I’m in North Wales, doing Britain’s longest possible bike ride. Not distance, but word length: from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion near Barmouth, fifty-odd miles away. A day ride that genuinely breaks down barriers. Such as the margins on web pages.
You won’t find either name on the OS Maps. The official version of the first (village) is Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, and the second (train stop) is Golf Halt. The two longer names were concocted for publicity purposes: ‘Llanfair…’ etc around 1869; ‘Gorsaf…’ etc – in an attempt to outdo the first – in about 1986.
REMEMBER MY NAME
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (58 letters in English, but only counted as 51 in Welsh) is the contrived but well-established name of a village on Anglesey, North Wales, just over the Menai Bridge. It’s regarded as the second-longest single-word place name in the world (a hill in New Zealand technically beats it, but offers far less visitor fun).
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll or Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll is its official name. This is what appears on the road signs and OS maps.
Llanfairpwll is how the village’s train station is referred to by National Rail.
Llanfair PG is an abbreviation occasionally used (in a postal context for instance).
LPG is the three-letter abbreviation for the train station used by National Rail.
But while ‘Llanfair…’ etc stuck, as people took a fancy to its just-absurd-enough length, ‘Gorsaf…’ never did. You only see the word these days in obscure web pages. Such as this one.
I couldn’t resist the idea of cycling between the two, especially as the route takes in some decent railtrails, some super scenery round Eryri (or ‘Snowdonia’, as old people call it), two remarkable bridges, the world’s steepest street (allegedly), and a legend about a dog that’s actually a load of cobblers.
WELL, WE TRIED
Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion (67 letters in English, 62 in Welsh) is the contrived and now deprecated name for a small halt on Fairbourne Railway, just south of Barmouth in North Wales.
Golf Halt is the ‘official’ name for the train stop. Both versions appear on the sign.
(It’s for a future magazine article; I hope their page layout software has good hyphenation options.)
For convenience, I’ll refer to the two monster-named places from now on as ‘LPG’ and ‘Golf Halt’ – see the boxes for more info.
I started from LPG train station on a grey, damp, chilly morning, as it always seems to be in Wales whenever I’m there. (The station is a request stop: you have to ask the conductor to let you off. I wonder how many people have missed it because it took too long to say.)
Transport for Wales celebrate the long version of the name on several signs and give plenty of photo opportunities, though scaffolding round the main station building detracted a little from that today.
This often seems to be the case wherever in the world I go. My lifetime photo album boasts all the famous big-ticket tourist sights – Notre Dame, Sydney Opera House, the Taj Mahal – spoiled by building works. Clearly a team of international guerrilla builders anticipate my movements and erect scaffolding, rubble chutes, hoardings and barriers in front of attractions I want to see. Dammit, they even did it for the Sagrada Familia.
But I had several other opportunities to celebrated LPG’s jumbo moniker. The Co-op proudly sports the full version on its shopfront. The Volvo dealership also spells it all out, straight-faced. And the expansive gift shop offers a further variety of signs for the Instagrammer with a very wide-angle lens.
So started my ride. I followed the main road to the Menai Bridge, Thomas Telford’s 1826 showpiece that was the world’s first major suspension bridge.
At last night’s campsite I chatted to a group of very amiable German students on a field trip. They told me enthusiastically how much they admired Britain’s groundbreaking reputation for remarkable civil engineering two hundred years ago. We can be proud that we are still a world leader in once being good at things.
The Menai Bridge itself was full of scaffolding and roadworks – see what I mean? – and once back on the mainland I followed NCN8 south along mundane but just-about-OK bike paths to Caernarfon. I did this route the other way in 2020, when I biked the Wales End to End, and I remembered now just how unmemorable some of these stretches were.
Caernarfon’s rugged castle dominates the square – actually no, cars dominate the square – and fortunately it was too early for the nearby ‘smallest bar in Wales’ to be open. Otherwise I might have been tempted to visit, and ride instead to the biggest one, wherever that is.
South from here NCN8 is a railtrail – all tarmac, but often irritatingly tree-rooty. And, as with just about every railtrail in Britain, it’s like a supermarket doughnut. It looks great on paper, but soon proves dull and stodgy, and you abandon it halfway through.
Which is what I did, somewhere at Penygroes, cutting across through the hills east on the B4418. At last, some scenery! Some hills! A quiet road, too, which climbed up excitingly but not threateningly over a modest but photogenic pass. It funnelled me on to the A4085, a B road in all but name, and it was downhill to Beddgelert.
I passed through Beddgelert on that 2020 End to End, so didn’t need to revisit the main draw of this quaint and characterful little stone-cottage village: the grave of the faithful dog Gelert. The story goes that the luckless hound was mistakenly slaughtered by his master who believed it had killed his son, when in fact it had faithfully saved the boy’s life from a wolf.
And that’s absolutely true. Well, true that it’s a story.
And that it’s a grave. Just one without a dog in it. Because the story is cobblers. Gelert never existed.
Anyway, I carried on, from Nosuchdog to Porthmadog, where I took a break from this route to explore the Llyn Peninsula. I’d be back here in three days’ time to pick up where I left off: 58 letters down, 67 to go.
Miles today: 39
Miles since LPG: 39