The Six of Cups: The Great Orme, Planet Playground, and a game of Goat Lottery

The Six of Cups from The Gilded Tarot, Ciro Marchetti, and from The Legacy of the Divine Tarot, also Ciro Marchetti

The Tarot’s Six of Cups is about childhood, children, old friends, memories, nostalgia, old familiar places, people and pets at play. It may be forecasting a return to an old haunt, or the re-appearance of an old friend. Drawn reversed, upside down, it might be saying don’t go back. There is no nourishment there for you at this time.

The Six of Cups is family holidays, the happy kind, that can feel so long ago.

As LP Hartley said in the opening of his novel, ‘The Go-Between‘…’the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

The dramatic limestone headland of the Great Orme separates the largely Edwardian seaside town of Llandudno from the drama of the Conwy Estuary just round the corner, with its stupendous castle and walled town.

The technology pedigree of this area is quite something, from the ancient copper mining, to the Iron Age forts, to Edward I‘s castle, to the building and embarkation of The Mulberry Harbour used in D-Day, and in recent times, the conversion of a railway tunnel at Caernafon that become a road tunnel.

The headland of The Orme is a Viking name meaning Serpent- is like a children’s fantasy wonderland on a sunny day.

It’s all going on! To appreciate the Serpent, drive the 4 kilometres around the base…to Deganwy and Conwy beyond.

But if you peel off left you’ll go up a steep hill, zig-zagging past St Tudno’s chapel on the way up to the summit where cable cars glide overhead, people sit smiling, chugging along on what is surely the shortest train journey ever, from the station the few hundred yards to the stop at the cable car cafe.

There’s a neolithic copper mine in a hollow on the summit. Walk or drive down into it, walk about on wooden bridges, look down into the ancient industrial excavations, put out of business in the Iron Age.

Coming back down from the summit to rejoin the marine drive, the chapel’s churchyard tilts so steeply, you feel the dead might tumble into the sea.

Asian families were out on picnics during one of our visits, celebrating Eid. A small girl dressed in pink and coral, shyly smiling, put her hands in prayer position, and bowed a holiday greeting as we passed.

Those kashmir goats…where would we spot them this time? Driving out again next day at sunset, we had a goat lottery…no prizes, just a guessing game. How many goats would we spot on the marine drive? My husband said 4 goats, Il Matrimonio said 7, and I guessed 11 plus but rounding the very last bend, we still hadn’t potted a single goat and we had never yet seen them at this point on the route, so far round. Not a goat in sight. Oh hang on. Yes! There they were, resting or grazing in the apricot light as they faced the setting sun over Anglesey. 13 goats. Only two pictured here (and not my pic) but what a pair of characters.

“Most of us don’t need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with.”- Robert Brault. And I haven’t told you about the toboggan rides yet. There goes my daughter, just arriving at the bottom, and the view out over the bay at Llandudno.

It’s all going on. But there’s a magic. Many echoes. Some are sunny, some are darker. In stormy weather, the light is strange, the echoes speak, and some may be your own.