This evening

Suicidal sheep atop Dryslwyn Castle. The next moment they had leapt over the wall - and were happily grazing the other side!


I had to drop my son off for a Pub Quiz tonight, so took the short cut across the Towy Valley, and on the way back I stopped at the top of the hill overlooking Dryslywn Castle and the beautiful valley of the Towy, and just stood and looked.


It has been a beautiful sunny evening, a canvas of clear blue skies with the golden orb of the sun melting down through the heavens towards the horizon. The shadows were long in the water meadows, and little white cottages and farmhouses were hugged in the corners of dark hedgerows. Beside the lane, the sun lit the saffron grass, snagged with burgundy leaves. The river flung itself round shepherd's crook meanders like loops of shot silk ribbon and a quarrel of Sparrows pounced about the hedge beside me.

The sun glinted on car windscreens as they travelled home along the A40 past Merlin's Hill and Whitemill, and the shadows lengthened in our own valley, the pine trees of Horeb forestry plantation black as a crow's back, and above them, tense as a crouching lion, the humped back of Llanllwni mynydd, tawny with bracken. Moments like these should be savoured, the memories taken out and polished in the depths of winter . . .