been picked up and thrown at the hill to land chaotically, this bizarre, but beautiful place has been attracting tourists, artists, philosophers and Hollywood for years.

Portmeirion is the work of eccentric, but amazingly talented Welsh architect Clough Williams Ellis. After the end of the First World War, he bought up a crumbling old estate near the traditional Welsh harbour town of Porthmadog, describing the land as “a neglected wilderness” and set about transforming it into his idea of utopia; a perfect coastal village that paid more than a passing tribute to the glamorous air of the Mediterranean. It became his life’s work, and between 1925 and 1975, he worked tirelessly on designed, building and renovating the village.

Today, the village is run as a hotel and self-catering apartments, incorporating a restaurant, cafes, shops and ice cream parlours.