Finding Your Happy

The joy of having a life size train set at the top of your garden!

Lifestyle House Film

Let’s sell the house. Let’s choose an estate agent with OnTheMarket. Let’s make a film about it. OK, but what sort of film? We looked at lots of films of houses in North Wales and there is quite a mixed bag from the cheap and cheerful to the professional. The professionally produced films all showed the houses to their best, with excellent camera work, but one film in particular caught our eye. Everything about it was just right and we said that’s what we want.

Watch those chimneys!

Whereas the other films were good, we found them a bit sterile, cold and lacking in character. But the one we liked invited us in, this was a lifestyle house film, a sub-genre we had been unaware of. Instead of seeing rooms, windows and gardens you saw people using and enjoying them.

After a brief exchange of emails ‘Gareth the Film’ came to meet us, to do a recce and talk through some ideas. The key question was to what extent would we be prepared to get into the spirit of it. Would we be filmed arriving by train? Picking some herbs? Playing with the dog? Catching some fish and putting them on the BBQ for friends who we’d meet at the platform? We said yes.

With the story and scenes agreed we had to procure some props, dress the rooms, make sure the garden was looking just right and invite some extras to be our guests for the BBQ scene.

A key element of the film was choosing the right music and we scoured through websites that provide thousands of tracks for use in films. After dismissing ones that sounded too much like Lord of the Rings, we ended up with a perfect choice – the rhythm was light and happy and most importantly it would fit in with the sounds of an approaching train. Our chosen track was 2 ½ minutes long, so that became the length of the film. Surely that wouldn’t take two days to film!? 

Gareth and John Hearn

As the first day approached we prayed that the forecast of good weather would hold, this was to be the day for outdoor filming and the BBQ. Gareth arrived with his partner-in-film, his father John, who operated various cameras and microphones and was also the ‘spotter’ for the flying of drones. Drones would be a key component of the production and for this we would need wind speeds of less than 17 mph.

It was a Sunday with just two trains scheduled which would pass Campbell’s Platform twice on the way up and twice on the way down. These were the four, time-critical slots of the day for the story to work.

As the first train approached I stuck out my hand to request it to stop and it did. I then asked the volunteer guard if it would be OK for me to get on and off a few times while I was filmed from different angles. Having pre-booked this with the management of the railway I was expecting ‘of course, no problem’. But instead I got ‘that’s the first I’ve heard of it’ and much later ‘I’ve got a connection to make’. But we were accommodated and it all worked well.

The story involved my returning with the shopping to the kitchen where Sue was boiling a kettle on the Rayburn for coffee. We were supposed to exchange a kiss as I put down the shopping bag and Sue poured the boiling water into the mugs. Sounds simple enough, but there were many takes and near misses!

After Sue was filmed doing some gardening, I tied a fly in the old barn, walked away with a split-cane rod and returned moments later with a couple of trout. Virtual fishing with the help of a Tesco’s fish counter is so convenient and guarantees success.

Our guests arrived on the down train and we greeted them on the platform. After the children played in the garden, throwing frisbee to Molly, we settled down by the BBQ, where the trout was cooking, and toasted with Champagne …. This was the critical closing scene!

The drone was in the air beneath the Scots Pine as we waited for the last down train of the day, hovering at eye level until Gareth heard the train’s whistle. It was then a swift flight away from the tree and up into the sky at the right angle to capture the house in front of the mountain with the train swinging into view. It worked perfectly.

On the second day of filming we filled in the key gaps of the story such as the rooms and the actual riding of the train. Continuity meant I had to wear the same clothes and carry the same shopping bag and contents – I looked fine, but the baguette was a bit limp.

For the interior filming a lot of use was made of the ‘slider’, a level track on which the camera could move sideways. It was very effective at conveying the sense of just walking into a room. Then there was the boom which captured the essence of the four-poster room. It started high to focus on the cruck beams, coming down to reveal the bed itself and the ancient Persian tapestry above.

It was an enjoyable experience working with Gareth and John and a couple of days later Gareth was back with two versions of the film to get our feedback as to which we preferred and whether any final edits were needed. We were over the moon with what we saw and are hopeful that this film is going to be a great success in attracting potential buyers to the house. For further details look at OnThe Market.

Gareth and John own and work for North Shore Productions. This is the film and I think it's fantastic. Everyone was a star but I think Molly upstaged us all.

Campbell’s Kingdom

In 1962 a retired colonel from the Black Watch regiment bought an old manor house in the Vale of Ffestiniog. He bought it on a whim at the auction of the Plas Tan y Bwlch estate and was doubly surprised that, not only was his bid accepted, but the bank manager agreed to the necessary loan.

