Your own private hideaway: Welsh mountain cottage with railway platform
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Version 0 of 1. An isolated, derelict cottage, perched on a ledge of Welsh mountainside might not strike everyone as the ideal holiday retreat. However one feature will make the heart of every railway enthusiast beat faster: it has a private platform from which residents can hail regular passing steam trains. Coed y Bleiddiau – or the wood of the wolves, named according to legend that the last wolf in Wales was killed nearby – was inhabited as recently as 2006. But since the death of the last tenants, who had lived in the cottage since the 50s, it has fallen into dereliction, a mournful landmark to tourists who come from all over the world to ride the steep railway line between Blaenau Ffestiniog, once the heart of the largest slate quarries in the world, and the harbour at Porthmadog 13 miles below. A major rescue plan has now been agreed, which should see the cottage inhabited once more by summer 2017, with the trains adding an extra stop at the tiny private platform. The Landmark Trust has a reputation for restoring historical oddities and transforming them into holiday homes – including a Greek temple pigsty and a giant pineapple gardener’s lodge – and has now entered into partnership with the Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland railway trust to bring the cottage back to life. Emergency work on the cottage has already been carried out to stop the rain pouring through the shattered roof and rotting the interiors. A £400,000 appeal is being launched for full restoration of the building, which cost just £350 to build in the 1860s. All the construction materials will be brought to the site by the same route used by the Victorian builders – railway wagon. Anna Keay, the director of the trust, said it was determined to rescue the abandoned building. “Coed y Bleiddiau has much in common with some of Landmark’s earliest projects: it is modest in scale but deeply special for its place in our history and landscape.” The Ffestiniog railway, the oldest narrow-gauge steam railway in the world, which closed in the late 30s and was restored and reopened in the 50s by enthusiasts, is the reason the cottage was built in 1863, as a home for the supervisor and his large family. The trains are still the only way of getting to the house, apart from a steep scramble up a footpath from the nearest road. Related: My life in travel The supervisor, Henry Hovenden, and his two wives reared seven children in the cottage and he continued living there and working for the railway until two years before his death in 1903. Later tenants included the composer Granville Bantock, a friend of Edward Elgar, who dedicated his second Pomp and Circumstance March to him. Bantock rented the cottage for 10 years as a retreat from his work as professor of music at Birmingham University and founder of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Bantock’s daughter recalled that groceries came just as they had in Hovenden’s day, with a list and a basket handed to the engine driver on the up train, and brought back full of provisions by the driver of the down train. Harry Philby, the father of the spy Kim Philby, was also a tenant of Coed y Bleiddiau. The railway was built to take slate down the steep mountainside to the sea to ship across the world. As the quarries grew, the community of scattered farmsteads became a boomtown, with the residents of Blaenau Ffestiniog growing to 11,000, twice its present population. The original railway ran down the mountainside by gravity, with the wagons hauled back up by horses, but was converted to steam to keep pace with production. In the 20th century, the quarries gradually declined and closed as a result of rising costs and cheaper imported slate, and the railway seemed doomed. Passionate 50s enthusiasts worked hundreds of thousands of unpaid hours to restore the track and build new sections, and who are still crucial to its survival today. The railway, which runs wagons and locomotives that are more than 150 years old, is now one of the UK’s top tourist attractions, and the Landmark Trust expects keen interest in the holiday cottage with an unmatched view of the tracks. |