Our story
The pub · The family · The place
Y Griffin is the pub in Penrhyndeudraeth: family-run, on the road between Porthmadog and the mountains, with Portmeirion and the Ffestiniog Railway effectively next door.
The pub's proper history (how long there has been a Griffin here, the people who kept it, and how it came to the family who run it now) is being written with the family so that every word of it is true. It will live here, not a paragraph of invented heritage.
The family
The same family runs Blaen Cefn Leisure Park up the hill. That is not a marketing line: the businesses are family companies under one roof, registered and real. Visiting families move between the two all summer, park to pub and back again, and the two look after each other's guests.
The little griffin
Griffin Bach, our indoor soft play, is the newest member of the family: the same griffin, drawn smaller and considerably louder. Meet it here.
Cockletown
The place
Ask an older head in Porthmadog or Blaenau what they call Penrhyndeudraeth and you may still hear "Cockletown". The village grew up on cockles: women gathered them out on the estuary sands and carried them to market, and the name stuck long after the trade went.
The mural in our games room holds the whole story on one wall: the cockle-pickers out on the sands, the map of the headland between two beaches that gives Penrhyndeudraeth its name, the granite company's sign, the steam engine, the Florence Cooke under way, and the lorries that took over from her. Worth a proper look next time you're in; it repays a pint's worth of study.