Campbell building the signal box

The building was in a sorry state, with the roof leaking like a colander, a collapsed stone spiral staircase and over a hundred years of ‘buy to let’ neglect. It was a shadow of its former glory as the posh home to the Lloyds, minor nobles who traced their ancestry back to Llewelyn the Great.

Andrew Campbell spent the next, and the last, twenty years of his life restoring the house with the help of some grants and a lot of resourcefulness. His first major challenge was the delivery of materials – the only access was by foot up a steep path.

At this time, the volunteers, known as the ‘deviationists’, were building the deviation route to re-open the railway which had stopped operating at the end of WWII. The Central Electricity Generating Board had flooded the track with a reservoir, to create Britain’s first pumped-storage hydro station, and the new route needed to go above as opposed to through Llyn Tanygrisiau.

Starting from Porthmadog they had reached Campbell’s ‘new’ house and he offered them the use of his barn for accommodation and his help with the explosives. In return he was given a platform onto the railway and a running powers agreement which allowed him to drive his own engine on the line.

As well as for the delivery of materials, the railway was also a lifeline for Andrew’s daily commute, to the Merioneth Council office in Dolgellau, where he worked as the solicitor for the county. He had been a lawyer in the army, which is governed by the laws of England and Wales – this meant he could not practice law in Scotland and that’s why we had this charismatic Scotsman in Snowdonia.

In 1974 the story of his eccentric commute sparked the interest of the BBC which made a 30-minute documentary called ‘The Campbells Came by Rail’. They filmed Andrew parking his car at Tan y Bwlch station, where he hand-cranked his diesel engine, called The Colonel of course, and drove the mile up the line before parking on the siding. To get the shopping the fifty yards down from the platform to the house he used an electric aerial hoist.

By the time of the filming, the Colonel had just created a half-mile driveway through the nature reserve to the house, which would have detracted from the story, so the cameraman was careful to avoid any shots that showed the new road.

As well as the commute, the half hour documentary also covered the restoration of the house including some of Andrew’s carpentry. He built ancient looking doors and furniture out of reclaimed timber and left his mark in many places such as the wooden beam over the fireplace in the main bedroom. In the middle is his adopted coat of arms and on either end of the beam are Andrew and his second wife Mary. Andrew is dressed in his medieval clothes next to a heart with an M in the middle for Mary. On the opposite side is Mary with her heart beating A for Andrew.

Colonel Campbell died in 1982, the year that the line was re-opened all the way to Blaenau. There’s a memorial stone dedicated to him at the Dduallt railway spiral, but his epitaph has to be Campbell’s Platform, which together with the medieval house were Campbell’s Kingdom.

His twenty-year mission to restore the medieval Plas y Dduallt was a brief but important chapter in its long history. You can see the fruits of his labour in the above film which has been made to promote the sale of Campbell's Kingdom.

The Lloyds of Dduallt

When we moved into the house we inherited lots of documents, articles and letters full of titbits and speculation on its history with building dates ranging from the 15^th to the 17^th century.  Then we joined the Dating Old Welsh Houses project and from the science of dendrochronology we now know the first house (west) was constructed around timbers that were felled between 1559 and 1565 and the second (east) house from fellings between 1600 and 1604. These two houses, on a cliff overlooking the Vale of Ffestiniog, were joined together at the first floor although we don’t know when; the tithe map (1842) shows them separate. 

 One of the other things we inherited with the house was a framed copy of the Dduallt page out of Griffith’s Pedigrees. The full title of the book, first published in 1914, is ‘Pedigrees of Anglesey and Caernarfonshire Families’ with each page tracing the genealogy structured around significant houses. From this we have leapt to the likely conclusion that the first house was built by John of Dol y Ddwyryd, an older way of describing Plas Dol Moch in the valley below, and the second house by his son David Lloyd. Unlike the tree ring dating this is not a fact - John Edward Griffith did not always get it right!

Lloyds are named in documents connected with the house all the way through to 1903 but it’s a common name and we can’t (yet) prove the Lloyds of the 1840s are related to the previous Lloyds. 

Cores from beams with crumbly sap wood at the end

Early history is sketchy and confusing in places. David Lloyd, builder of the second house, married into the Pengwern family, as did his grandfather.  One of David’s sons married into the Park family of Llanfrothen whilst his oldest son John Lloyd inherited Dduallt and married Margaret, daughter of John ap Richard of Ffestiniog, who had also married into the Park family!

