Climbing Pen-y-Fan

The start of the walk.  You can't see me, but I'm sat in the car in the car park, reading a good book!  (Diana Gabaldon: "A Breath of Snow and Ashes") 

It was a steep and steady climb, but the views soon became worth the effort.

Not just one lake in the view, but three . . .

Looking towards Brecon.

Left over from the glacial period, a tarn nestles amongst the hills.

On a clear day, you can see forever . . .  Brecon town again.

This is truly the TOP!

I was very proud of my husband and daughter as it was quite a challenging climb with a bit of scrambling in places, and it was the 1970s since my husband was last up there!

Jeepers it's HOT!

 Of  course, having written that, we will probably have a Monsoon arrive in time for the weekend, just because we are hoping to have a stall at the Fleamarket . . .

Meanwhile, we are making the most of this glorious weather though I rather stupidly gardened in it yesterday.  You know - you start off dead-heading and an hour later find yourself in a muck sweat with a barrowload of spent leaves and stuff which was growing where it shouldn't have been . . .

I've been clearing bits of the pond too where it was getting clogged up with a pernicious dark green weed which grows EVERYWHERE.  I have to check each handful for little aquatic bugs, and the worst area is where I cannot reach, so that should be interesting . . .  There are still the three frogs in residence, and a few newts but once the latter have mated, apparently they forsake the pond for dry land again.  My Dragonfly larva has metamorphosed into a Dragonfly and I have seen a greeny Dragonfly in the garden so perhaps that is "our" one.

Both daughters in residence last night, but G just for the one night.  T is here until Monday.  Tomorrow we are planning to climb Pen-y-Fan (if it's not too hot).  Leastways, she and her father will climb it - I shall sit in the Storey Arms car park with a good book as I know I'm completely unfit and I'm not even trying the local hills yet - still just walking on the flat until I know I am properly on the mend.  I shan't tempt fate, but let's say I'm heading the right way and I have checked whether I can take my anti-histamines again although I'm still on the last week of the anti-biotics, and yes I can, and I have found this has made quite a difference as it stops the allergic response to pollens/dust so less "gunge" should form as a result.  All the local farmers are cutting/drying/baling hay/haylage and silage so there's a lot of dust in the air.

This was last week's car boot sale.  As you can see, it was absolutely heaving.  We didn't do well, as people were more inclined to buy things like the inflatable Pooh bear on the right, and the rather hideous concrete dragons/dogs/things for the garden as on the left . . .  No accounting for taste.  However, the chair in the top picture is one that my OH bought as his next restoration project . . .

For Issy - one of those "ceiling moments" . . .

I will hasten to add, this was an INTENTIONAL hole in the ceiling.  It wasn't the one I fell through . . .

How We Came to be in Wales (8) - "Well . . . it's got Potential . . ."

 That's what people used to say when they visited - looking back, they must have had SUCH a shock.  We were living in a complete and utter DUMP.  There were no two ways about it, the house had seen better days and it would be a good few years before we could do more than just do the minimum to put it right.  For the first few years we didn't even dare to apply for a Council Grant to improve it for fear they would condemn the place!

The top photo shows my dear husband (Hah! when he still had black hair!) showing you just how damp our sitting room was - and how excruciating the wallpaper!  You can see the awful fireplace too - that was one of the first things to go.  As you can see, wallpaper stripping was extremely easy . . .

Here he is reading little T a bedtime story (a Puddle Lane one, judging by the cover).  Look at the concentration on her face : )  As you can see this was before there was a fireplace revealed, so the grotty old Stanley (?) stove sat out in the room.

As you can see the decor of the kitchen left something to be desired . . .  Looking back, I honestly can't remember it being quite so truly awful . . .  As you can see, some foodstuffs had to be hung from the beam so that the mice didn't get them . . .

Here's a close-up.  My ma-in-law had a fit of the vapours when she came to visit and for years said we would never get our money back on the house!  She also insisted I put curtains up at her bedroom window because she knew for a fact that UFOs had been spotted in Wales, and "they took you up into the spacecraft and carried out very painful experiments on you."   !  And she was an intelligent woman . . . supposedly . . .

