If you’re ever in North Wales and pondering a route home then, assuming
home is somewhere you might get to by first aiming vaguely at
Birmingham, don’t hesitate: take the B4391.
Or, perhaps: don’t, as one of the things I liked about this road as we
drove down it on Monday was the utter lack of traffic. I don’t think we
encountered more than a dozen vehicles in an hour and a half’s driving.
What I liked most, though, was the sheer, raw beauty of the
landscape this route passes through. Running from Ffestiniog nearly all
the way to Shrewsbury (you take the B4393 for the last few miles, but it
takes up the mantle very well), the road starts in the 
wild, bleak, craggy land of Snowdonia, and snakes down into the more
cultivated, hillock-strewn terrain of Shropshire. One minute tiny, winding,
and sheep-strewn, threatening to toss you down the sheer side of the
valley; the next looping at speed across a great marshy expanse with
glowering peaks in the distance.
Well, I don’t have the words to evoke it right now; or ever, perhaps. You can see the route here