There would be no Porthmadog without William Madocks. Between 1808 and 1811 he built the Cob, a sea wall across the Glaslyn estuary, to reclaim land at Traeth Mawr for farming. The diverted river scoured out a new harbour deep enough for ocean-going sailing ships, and quarry companies promptly arrived to take advantage. By 1825 there were public wharves; by 1861 the village of 885 souls had become a town of more than 3,000; and the slate of Blaenau Ffestiniog was being shipped from these quays to roof the rapidly expanding cities of industrial England. The town that grew up around the harbour is still here, still mostly Welsh-speaking, still the southern terminus of two narrow-gauge railways that climb into the mountains.
Madocks's sea wall was a gamble of an order rarely seen in nineteenth-century Wales. It opened in 1811 with a four-day feast and Eisteddfod, celebrating a road that connected Caernarfonshire to Meirionnydd. Three weeks later, high tides breached the embankment. Madocks's supporters had to raise money and men from across the county to repair the damage and strengthen the whole structure. By 1814 it was open again. By then Madocks's finances were in ruins, and he was letting out his own house in nearby Tremadog to pay the bills - his first tenant a young vegetarian poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley, who criticised local farmers for raising sheep, ran up debts, and fled after an alleged attempt on his life by a nocturnal intruder, leaving his rent unpaid. The Cob, meanwhile, held. A toll was charged on it until 2003, when the Welsh Assembly Government bought out the rights.
By 1873 some 116,000 tons of slate were being shipped out of Porthmadog every year. Local shipbuilders responded with a distinctive answer: the three-masted schooners they called Western Ocean Yachts, designed to handle the long passages to South America, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic. The last of them launched in 1913. The town accumulated three iron foundries, a school of navigation, a maritime culture that still surfaces in the Porthmadog Maritime Museum on Oakley Wharf. The First World War broke the trade: ships were sunk, no new ones were built, and the survivors were sold off. By 1925 less than five per cent of Ffestiniog's slate left by sea. The last load of slate arrived in Porthmadog by rail in 1946. Two months later the Ffestiniog Railway ceased commercial operations entirely.
What looked like an ending was actually a pause. Volunteers reopened the Ffestiniog Railway in 1955 as a heritage line; today it runs the entire thirteen and a half miles from Porthmadog Harbour to Blaenau Ffestiniog, and it is the second-most-visited tourist attraction in Wales after Caernarfon Castle. The same company rebuilt the Welsh Highland Railway, which now runs from Porthmadog north to Caernarfon. The Welsh Highland Heritage Railway, a separate operation, runs from a station near the north end of the High Street. Porthmadog also keeps a working mainline station on the Cambrian Coast Line, served by trains for Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton and Birmingham. Three stations in a town of just over 4,000 people, each one carrying part of the town's history into the present.
The National Eisteddfod of Wales, the country's major Welsh-language cultural festival, came to Porthmadog in 1937, again in 1980, and once more in 1987. Most residents speak Welsh - about 75% of inhabitants in the 2011 census - and the town council does its business in the language. The bardic life of the area runs deep. The Welsh-language poet William Ambrose, known by his bardic name Emrys, was minister of the local Independent chapel until his death in 1873. The ashes of R. S. Thomas, one of the finest English-language poets of twentieth-century Wales, are buried in the churchyard of St John's Church on Ffordd Penamser. Mary Davies, who wrote in Welsh, grew up here in the mid-nineteenth century. Painters Rob Piercy and Elfyn Lewis - the latter a Gold Medal winner at the National Eisteddfod - continue the artistic line.
Around the town the coast unfolds in small surprises. Borth-y-Gest, a sheltered bay south of the harbour, holds the old pilot houses where men once watched for incoming ships needing local knowledge. Morfa Bychan, two miles south-west, has Black Rock Sands, a beach so wide and firm at low tide that cars are allowed onto it; behind the sand dunes stands Cist Cerrig, a Bronze Age dolmen on open farmland. The blind harpist David Owen, born here in 1712, composed the air Dafydd y Garreg Wen on his deathbed at the age of just twenty-nine. Tradition says he called for his harp at the end, played the piece once, and died. The melody is still sung in Wales. Lawrence of Arabia was born just up the road in Tremadog in 1888, in a house that now carries his name. Porthmadog's surface looks like a quiet Welsh coastal town. Underneath, the layers go on for a long way.
Porthmadog sits at 52.928 degrees north, 4.133 degrees west, on the north shore of Tremadog Bay where the Glaslyn estuary meets the sea. The Cob, a 1,200-yard embankment, runs east-west across the estuary just south of the town and is a distinctive landmark from the air. Three railway lines converge at Porthmadog: the Cambrian Coast Line, the Ffestiniog Railway, and the Welsh Highland Railway. Nearest airports: Caernarfon (EGCK) 14 nm north, RAF Valley (EGOV) 22 nm northwest. The estuary attracts migrating birds; sandwich terns are common in summer.