It was just as well really, that she wasn't here when the workmen came to excavate the old fireplace so the Hergom stove could go in.  We reinstated the beam, as it was missing, and I can remember driving around the Welsh lanes and seeing a falling-down barn and then trying to find out who it belonged to so we could negotiate to buy the beams in it to do up our house . . .

This was the rather grandly-named "Morning Room" which overlooked the paddock.  The wall to your left had quite a damp problem (down the chimney) and eventually we had to have the plaster hacked off and replaced, and it was only about 3 years ago that my husband and grown-up son (not even a twinkle in his daddy's eye in this photo!) also replaced the beautiful dentil coving - hand-made by my husband.  Then, and only then, did the roll of carpet we had bought at auction some 15 years earlier, finally get laid . . .

Outside was still pretty grim too, as the limewash soon got washed off by the blasts of winter wind and rain.  About all that has happened in this photo is a brick path has been laid across the yard and we appear to have painted over the chocolate brown paint around the windows.

However, it wasn't all doom and gloom, as here you can see T's first pony, Jo-Jo, a little section A Welsh mare who we bought aged 11 from a showing family near Sennybridge.  Unfortunately she'd had Laminitis very badly and had dropped soles but she was 100% reliable in every way, and although we always had to watch her weight, she taught all the children to ride, and we had her for many years.  You can see from this photo that the "garden" was a tad . . . basic too!

Here is T, aged nearly 2 1/2 with two of Blackberry's kittens who we kept - Sooty and Bumble.  Gosh, that takes me back.

So, do you think we were completely and utterly bonkers?  I think most sane people would have thought twice before taking THIS house on!

How We Came to be in Wales (7) - "It's like being on holiday all the time"

 Ferryside seen from Llansteffan. . .

Years ago I met someone who had moved to Devon from London and she said to me she was still pinching herself and hoping she didn't wake up as "it's just like being on holiday all the time." I think I can fairly say that about living here.  I was reminded of it this morning as on our way back from the car boot sale we had visited (laden with bargains), I suggested to my OH that we dropped down into Ferryside, and got the papers there, and I fancied a stroll along the beach . . .

I got my stroll and relaxed completely and utterly.  I just wandered quietly up the beach, watching the tide quickly receding, leaving tangled rolags of seaweed stumps and fronds mixed with binder twine, dead crabs, large feathers and plastic bottles.  Beyond Scotts Bay, I could see the deserted strip of beach which borders the MoD land at Pendine, and beyond that, misty in the early morning heat haze, Caldy Island, with the white monastery  of the Cistercian monks gleaming in the sunlight.

I looked at Llansteffan Castle, guarding the entrance to the River Towy as it has done for hundreds of years.  As I can't find my photos from Ferryside, this one taken inside Llansteffan castle will have to suffice.

The little village of Llansteffan seeps right down to the edge of the estuary, with its pastel colour-washed cottages, church and a huge white mansion overlooking it all.  HERE is a link to tell you some of its history.  I like to imagine it in its holiday heyday, as once the railway reached the village in Victorian times, it became a magnet for holidaymakers from the Welsh coalmining valleys during "miners' fortnight" and every spare room in the village was divided and divided again with old sheets or blankets to make up small rooms with put-you-up beds and a "po" in the corner.

It is our nearest "seaside" and is where our children grew up playing in its sands, scrambling up to see what was in the rock pools, and exploring the castle.  We have so many happy memories of Llansteffan, as have most of our neighbours and we often saw people we knew from school or our vicinity.  Oh gosh, if I had a pound for every time we'd climbed up from the beach to the castle, I'd be a rich woman now.

Pembrey, just along the coast, and now a country park, boasts much better beaches - you can walk for miles along the sandy coastline there, and the beaches boast Blue Flag status.  Here our children played for ours in the play area, explored the sandy forest trails through the pine trees, built sand-castles and paddled in the sea, collected bucketfuls of shells and had to be persuaded that gently-stinking dead crabs were better left on the beach . . .

And of course, there's Pendine, further West along the coast, and approached through Laugharne, the village made famous by Dylan Thomas.  Pendine made famous by Parry-Thomas's fatal land speed record attempt back in 1927.  There is now a small (and extremely atmospheric) Museum of Speed where Babs (once buried at Pendine) is now restored and on display.

