In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
I'm nearing the end of an inspiring journey through England
to the northwest tip of Wales.
With each step, I've learned ever more
about the extraordinary world of Victorian railways.
I'm exploring Britain with the help of my 19th-century Bradshaw's Guide,
and every day I'm amazed by how much is packed into this small volume.
Even tiny Welsh villages are mentioned here.
And it makes me think about those Victorian railway builders.
Nothing was off limit to the Victorian railway men.
They could put railways even to the top of a mountain.
Today I'll be following my "Bradshaw's Guide" to the highest peak in Wales,
rising above stunning scenery in the Snowdonia National Park.
I'll be getting to the top by train, of course...
It's magnificent. And it's really imposing.
...before wrapping my tongue around the Welsh language...
So, it's fairly easy, really.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn- drobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
...and tasting one of Wales's Salt.
It really hits you from the sides of the tongue.
It's got a wonderful texture. It's really crunchy, isn't it?
I'm completing my trek
from Ledbury via Chester
and all across North Wales.
Now I'm headed for Snowdon,
before crossing the Menai Straits to Anglesey and the port of Holyhead.
Today, after ascending Snowdon, I'll travel on to Llanfair
and the final stop on this route, Holyhead.
Just before I rejoin the main line, there's one tourist attraction
that I must see recommended to me by George Bradshaw. Mount Snowdon.
And he suggests that here at Llanberis I should hire ponies and guides.
But he says, if you want to dispense with those assistants,
then a stout pair of legs is the best thing for getting to the top.
What he couldn't know was that at the very end of the Victorian era,
a wonderful new facility would be provided to save your pins
and still deliver you safely to the summit. A railway.
For the first part of my journey, I start in Llanberis
to catch the train that will pant its way to Snowdon's summit.
- Morning. - How are you, OK?
- Thank you. - You're in section A. Here.
Thank you very much indeed.
Since 1896, travellers have been able to ride to the top
on what's called a rack railway, a system that was devised by the Swiss.
Doug Blair, chief engineer of the line, accompanies me.
The technology we're following dates from the 1890s.
The railway goes up such steep inclines
that if it was a normal friction railway,
you would simply slide back down the inclines.
So you've basically got a rack,
like teeth sticking out in between the two tracks,
and then you've got a pinion that meshes in with the rack
and drives the locomotive up the mountain.
So the pinion is rotating.
- The pinion's rotating. - Under power.
The train travels at a sedate 5mph.
When the railway opened,
it cut the journey time to the summit to just one hour,
much quicker than the time most of us would take to walk it.
I imagine that when this opened just before Queen Victoria's death,
it must've been a great hit with visitors and tourists.
I would imagine it must've been.
Victorians loved Snowdon because prior to the railway,
you would've had a pony take you to the top of Snowdon.
There's even the ruins of stables close to the top of the mountain,
and there were actually two small hotels on the summit.
So when they came to build the railway,
they had a pretty good expectation
that there was going to be a ready supply of tourists, of Victorians,
hungry to get to the top.
I think they had a captive market
and they were probably onto a good idea at the time.
Once the line was finished, this popular mountain attracted even more visitors.
These days, around half a million people a year journey to the summit,
whether on foot or by rail.
I'm travelling with George Bradshaw's mid-19th century guide.
I think he'd be very thrilled that this Victorian railway
is still running today,
still with the same locomotion that it started with in 1896.
And we're also doing what we did in 1896.
We're taking tourists to the top of Snowdon.
"Bradshaw's" refers to Snowdon by its Welsh name,
which translates as "eagle top".
At that time, getting to the summit of this wild and rugged peak was tough
and few people in those days had experience of taller mountains overseas.
Now, if you're used to the Himalayas or the Andes or the Alps,
you'll think that British mountains are tiny,
and Snowdon is just over 1,000 metres, 3,500 feet, and yet, it's magnificent.
And yet, somehow, it's really imposing.
Well, it's quite blowy up here.
The Snowdonia National Park covers over 800 square miles.
