The Great Orme Tramway

 
Legend has it that St George (or St Michael, depending upon which books you read) fought the dragon all over mainland Britain. The dragon breathed a deadly fire, but the saint leapt onto its back where the flames couldn’t reach him, and rode the enraged dragon off the top of a rocky headland at the northernmost tip of Wales and into the sea, where it drowned. Martyn Oliver took the same route, but travelled by tram.

The headland is The Great Orme, at Llandudno in North Wales, the highest sea-facing outcrop in Britain and named after an old English word for a dragon: ‘worm’.

The climb to the top of The Great Orme is as steep today as it was in St George’s time, but you no longer need to wait for the next dragon to hitch a ride. Instead, the four carriages of The Great Orme Tramway make their measured way up and down the hillside, one every twenty minutes, seven days a week, between April and October.