It has been perhaps our favourite place for a seaside outing over the years, and as you can see from the above photo, even grown-up smalls still love it there (daughter T with her father).

How We Came to Be In Wales (6) - "A view won't pay the rent"

The quote in the title came from Yorkshire friends of ours - salt of the earth - and was a good Yorkshire saying and never a truer word spoken.  When we waxed lyrical about how beautiful it was here, that was their reply!  Whilst we don't have a view from the house as such - just across the valley if we are up in the attic - the surrounding scenery is stunning, and it is so tranquil here - and SAFE. 

They were right, of course, but we were still on Cloud 9 then, before everything started to go pear-shaped, but that will be written about in the fullness of time.

I can remember the Farmer Next Door saying to us, when we had been in residence a few weeks, "I suppose you think it's beautiful here."  Well yes, actually we DID.  We still do.  He had lived here all his life and just saw work when he looked at the fields hereabout . . .

And yet - this is the view a couple of miles up the hill from us, looking across to the Carmarthen Fans (aka Black Mountain, on the right of the picture) this morning, with the twin flat-topped peaks of Pen-y-Fan behind them, some 45 miles or so away.  Our eldest daughter is home next week and plans to climb Pen-y-Fan.  I think it will be her father accompanying her, as I won't be up for it by then!  I had better pack a picnic and take a good book to enjoy in the car park at the Storey Arms!

If we drive towards Horeb, on a clear day (as it was this morning) we can even see the sea at Llanstephan. Centre of the picture you can see the stepped hillsides where Llanstephan Castle dominates the landscape when you are closer.  However, you CAN see the sea there, and the slightly yellow bit which is the beach - so the tide must have been out a fair way for that amount to show.  It's about 18 miles away, as you drive it.  I've always lived within at most, 40 miles of the sea, and I know I would find it hard to be totally land-locked.

I can remember one of the first exploring journeys we took, driving along a narrow steep-sided lane and then through someone's FARMYARD.  They must have been moving sheep or something as we had to open and shut the gates either end of the farmstead (which had buildings both sides of the road) and it felt like we were trespassing! There was nothing like that where we came from in Dorset.

We used to get lost sometimes, particularly when the children were school age, and we had to take them to their friend's houses.  None of this "just along the road" round here - schools had quite big catchment areas and housing is dispersed in the countryside. Sleepovers were the norm. We had to learn where to shop for things, as Carmarthen was a very quiet little market town, with a tiny Tesco's, and a bigger Woolworths, and then individually owned shops with a few chain shops like W H Smith, and shoe shops.  Quite often, if we wanted anything remotely out of the ordinary, we had to drive 25 miles to Swansea for it.  We grew very used to long trips to buy "things" or quite often, went without.  When you are ten miles from the town, and living on a budget, if you have run out of something then it just has to wait until next week.  Making a shopping list of items the moment they got low became a necessity, and I soon learned to keep one spare.

Ah yes, keeping a storecupboard was also something I learned early in our time here, as when the nearest shop is a 10 mile round trip and it only stocks essentials anyway, you need to be a little self-reliant for when circumstances - a broken-down car, icy roads, flooding, keep you within your own four walls.  You do NOT want to run out of loo-paper if you are snowed in!

We had to get used to the mud too.  When you live next door to a working dairy farm, then mud - and worse - are a daily part of your life.  A hundred or so cows puddling past your front gate twice daily make for mess.  Now there are 200 plus, and it's even worse!

When we hit hard times, in those early years, I can remember trying to keep house with a dustpan and brush when our vacuum cleaner bit the dust.  Finances were very tight - almost non-existent in fact - and I can still remember wearing a mask (I am allergic to dust) and taking a stiff brush to the hideous nylon carpet up the stairs.  If you can imagine the colour of the mud outside the front gate, mixed with a Saturday night pavement between the boozer and the takeaway, you have a rough approximation of the decor underfoot when we arrived.  You have no idea of how ECSTATIC I was when that sh*tty carpet finally went!  I felt pretty much the same when we had saved up for a new vacuum too . . .