My "Bradshaw's Guide" tells me that, on a good day,
you can see as far as the Isle of Man and Yorkshire.
I've come here on one of those days when the cloud shifts by the second.
Every now and again it parts
and I get this magnificent view over there towards Anglesey.
And Bradshaw says, "Snowdon is composed of four great ridges,
separated by vast precipitous cwms 1,000 foot deep."
"They unite in a single peak, the conspicuous head,
3,570 feet above the sea, the highest point in Wales or England."
"This is Snowdon proper."
Magnificent.
The railway makes the top highly accessible but some feel virtuous
only if they arrive the old-fashioned way.
- Have you walked up? - We have.
What does it feel like to be nearly at the summit?
- Fantastic. It's a good feeling. - How long has it taken you?
- How long has it taken us, Richard? - Two hours and one minute.
- That's not bad, congratulations. - Thank you.
And did you find it today just as you imagined? Worse?
- It's always worse. - It's always worse.
- Did you climb or come by train? - Er, how does it look?
No, this is the look of a man who took the train.
In Bradshaw's era, weary visitors could linger at the summit
for as long as they liked, even overnight.
He writes, "For those who wish to see the sunrise,
a few huts are built on top, but it's frequently obscured by clouds. "
The weather is as changeable now as then,
and luckily, there's still a haven to shelter from the blasts.
Welcome to Hafod Eryri. My name's Jonathan.
Hello. Michael Portillo.
Jonathan Tyler works at Snowdon's new summit café which opened in 2009.
It's an impressive facility. Fantastic.
How on earth was it built? You're a long way up here.
- Everything had to come up by train. - All the building material.
All the granite, the Welsh oak, absolutely everything.
It took just over two years to build.
Where do you get your electricity from and water and so on?
Everything comes by train.
So the generators, it brings up oil to run those
and the water comes up by train as well.
Nothing comes from national facilities, the National Grid or anything like that?
Not at all. I don't know if you'd count the rainwater we use for the toilets.
That's the only thing we don't bring up by train.
There's another reference in my "Bradshaw" that I want to investigate.
And I turn to ecologist Dr Barbara Jones to help me.
- Barbara, it's a great view, isn't it? - Superb. I mean, what a day.
I particularly wanted to meet you because my Bradshaw's Guide
says very simply rare mountain plants are found on Snowdon.
There are some that are very rare but when we say very rare,
perhaps very rare in a British sense, not in a world sense.
Snowdonia has been formed...
All these ridges, all these mountains you can see,
they're all a product of the Ice Age.
When we had a lot of ice coming over in glaciers,
they carved out these big valleys and the ridges,
and when the glaciers started to retreat,
if you can imagine we had a kind of tundra landscape,
very cold, very dry, so we would've had the type of plants
that now you find up in the Arctic or in the Alps.
And some of those plants just managed to hang on
in these high, cold, north-facing, miserable, wet cliffs
that we don't frequent very often but are great for these plants.
They're right on the edge of the range
but they're just about managing to hang on.
That's why they're quite rare in Britain.
It takes a keen eye to spot the plants the Victorian botanists searched out.
So here we are, here's your first plant that's mentioned by Bradshaw.
See this one? It's called roseroot.
It's a lovely plant and it's got a very interesting history
because apparently some of the shepherds around here
used to chew the root of this plant and it helped to dull toothache.
There must be something in the plant that helps to kill the pain.
A lovely plant. Again, only found on the mountains.
Ah, right, now here is one of our mountain lilies.
This is one of the real rarities. Just look at that.
That's extremely pretty.
That is called the Snowdon lily
and it's found on about six cliff faces in Snowdonia
and nowhere else in the whole of the UK.
This lovely lily, how long does it flower?
- Am I fortunate to see it flower? - You're extremely fortunate.
One flower will only have a flower open for about two weeks.
And the flowering in this site here is about over three weeks.
Normally, to be able to see this plant, you have to hang on a rope.
It's usually growing in such inaccessible places.
These days, the lily is even rarer than it was in Bradshaw's day.
