Reblogged from The Silent Eye:

It is hauntingly  beautiful. It sits in its own part of a lovely estuary, just east of Porthmadog, in the south of Snowdonia, Wales. Its name is Portmeirion and it was the life-work of an architect named Clough Williams-Ellis, who held a passionate belief that a ‘tightly-grouped coastal village’ could be developed in that majestic mountain setting, and that its development would illustrate how such a design could grow into the landscape without spoiling it.

In the late 1960s it became the setting for the ITV series “The Prisoner”, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, famous for the Danger Man series. The then head of ITV, Lew Grade, eventually got fed up with funding the rather eccentric series, causing McGoohan to bring it to a premature conclusion after only seventeen episodes. The final episode caused the television company’s switchboard to be jammed for hours, as tens of thousands of people rang in, demanding to know what it all meant!

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