‘I had been in courts where Arabs and Spaniards had appeared and had translators provided for them. But these men, speaking their own language in their native land, had to pay. The outcry eventually led to the Welsh Courts Act.’
It was a pastoral, self-sufficient society that medieval travellers would have recognised. There were no villages, no roads, and travel was on horseback, the women riding side-saddle. ‘My uncle used to come and visit us only in the summer, but only if it was a dry summer,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘I remember my mother taking us to market in a horse and trap, and, when it came to rain, pulling a leather blanket over us. I looked out and saw the moon, but when we came round a hill the moon was on the other side of us. “Mam, mam, the moon’s moved.” The only cars we saw belonged to the district nurse and the school inspector. If a plane came over, we were allowed out of school to watch.’
The only travel was with the flocks or to market. Every visit to a town was an opportunity to take on supplies, however small, before the wet autumns came, and with them a stock-taking of coal, flour, yeast, sugar and salt to see whether there was enough to get through the winter. One farmer, caught in a snowstorm with his wife while returning from market, reassured her. ‘Look at it this way, once we’re home we’ll be all right ’til Easter.’ Families saved broken crockery to embed the brightly coloured fragments in the mountain paths so children could find their way to and from school.
‘But it wasn’t lonely, that was the odd thing,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘You couldn’t go anywhere except to your neighbours, so people called on each other, my mother would kill a chicken, and there’d be an evening of singing and telling stories. Not everyone had a wireless, but we did, and then we had no end of people call on us.’
One old gentleman claimed he had known the wireless was coming long before it was even invented, because up there with his sheep he had heard voices in the air. When he finally did have his own set and heard people coughing, he and his wife would sit as far away from it as possible because of the risk of disease. An old lady, recalling life on the Epynt, told Herbert Hughes, ‘We had the whole world to ourselves.’ And it is a quote that, once read, you never forget.
It was on this small, close, traditional society, the heartland of the Welsh rural past that, one September day in 1939, Nemesis called, carrying maps and ringed with the morning sun, for it was glorious weather. Nemesis was an Army captain in a khaki-coloured Hillman Minx driven by an ATS girl. She was blonde and beautiful, but a boy who saw her remembered chiefly the sadness of her expression. Afterwards, when the two had gone, he remembered the terrible silence of the grown-ups.
They never forgot the words the captain had used. Epynt, he said, ‘would be turned into a desert for Government purposes’. Another phrase was widely quoted, of the intention ‘to blast into a wilderness’ the 54 farms and smallholdings. It was ideal for the purpose, the wet land precluding the danger of ricochet. They were given until the spring to make their own arrangements to go, the worst time of the year, though this was later extended to the summer because of lambing. The amount of compensation was determined by the Government.
‘We were given to understand that this was on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘If we’d argued, we would have had nothing with which to buy another farm.’ The shepherds, who did not own land, were not given any form of compensation.
By summer they were all gone, but the animals were more intractable. The Davies family of Gwybedog having found a farm 30 miles away, Iorwerth Davies had to round up their horses. ‘I rode two mares into the ground before I got eighteen together and we started to walk them by road. I was riding in front, my nephew behind on a
It was a pastoral, self-sufficient society that medieval travellers would have recognised. There were no villages, no roads, and travel was on horseback, the women riding side-saddle. ‘My uncle used to come and visit us only in the summer, but only if it was a dry summer,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘I remember my mother taking us to market in a horse and trap, and, when it came to rain, pulling a leather blanket over us. I looked out and saw the moon, but when we came round a hill the moon was on the other side of us. “Mam, mam, the moon’s moved.” The only cars we saw belonged to the district nurse and the school inspector. If a plane came over, we were allowed out of school to watch.’
The only travel was with the flocks or to market. Every visit to a town was an opportunity to take on supplies, however small, before the wet autumns came, and with them a stock-taking of coal, flour, yeast, sugar and salt to see whether there was enough to get through the winter. One farmer, caught in a snowstorm with his wife while returning from market, reassured her. ‘Look at it this way, once we’re home we’ll be all right ’til Easter.’ Families saved broken crockery to embed the brightly coloured fragments in the mountain paths so children could find their way to and from school.
‘But it wasn’t lonely, that was the odd thing,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘You couldn’t go anywhere except to your neighbours, so people called on each other, my mother would kill a chicken, and there’d be an evening of singing and telling stories. Not everyone had a wireless, but we did, and then we had no end of people call on us.’
One old gentleman claimed he had known the wireless was coming long before it was even invented, because up there with his sheep he had heard voices in the air. When he finally did have his own set and heard people coughing, he and his wife would sit as far away from it as possible because of the risk of disease. An old lady, recalling life on the Epynt, told Herbert Hughes, ‘We had the whole world to ourselves.’ And it is a quote that, once read, you never forget.
It was on this small, close, traditional society, the heartland of the Welsh rural past that, one September day in 1939, Nemesis called, carrying maps and ringed with the morning sun, for it was glorious weather. Nemesis was an Army captain in a khaki-coloured Hillman Minx driven by an ATS girl. She was blonde and beautiful, but a boy who saw her remembered chiefly the sadness of her expression. Afterwards, when the two had gone, he remembered the terrible silence of the grown-ups.
They never forgot the words the captain had used. Epynt, he said, ‘would be turned into a desert for Government purposes’. Another phrase was widely quoted, of the intention ‘to blast into a wilderness’ the 54 farms and smallholdings. It was ideal for the purpose, the wet land precluding the danger of ricochet. They were given until the spring to make their own arrangements to go, the worst time of the year, though this was later extended to the summer because of lambing. The amount of compensation was determined by the Government.
‘We were given to understand that this was on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘If we’d argued, we would have had nothing with which to buy another farm.’ The shepherds, who did not own land, were not given any form of compensation.
By summer they were all gone, but the animals were more intractable. The Davies family of Gwybedog having found a farm 30 miles away, Iorwerth Davies had to round up their horses. ‘I rode two mares into the ground before I got eighteen together and we started to walk them by road. I was riding in front, my nephew behind on a
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