Partly because the Victorians didn't just come to observe the plants,
they came to loot them.
In Victorian times, this would've been presumably one of the specimens
that the tourists were hunting for.
The botanical tourists, as they called them,
they'd come up in their droves,
and they were so keen on collecting rarities, something that bit different.
And they'd even come with long sticks with a hook on the end
so if they couldn't reach it themselves, they'd hook the plant out.
I've even heard tales of some of them taking a bunch of the Snowdon lily
back down to their hotel and putting it in a vase
while they had their meal in the evening.
I'm sure that must look lovely but it wouldn't last five minutes
and it's so sad to hear of them all going like that.
That is very sad.
The lily is now protected by law. Picking any part of it is an offence.
So, empty-handed, I turn back down the mountain
to catch a train to my next destination.
After my brief mountain excursion and with my lungs full of pure Snowdon air,
I've now rejoined the main line at Bangor
for that last stretch to Holyhead.
I'm travelling towards the spectacular Menai Straits
which I'll cross over to Anglesey on Stephenson's famous Britannia Bridge.
Bradshaw had plenty to say about it,
so I'm going to get off at the next station and take a closer look.
So, I've asked the train to stop because it's a request stop, at Llanfair,
but that's only the shortened version of where I'm going,
I'm actually going to the station
with the longest name of any station in Britain.
The town's name contains a whopping 58 letters.
But luckily, there's a helpful sign on the station platform.
So, it's fairly easy really.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn- drobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
There are many theories as to how the town got its famous name.
Some say it was invented to attract more visitors.
Others say that locals wanted to embarrass tourists
who flooded to the area in the 19th century.
Whatever the reason, I'd like to test out the locals.
Are you able to pronounce the name of this village?
- Yes. - Quite easily.
Go on then, off you go.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn- drobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Fantastic.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn- drobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
- Fantastic. - Can you say it?
- No. - Can you give it a go?
I've given it a go on the platform where I had it written in phonetics.
- So, you must be locals. - These two are.
Yes, I was born and bred here.
Were you? It brings tourists, doesn't it?
- Yes. - Definitely.
Yeah, there's hundreds of coaches here every week.
Americans and Australians and all over the world.
- D'you speak Welsh amongst yourselves? - Yes.
You were smiling, so it seemed a very nice thing to say.
What did you actually say?
A very big welcome to the village of Llanfair PG.
That's really kind of you, thank you so much.
I'm really enjoying my visit. Thank you so much.
But the town's tongue-twisting name isn't my main reason
for visiting Llanfair.
It's my vantage point for appreciating Stephenson's Britannia Bridge.
Bradshaw was completely bowled over by it.
"This magnificent structure is one of the most ingenious, daring
and stupendous monuments of engineering skill
which modern times have seen attempted. "
"As this gigantic and amazing structure now spans the Menai,
we may justly express our admiration of it by calling it
Mr Stephenson's chef-d'oeuvre. "
Well, here now, I think I begin to get Bradshaw's point. It is colossal.
It rises into the sky above us. It has this enormous span.
And, of course, it had originally this breakthrough technology,
these tubes carrying the railway line.
And Bradshaw said it can best be thought of as a double-barrelled gun
on an immense scale.
The bridge was built using the same tubular design
as Stephenson's smaller Conwy Bridge.
Sadly, the tubes were destroyed by fire in the 1970s,
but this extraordinary Victorian structure
still impressively spans the water.
As the sun begins to set on the Menai Straits,
my mind turns to where I shall be spending the night.
Bradshaw's Guide mentions that Anglesey is famous for supplying grain.
And so I've come to stay in a windmill.
Constructed in 1741, this one is a listed building.
It was recently converted into accommodation by owner Julian Wood.
- Hello, I'm admiring your windmill. - Good, I'm glad you like it.
Fantastic. When did the sails disappear?
In the 1920s. Apparently they were sold for scrap.
Were there lots of windmills on Anglesey?
There were.
It was known as the breadbasket of Wales.
Apparently, a bit like beacons, they could all see each other. Come in.
