Pure Imagination

At Glyn Cywarch, in northwestern Wales, romantic silhouettes and a restless sense of play - meet a grand and storied setting. Yet, as Amanda Harlech writes, her family's 400-year-old estate simply feels like home.

- Amanda Harlech

I first remember visiting Glyn Cywarch with my then fiancé, Francis. It must have been about 1984. 

I remember the drive there, across the two mountain ranges between the town of Harlech and our house in Shropshire. And I remember thinking how it got more and more impossibly romantic on the way, with Snowdon, the deep valleys, and then great tidal waves of mountains coming toward you—and the sea. From a distance, you could see Harlech Castle to the southwest, which stood out like a little broken tooth on the promontory.

Francis’s father, William David Ormsby Gore, the fifth Baron Harlech (just David to friends), and his wife, Pamela Harlech, had invited us to dinner, and I was a bit wide-eyed about the whole thing. Pamela had refurbished Glyn Cywarch’s ancient manor house, which had been in the family since 1616, in the 1970s—filling it with deep pile carpets and gleaming wood and silver—and my sense was of extreme comfort: a tapestry of personalities and history and warmth.

Francis and I were married in 1986, and then along came our son, Jasset, and daughter, Tallulah. After that, we would spend a theoretical half-year in Wales—all of Christmas, all of Easter, then the whole summer. The sadness was that Francis’s father had died in 1985, and inheriting the house came with towering death duties, and the puzzle of making it all work. But I left that to him and worried chiefly about making Glyn Cywarch a home.