The Civil War must have been tricky times for families such as these. There is evidence that the current grand house at Dol Moch, built around 1643 by John Jones, was used as a royalist headquarters.  There are also stories that Dduallt was used as the headquarters of the parliamentary forces and billet for the officers during the siege of Harlech. But the Lloyds survived.

There are several references to John Lloyd, including the tax payment of five hearths in 1662 and his death in 1665 without children and thus his nephew Hugh Lloyd inherited.

Hugh married Katherine, daughter of Robert Evans of Tan y Bwlch, and there is mention in Hanes Plwyf Ffestiniog of a cupboard at Dduallt with the inscription H.Ll 1672 K.E.  In 1684 Hugh Lloyd died and his will, written early that year, contains the following provision ..... ‘unto my daughter Catherine Lloyd all that tenement and lands known as Bron-y mannod ... for and during the terme of five years’. This property, a 100 acre farm just beneath Manod Mawr, remained a part of the Dduallt estate all the way through to 1920. Why should Dduallt have a long term satellite that far away? Bron y Manod abutted the Pengwern estate which in turn abutted Dol Moch and thence Dduallt. We suspect, but can’t prove, that the power and influence that created Dduallt emanated from the Pengwern family. Maybe a marriage settlement?

Within the same will Hugh Lloyd goes on to leave his ‘manhor houses’ to his eldest son Robert Lloyd including the four wainscot bedsteads at Dduallt and the two at Bron y Manod.  Locally this type of bedstead is referred to as a ‘gwely wenscot’ and we have obtained some pictures from St Fagan’s. In essence it is a bit like a four poster enclosed on three sides with wood panelling and either a sliding door or thick curtain on the fourth:  imagine how cosy that must have been, a bit like camping in the bedroom. 

Gwely Wenscot (St Fagan's Museum)

 Appended to the will is the inventory and valuation for probate which lists the total value of possessions at £167 14sh 00d. Included in the list are the following livestock: 6 oxen, 18 cows, 12 bullocks and heifers, 1 horse and mare, working horses and wild horses, 219 sheep, 1 hog and 59 goats.  Descendants of these goats are still here today!

Robert Lloyd married Anne, daughter of Griffith Vaughan of Dolmelynllyn who entered into an agreement with Katherine Lloyd (Robert’s mother) in 1693 to pay a marriage portion of £170.   Robert and Anne were quite prolific spawning nine children including Elizabeth who married into the Brondanw family.

By the time of Robert’s first will the eldest son Hugh had died and Griffith, the second eldest, is or is about to become an attorney at law. In his subsequent will of 1753 ‘being far stricken in years but of a sound and perfect disposing mind and memory (praise be God)’ he leaves five shillings to his by now eldest son William Lloyd and other legacies including the yearly interest of the principal sums of two hundred pounds to both Evan and Robert Lloyd who are described ungraciously in Griffith’s Pedigrees as ‘idiots’. To outlive two sons and have another two described as idiots is dreadful bad fortune.

In 1747 William Lloyd had married Catherine Jones, daughter of Evan John Owen of Dolwreiddog, and together they had five children. William Lloyd’s will was dated 10^th February 1774, just twelve days before he died. Neither William nor his wife Catherine were able to sign their names but simply placed their mark. We suspect their eldest son had died and therefore John Lloyd inherited with £200 legacies for two of his sisters but no mention of his youngest sister Catherine who goes on to marry Rice Price from the Parish of ‘Dolgelly’ in 1781.

There is an implication that Catherine and Rice Price did not meet family expectations. In her mother’s will, Catherine Lloyd, is the following provision ‘to my grand-daughter Catherine Price daughter of Rice Price Mariner the sum of twenty pounds the interest thereof to be allowed my daughter Catherine Price (being her mother) for and during the term of the natural life of her my said daughter Catherine Price to her own use free and uncontrolled by her husband Rice Price’. What had Rice Price done to offend his mother in law?

John Lloyd had six children all of whom were said to be of Dduallt at baptism, the last one being the second son, William Lloyd, in 1793. William celebrated his 21^st birthday at the Pengwern Arms on 5^th May 1814 ‘when his friends and tenantry were sumptuously entertained’. In a subsequent newspaper report in August 1817 we learn of his marriage ‘At Corwen, William Lloyd, Esq. of Dduallt in the County of Merioneth, to Margaret youngest daughter of Mr Richard Horne, Solicitor, Ruthin’. The parish register for Corwen records the marriage on 1^st August with William being of Ruthin parish. Presumably he was no longer living at Dduallt.

