These plaques are mounted around the plinth of William Brodie’s statue of Hercules at the centre of Portmeirion. They are – as Jonah wrote in his biography Clough Williams-Ellis, the Architect of Portmeirion (Seren Books, 1996) – “the legends of such good summers as we have enjoyed during the last forty or so years” – roughly from the 1950s to the ’80s.
“In his long life,” Jonah continued, “Clough recalled 1959 as the best of all summers, when we basked in unbroken sunshine for month after month, and found it so heavenly that even the doom-watchers’ predictions of impending drought could not deter us from exulting day after day in this glorious Mediterranean bounty. So Clough asked me to carve an inscription to mount on Hercules’ plinth: To the Summer of 1959 in Honour of its Splendour. Since then, a few more medals have been awarded but nothing has quite rivalled 1959, which ended the much-maligned Fifties in a blaze of glory. The celebrated Sixties, on the other hand, did not even warrant a ‘mentioned in Dispatches’, and [evidently with the exception of 1971] indifferent summers persisted until 1974, with 1976 even rivalling 1959.”
Photographs: Stephen Brayne.