Croeso Cymru

Despite living less than ninety miles from where I was born, I am in fact in a foreign country. Cross the border from Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire or Gloucestershire and you enter another land, one which has its own language, culture and history. Wales is a very different place from England. Too often it is dismissed by the English with a lame joke about the rain or the sheep. It is a visually stunning place, rivers tumbling down vertiginous slopes, vast green uplands, tumble-down stone cottages and barns dotting the landscape, little hamlets clustered around their chapels tucked away in each valley. Conifer forests form patchworks on the slopes. The rivers have sea trout, the sky is full of red kites and buzzards. And the Welsh, in my experience so far, are friendly despite the reputation for anti-English sentiment.

The Mawddach estuary

I've always loved visiting Wales on holidays, the feeling of having gone properly abroad with the bilingual roadsigns, the long unpronounceable place names and the dragon flags. Susan Cooper's “The Grey King”, part of the Dark is Rising series of novels, was a favourite when I was a teenager, evoking a sense of ancient Welsh folklore and Arthurian legend that stuck with me.

It's not a prosperous part of the UK, of course, and especially round here in mid Wales it is sparsely populated. Sheep farming and tourism are the main industries, the latter recently going to such lengths (literally) as the longest zipwire in Europe and underground trampolines in an abandoned slate mine. You can shoot pheasants too, of course, for a hefty price.

The cucumbers and tomatoes are competing for the roof 

Many of the locals around here are Welsh-speaking, so often I'll enter my local petrol-station shop and have no idea what the conversation is about. I've never experienced what some English people claim to have, that the conversation was in English but they quickly switched to Welsh when they saw an English person come in. I suspect this is simple paranoia playing tricks. Over the last couple of years I've tried to learn some basic phrases from a free podcast called SaySomethingInWelsh, so I can at least say hi and thanks as I buy my llefrith (milk). But to approach anything like conversational Welsh would require a serious investment in time and brain-ache. A seriously high proportion of people who try, I'm told, drop out before getting anywhere near fluent. Although it's a phonetic language so once you've learned the basic rules you can pronounce a sentence easily enough, it's one of the hardest to grasp.

There are a lot of English people living here too. Out of the five nearest houses to my land all are owned by English people apart from one, a Welsh family. Many of the people I know in Machynlleth who came to the town originally through working at the Centre for Alternative Technology are not Welsh. I'm glad though that living where I do, thirteen miles further north into the Welsh-speaking heartlands, I've been able to get to know quite a few Welsh people as well as the English (and Scots).

Friends of mine from Birmingham are currently spending a two week holiday on the Welsh coast at Tywyn and Harlech, and stopped off to see me on the way in as I'm literally on the main A road that brings in the tourists from the Midlands. I mention this as a spur to action to those of you wondering where to spend your next holiday. Come to Wales! It's great! And visit me on the way!

The last delivery I made to the veg bag scheme: rhubarb, cabbages, salads, kale and cucumbers

This was my stall last Sunday at the local monthly farmer's market