Between 1813 and 1827 there are four baptism records in the parish registers showing children from Dduallt with surnames of Roberts, Edwards and Williams but no Lloyd.  

In 1832 the Ffestiniog Railway Act of Parliament was passed which included an appendix listing the landowners against whom compulsory purchase orders could be served.  Trustees of the late William Lloyd were the owners of the Dduallt section.  His widow Margaret is recorded in the 1841 census living in Vale Road, Ruthin, with (probably) a younger brother and his wife. She is shown as being  'independent’.

By 1842 Dduallt and Bron y Manod were owned by the Rt Rev Lord Robert Ponsonby Tottenham from County Wicklow who was also Bishop of Clogher. The property passed down the line to the next two generations of Tottenhams who lived between Ireland and Plas Berwyn in Denbighshire. Both held local positions of office including being a JP and Deputy Lieutenant of Merionethshire.  Why were they in the Vale of Ffestiniog? Maybe they were railway or quarrying investors.

At this time what had once been a minor noble’s house was very different with the 1841 census showing it split into three units housing a total of fifteen people. To complicate matters a Thomas Lloyd and his family had spread themselves between Glanyrafon, a farmhouse at the bottom of the hill and part of the Dduallt estate, and Dduallt. At present there is no evidence this Lloyd family was related to the original Lloyd family. The first unit of Dduallt housed Richard Lloyd and Elizabeth with their five labourers and two servants. Maybe not surprisingly the second unit housed a railway foreman and his family. In the 1851 census the foreman had been replaced by a copper miner, which may give a date for the mine working just outside the house, and we learn that Richard Lloyd is farming 665 acres. 

Richard died in 1852 and David Lloyd took over the Dduallt farm tenancy having moved up from Glanyrafon.   His father, Thomas Lloyd, and other members of the family were still in Glanyrafon in 1851 but by 1861 they were living at Dduallt with David being the farmer and Thomas retired.

In 1903 David Lloyd died and by 1910 the tenant at Dduallt was Morris Thomas, with his wife and three children in residence at the 1911 census. Morris was the farmer until his death in 1927. By 1920 the farm had been sold at auction and become part of the Tan y Bwlch estate. More tenants followed until World War II when the house became home to 18 evacuees and their schoolmistress from Liverpool. After the war the reverend Hopkinson rented it for five shillings a year using it as a holiday home. One of the children, Barney Hopkinson, recently came back and described how dilapidated the place was. By great coincidence Margaret Dunn was a guest of the Hopkinsons in 1959 and can remember staring into space at the top of the collapsed stone spiral staircase.

The death of Hilda Inge in the 1950s triggered massive death duties resulting in the 1962 auction of the Tan y Bwlch estate. Colonel Andrew Henry Knight Campbell, formerly of the Black Watch regiment, went to the auction and ended up owning Plas y Dduallt. For the next twenty years he dedicated himself to the restoration of the dilapidated house adding, to the annoyance of historians, many embellishments. 

His epitaph is Campbell’s Platform, a private platform on the Ffestiniog Railway from which passing steam trains can still be hailed by occupants of the house. He got this through allowing the deviationists, volunteers building the deviation route to Blaenau, to stay in his barn. Also for using his explosives licence from army days to blast through the rocks.

At that time there was no vehicle access to the house and this was the subject of a classic BBC documentary in 1974 called The Campbells Came by Rail which described his commute from the office in Dolgellau, where he was county solicitor, by car to Tan y Bwlch station and thence on his private engine ‘The Colonel’ to Campbell’s Platform. At the time of the filming he had already bulldozed a zig-zag hairpin route up the cliff face through the national nature reserve so the camera crew took great pains to exclude this from the camera as this would have spoilt the story.

His widow Mary Campbell sold to Margaret and Tony Eaton in 1984 who added their artistic mark on the house and started the self-catering holiday business. This continued with many more improvements organised by Ruth and Ray Lewis between 1990 and 2004 including central heating and a tarmac driveway. Huw Jenkins and Sue Farrand are the current ‘caretakers’.

In the 1841 census there were fifty two people living in the five buildings on Dduallt farmland. In the census of 2011 there were just five!

VACANCY at Campbell’s Platform

A whistle blows – time to put the kettle on! Bubble… rumble… bubble… rumble… CLICK! The 'bubble' stops but the rumble gets louder. With mug in hand I walk outside and wave to the first train of the day from Porthmadog to Blaenau as it passes Campbell’s Platform.