Thank you.
In the 19th century, there were around 50 windmills on Anglesey.
Now Julian's is one of the few that's left.
So the grinding shaft would have been here.
That's right.
And you've built the dining room table around it. Fabulous.
This is known as a pièce de résistance.
What an amazing...
What an amazing room. What a view.
- So, looking towards Snowdon. - Yeah, that's it.
- And looking towards Llandudno. - Yep.
- Puffin Island there. - Puffin Island first.
And you can see it's low tide because you can see the causeway.
Wind power is clearly still important around here.
I can see three wind farms on the horizon.
- I will enjoy staying here very much. - Great, thank you. Nice to meet you.
I'll just stay here and watch the sun go down.
I really enjoyed my night at the windmill
and I've woken to this fantastic morning.
And now, intrigued by a couple of references
in my Bradshaw's Guide to Salt Island,
I've come to discover something about an industry, salt,
which I believe is in revival.
David Lee Wilson runs the Anglesey Sea Salt Company.
My 19th-century guidebook led me to you
because he makes a couple of references, Bradshaw, to Salt Island.
So there must've been a traditional industry here.
There was. And even before, Salt Island was famous for salt.
The Romans, this was one of their furthest outposts
and Caernarfon behind me,
and of course they paid people in salt, hence the word "salary",
but Salt Island itself was the last place that I can find round here
that was making salt in the 1700s.
And in 1775, a factory there closed, we understand,
and that was the last time salt was made here.
Until you came along.
From the late 18th century, it became easier to mine salt from the ground
and the sea salt industry fell into decline.
Since 2000, David has begun extracting salt from the Menai waters once again,
because it is exceptionally pure.
Just like a chef wants good quality ingredients,
we want good quality sea water and that comes from the Gulf Stream
that comes flooding in here, washes round the island twice a day.
We're in the right place for producing good-quality sea salt.
- Pure water coming in. - Absolutely, yes.
Originally, salt was harvested by flooding large fields with sea water,
allowing the sun to evaporate the liquid.
David's factory is a bit more sophisticated, but the idea's the same.
- This is one of the salt pans. - It's a very hot room, isn't it?
That warmth helps us evaporate the moisture
and that is the key to the process, removing the water.
The analogy I use is just imagine a cloud can only hold so much water
before it starts raining,
so sea water can only hold so much salt before the salt starts crystallising.
So these crystals are forming on the surface
and they're tiny flakes and that is our trademark.
The crystallised salt is delicately lifted out by hand.
And you're just handling it gently.
- And lift. - And just let the water out.
And drain out the back.
It reminds me of pure driven snow. It's absolutely perfect.
- How's that? - Thank you very much, yes.
I think a few months' work and you could have a full-time job.
As well as pure salt, it's also possible to make gourmet versions.
This one is the smoked salt which is smoked over Welsh oak
and has quite an interesting fragrance.
Oh, it is smoky, isn't it?
And that was picked up by a salt maker in Seattle
and it's now on the chocolates that President Obama really likes.
His standard gift to people when they visit the White House
is chocolates with a few flakes of our salt on top.
Well, if it's good enough for Mr President, it's good enough for me.
Now, David, instruct me in the art of salt tasting.
Well, I think the first thing is you don't taste salt on tip of your tongue,
it's at the sides and at the back.
Here we've just got a small cherry tomato
which has got lots of flavour anyway, but just a flake of salt at the most.
So do taste one of those.
Try to get this on the sides of my tongue.
Mmm, you're right, it really hits you from the sides of the tongue.
It's beautifully salty, of course.
But it's bringing out the flavour of the tomato brilliantly.
It's got a wonderful texture, it's really crunchy.
We all are told we eat too much salt
but we do actually need a small amount of salt.
So my message to people really is eat less salt but better salt.
So, now I must retrace my steps to the station
for the final leg of my journey across Anglesey.
Never having travelled this route before,
I'm struck by the sheer size of Anglesey.
It's quite a long journey across. The mountains of North Wales recede
as we move across this relatively flat country towards Holyhead.