We soon realized just what a bad state of repair the house was in.  One of the jobs we had to have done, under the terms of our mortgage, was to treat all the beams etc for woodworm, which it had had in the past.  We had a company in to do the work before we took up residence.  Then we worked on a room at a time, taking down the horrid pine "ceilings" (great for firewood) and in later years, when we took down the plasterboard to reveal the joists and rafters, we treated those ourselves.  So no self-respecting wood worm can move in here now without quickly perishing.

Sadly, it wasn't just woodworm (and downstairs, Death Watch Beetle) which was in the house.  The roof needed replacing, and a main beam where two stretches of roof joined in a gulley, had been leaking for years and the big beam beneath it was weak with wet rot.  Every time there was a bad storm we held our breath, praying that the roof wouldn't collapse in that corner.  We made sure we slept in the bedrooms away from it!  As it turned out, it held on for 8 years, when we had a large Council Grant for restoration works.

The first couple of years were so happy - if incredibly busy, as I was proof of the old saying: "New house, new baby" and our middle daughter joined us at Christmas the year we arrived.  I also started a business . . . and we had 5 horses stabled at one point.  I must have been mad . . .

How we came to be in Wales (5) - To Thine Own Self Be True

"To thine own self be true" is a saying I came across many years ago and it seemed such an apt one to me.  I've already mentioned, that reading Monica Edwards' Punchbowl Farm books "programmed" me for life with regards to the sort of house I wanted to live in - and ideally, the sort of life I would like to lead.

Other country books also influenced me.  I read all of Derek Tangye's books about life at Minack in Cornwall, where he and his wife Jeannie forsook their high-flying lives and lived very basically in a tiny rented cottage with small cliff-top fields where they grew early daffodils and flowers, kept donkeys and wrote memorably of their cats.  How I longed to emulate them.

In the 1975, The Good Life was first shown on British television (reruns are still being shown on Sky and yes, I still watch them, even though I know them off by heart!)  It gripped me - and thousands of others - with a wave of enthusiasm for stepping off the hamster wheel of life and living that way although it was another 15 years before I got the chance to even try it.  The following year John Seymour's Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency appeared on the bookshelves and has been in my possession ever since.  I was by no means a gardener, fair weather or otherwise, and was living in a flat in central Southampton then, but I had the dreams, even though to my then-husband I was an alien creature . . .  No wonder we divorced.

I continued to buy any cookery books which had "country" or "farmhouse" in the title.  I still do . . .

In the late 1970s I pounced on a copy of Elizabeth West's "Hovel in the Hills" where she told of moving to a tiny "Hafod" in North Wales and their struggle to live off the land.  It was followed by "Garden in the Hills" and "Kitchen in the Hills", although I have to say the latter gives recipes which show how close to the bread line they were living.  Frugality at its limits I think.  Once again, I read them again and again and they are still on my bookshelves.

In the 1980s I moved to Dorset and met my husband.  I listened avidly to Jeanine McMullen''s "A Small Country Living" every Saturday on Radio 4, and bought all her books and read them over and over.  I found myself looking speculatively at goats in the village, and wishing I could learn to milk.  (Sadly, the goat dream never came to fruition.)  Sadly, she died in February 2010, aged 74, still living in her beloved cottage near to Llyn-y-Fan-Fach.

Just a few of my earlier cook books which I refer to regularly.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's "River Cottage" programmes, beliefs about animal-welfare and  publications have always inspired me.

Over the years I have always believed in the same things, trodden the same path, occasionally wavered - baking bread regularly when the children were smaller was a bit hit and miss and based on hours in the day, and pretty well abandoned completely between 1996 and 1999 when I was doing my Archaeology degree - but I have always cooked from scratch, baked my own cakes, mainly made my own bread, grown my own soft fruit and some vegetables (more in earlier years than now), made wine, jam, chutney, preserves etc.  That is "me".  What you see is what you get.  I don't have hidden agendas and I am too honest for my own good and not very good at saying no, which means I get taken advantage of sometimes, but hey-ho, that's life.

Thereby, you have some of the reasoning behind "why we moved to Wales."  I knew from the beginning that total Self-sufficiency was beyond me, as I am the gardener here - my husband is not interested one JOT - and he has the sensible head on him (my heart usually rules my head!)  But I am practical, and self-reliant - we both are - and the life-style we chose to lead has suited us both.  It has been, truly, a Good Life that we have led, one way and another.