Trains punctuate our days and mark the seasons. Winter is very quiet; when the ground goes to sleep, so do the trains, waking briefly for a festive fling after Christmas, and to raise children's spirits at half term. By Easter they are back in full swing, and it's time to tidy the platform and its tubs of primulas and daffodils – both ignored by sheep and goats. What’s wrong with them? Penstemon and wild geranium also resist the fate of most of the flowers we plant.

Pink… blue… pink… blue… and then yellow. Not flowers, but two, four, two, four and then six trains a day as the timetable ratchets up to carry ever more passengers in the run up to summer. The grass on the platform will need careful mowing; not in the sense that it's a bowling green, but because of the profusion of wild flowers. Bird's-foot trefoil, in particular, needs a high setting on the mower.

Summer passes all too soon, we’re back into the pink and blue phase of the timetable and then BANG! Doors slam and cameras, tripods and step ladders alight onto the platform carried by 50 or more enthusiasts – it’s the annual photographic charter. The boss man speaks into his walkie talkie: ‘OK Roger, fire her up!’ Roger does the necessary, clouds of steam rise above trees and the train swings into view at the start of Tank Curve. Frantic bursts of camera clicks capture the scene in a few thousand versions. ‘Sorry Roger, the light faded, can you do that again?’ Then winter is back and it’s quiet again. Will we get snow? Building and decorating the Colonel Campbell snowman is Sue’s speciality.

So far we have enjoyed thirteen cycles of the seasons since moving to Plas y Dduallt, the ancient house that comes with Campbell’s Platform, and a cottage known to the Deviationists as Dduallt Mess. However, our children have left home and it’s time for our next adventure – so the hunt is on for a new caretaker. Applicants should have a passion for old houses and steam trains.

The story of the restoration of the house and the building of the platform are nicely told in The Campbells Came by Rail, filmed by the BBC in 1974. Without the Colonel, there would be no Campbell’s Kingdom to inherit. We are the third family since then to have taken on the caretaker role of owning the house, and each has left its legacy. The Eatons were arty and left a four-poster bed with painted panels. The central panel is a portrait of the house with Moelwyn Bach behind and on either side are panels of voluptuous nudes. Guests say they dream well in that bed. The Lewis’s were both musical and practical. Sadly they didn’t leave their grand piano but they did leave central heating and tarmac on the drive.

Our legacy will be an improved landscape and the telling of the house's history. Through the Dating Old Welsh Houses project, we have had the beams dated to the trees being felled from 1559 in the old house and 1600 in the new house. The new house is the bit that you see from the footpath with the balcony and arrow slits below.

As part of the project we have also looked into the people who have lived in the house. It was the centre of a 600-acre farm which, in the 1841 census, had five dwellings housing 52 people including a railway foreman. In the 2011 census there were just five people living in two dwellings.

The house was built by the Lloyd family and the earliest will we have found is dated 1684. In the name of God Amen I Hugh Lloyd of Dduallt … gent being sicke in body but of good and perfect memory praised be god …. His possessions at probate listed the livestock which included the ‘nine and fifty goats’, descendants of which still entertain us with their antics as they roam their hereditary lands.

As for neighbours, the nearest house, half a mile down the line, has been empty for several years. This is the well-known former railway inspector’s house at Coed y Bleiddiau, the plot of land for which was once part of Dduallt farm. Happily, the Landmark Trust have set about restoring this house and soon there will be new occupants with which to share this paradise.

So, if you would like to apply for the post of caretaker at Campbell's, which comes with the house, please contact our estate agents Walter Lloyd Jones on 01341 422278.

If you'd like a flavour of what it's like to live in a historic house with a platform onto the Ffestiniog, this fantastic film was made by North Shore Productions:

Trains over the Roof

There’s something really relaxing about water flowing through the garden; the stream, various ponds and waterfalls. But the best water feature of all is steam – steam trains gliding over the roof of the house. Running water and running trains. All the mod cons at Campbell's Kingdom.

One Swallow does not a Summer Make

Merddin Emrys marks the start of summer

Yes, but the first train at the end of March marks the start of the summer timetable and from now until autumn there will be trains every day.

Next week we’ll have some ‘blue days’, that’s the colour coding on the timetable for four trains a day, and then over Easter we’ll ratchet up to yellow with six – that’s a dozen times I’ll be waving to people as they trundle past Campbell’s Platform.

Somehow the novelty of waving never fades.

Depending on the direction of the wind you can hear the whistle of the train from way down the line, but the first train managed to sneak up the valley, and I had to make a dash for it ..... as you can see in this short film!