And Bradshaw says, "This once small town of Holyhead,
situated in a remote corner of Anglesey, will speedily become an important place,
lying in the direct route from London to Dublin
which Traffic and Communication, the London and Northwestern company,
is year by year increasing and developing."
So I'm going to find a Holyhead fully developed
as predicted by George Bradshaw.
I'm approaching the most western point in Anglesey,
on the edge of the Irish Sea.
In Bradshaw's time, this was a busy route for ships,
plying to Liverpool, Dublin and beyond.
They were guided safely past Anglesey's rocky shore
by the South Stack Lighthouse, close to Holyhead.
These days, most people are heading for the Irish ferry.
I feel like a bit of a novice here
because I've never set foot in Holyhead before,
and I think everybody else does this as a matter of routine.
They all know exactly where they're going.
Presumably to get the boat.
When the railway arrived here in 1848, it transformed travel to Ireland.
It offered a quick and easy route to Dublin, which is just 64 miles away.
Soon the port and the town began to grow.
Behind me, the pretty painted house fronts and the dark roofs of Holyhead
which sits on its own island, and in front of me, the packet station,
where, in Bradshaw's day, packet steamers arrived.
And this town became important, as Bradshaw had predicted,
as a seaport, as the gateway to Ireland.
Irish immigrants, British soldiers and politicians from both sides of the water
became regular travellers through Holyhead.
I'm curious to find out how this railway line
affected our relationship with Ireland in Bradshaw's time,
from historian David Gwyn.
- David, hello. - Hello.
Because of my background, I like to think of political implications.
Do you think the railway from Chester to Holyhead
helped the British government in some way to control Ireland?
I'm sure that was thought in their minds, that there were the means
to ship troops over if rebellion broke out or anything like that.
And there's certainly a consideration that Irish MPs
want a fast and comfortable way of travelling to London.
Yes, because they're represented at Westminster
all the way into the 20th century, so they're going backwards and forwards.
As more services used the port, a new harbour was built.
It included a massive new breakwater to protect shipping.
Bradshaw writes, "The principal breakwater to the north
will be 5,000 feet long, 170 broad,
and 30 above the bottom of the sea in the deepest part. "
We're on this breakwater here which is very much referenced in Bradshaw.
He says he's looking forward to it being completed 5,000 foot long.
It's an amazing structure. How was it done?
It is a huge thing, as you say. It was done over many years.
It's from quarried stone in Holyhead mountain
standing there behind you.
How was that stone... because they're huge blocks.
- How was it brought out here? - It was brought out by railway.
Steam locomotives carrying the wagons or pulling the wagons on timber staging
so that the stone could be dropped in between the rails,
and bit by bit, the whole thing was created.
It was a marvellous piece of Victorian engineering technology.
The new breakwater was and still is one of the largest constructed in Britain.
For Victorians departing on board the steamers,
it was their last view of Wales.
I get the impression that Holyhead really is a kind of frontier.
You could say that.
But it's also, you might say, the end of Britain, the end of Britishness.
And our unquiet relationship with Ireland
I think is embodied in the changing history of Holyhead.
The political landscape has changed and changed again.
But the Victorian infrastructure of railway and port
are distinctly recognisable even today.
This is the furthest point, the end of Wales,
and since Bradshaw's time, with Irish independence,
the limit of the United Kingdom.
Members of Parliament no longer go backwards and forwards through Holyhead.
But with airline delays and security queues,
the train and boat remain the preferred option for many
to reach the Emerald Isle.
On my next journey,
I'll be following some of the very earliest railway lines in Britain,
travelling south from Newcastle through Yorkshire,
to Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.
Along the way, I'll be getting up close and personal
with one of the world's first locomotives.
It's in beautiful condition. Am I allowed to?
- I think you are. Absolutely. - It's quite thrilling actually.
I'll be uncovering some railway treasures
with a descendant of George Bradshaw himself...
Oh, my goodness.
That is so beautiful.
...and exploring the seaside town that inspired the Victorian novel "Dracula".
How was that?