The Deceptive Village

    When you visit the Italianate village of Portmeirion, set on an estuary, a couple of miles east by south east {amended with thanks to Anonymous in having drawn this to my attention} from Portmadog in North Wales. The first impression you get, is the actual scale of the place. It's tiny. Some of the archways are only large enough for one to pass through. What's more, being familiar with that 1960's television series ‘the Prisoner,’ you eventually go to Portmeirion. Once there you set out into the village to discover all the scene locations therein, you will quickly discover that much of the village you see on screen, doesn't actually exist in Portmeirion, and that Portmeirion itself is a far smaller village in reality that it appears on the television screen. Driving  past something twice, in both directions in a taxi, or driving one way up a street, then driving back the other way all helps to make the Italianate village of Portmeirion to look a larger place. When I first went Portmeirion I thought that lawn the Prisoner walks across in the open sequence was much larger than it actually is. Like many others before me, I walked across that lawn in the Prisoner’s footsteps, and seemed to cross it in fewer steps than McGoohan took! But no matter what you think, size doesn't matter, if you get the chance to follow in Patrick McGoohan-the Prisoner’s footsteps, that should be enough for any fan of this cult series.

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