Words about Wales

Early in the morning, cup of tea (good English breakfast tea), I’m looking out over the rolling hills of northeast Wales. Greens fields, green treese, green grass, and spots of yellow and pink flowers here and there. Tufts of white too scattered everywhere too, but that would be the sheep. More sheep than people around here, many more sheep than people. We’re a few miles north of Corwen, just around the bend from G.... something with many consonants and few vowels! The house we’ve been staying in, a converted old barn with 2 ft thick walls and massive oak beams, a little weathered but still structurally sound. I hear the swallows that have nested in the chimney, sheep bleating and thats about it. My father is off for a run down the country road, or up the hill – more sheep, cows, fields of grass and also a stand of windmills, huge slowly whirling arms that are so foreign, yet somehow fit into the landscape. Ask that to some migrating birds and they might not agree, but to me they do not seem too invasive. They are quiet, isolated, even a landmark for travellers, inukshuks of the heath. 

We have been here almost a week since we flew in to Heathrow and have been exploring the area near and far. Our first day, motorways, rest stops to fuel up on Ribena, British smarties, Flake bars and roast beef flavoured crisps (or rather Monster Munch – suitable for Monsters and vegetarians) and coordinate our travel. Cutting off the A5 just after Birmingham we pass through small towns like Burton under Lizard , as well as the pub that boasts “noted ham and eggery,” and soon we’re into Wales. Following the Dee, suitable subject for Wordsworth and other Romantic poets of two centuries past, as is meanders between the hills, village after village with more and more unpronounceable names, stone bridges and houses, farms and mile after mile of stone walls, all built who knows how long ago, perhaps 100 years perhaps 500. That’s one thing I like about this place, it feels like it has been like this for ages, as if people have been farming these rough hills for 1000 years, as if the stone sheds and huts and houses have been here for 1000 years, as if the talk in the villages of their crops and beasts and laws has not changed much in 1000 years, and perhaps it hasn’t. Apart from the woods that have been cut and replanted and the paving of the roads, it seems almost timeless. Of course farming and government isn’t what it used to be. Yesterday there was a referendum on proportional representation, only the second pan-Britain referendum ever – results to be announced later this week – as well as for council and Welsh and Scottish parliament elections, so that has changed. The slate mines have mostly closed. Tourism is up, with farmers being encouraged to build holiday homes for the city dwellers, and the hills and mountains of Snowdonia are well worn with trails of hikers and hill-walkers, and the coachloads of tours make their way along the twisty roads, stopping at the Welsh Slate Museum, Betws-y-Coed, and the pass below Mt Snowdon, the highest peak in the UK at about 3500 ft. Still it feels peaceful, rustic, pastoral, and we’ve just begun to explore, and now have to leave.