A CARAVAN TOUR IN WALES

Taranaki Daily News, 1 December 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

A CARAVAN TOUR IN WALES

“Crazy Gates And Neat Sheep” In A Country Of Unsurpassed Beauty

A FTER the tranquil charm of rural England, North Wales has a splendour of noble contours and barbaric colour which goes straight to the heart of the wanderer from overseas.

ren rocks. White haired, and with rosy, indomitable face, Mrs Jones was quite content with her lot; she assured us it was “fine in the winter time,” and looked affectionately round on her bleak domain. Architecture in Wales, from the bare grey town houses to the simple, white-washed peasant farmhouses—frequently with cow sheds under the same roof—has little of the artistry which makes the old world English village a delight to the eye. Isolated villages, with their grey stone walls for every winding street, fit very snugly into the landscape, but their attractiveness is chiefly in the neat, homely interiors, betraying the love and pride of home which are natural in a storm-swept land. All the Welsh gift for architecture has gone into the making of bridges. No country in the world surely has such a wealth of graceful arches; every farm seems to have its swift stream spanned by a little masterpiece in stone.

Perhaps it also goes a little to the head, for our caravan, after resting quite contentedly in English woods and orchards, now seems to make instinctively for the highest and most rocky perches, accessible only by narrow byways. This in itself would be simple but for what seems to be a natural law in Wales, and indeed, throughout Great Britain, that the steeper the slope of the meadow, the smaller the gate (writes Elizabeth George in the Melbourne “Herald”). In this part nothing wider than a very minute haycart was ever dreamed of when making openings from the road; and to run up a very steep incline and turn a bulky caravan in a walled lane just wide enough for half a dozen sure-footed mountain sheep, is a slow and delicate operation! Usually car and caravan have to be parted at some stage, and if there are any country people near they come to join, with a babel of cheerful Welsh ejaculations, in pushing “him,” as they invariably style the caravan. Good-natured sheepfarmers, like helpful giants frequently move one of their crazy gateposts or take a gate off its hinges for our convenience; the business of enclosing the land not having the serious importance it has in a country of wandering stock. Once in, and blissfully careless of the problem of getting out, there is a special charm about a little eyrie among the heather, with a waterfall at one’s door and the majestic spectacle of Snowden, mist encircled, before one’s eyes. Even in the valleys near the border, North Wales has a landscape quite distinct from the neighbouring counties. There is a wealth of bright, clear colour everywhere—yellow flowers thick in the meadows, a green more intense because of the contrast with purple shadows on the hills, and gorse and heather among the rocks of the mountain background. The queerest little harvest scenes are taking place in the valleys and on those little patches on the hillside where man has snatched from stern Nature a rough holding Here and there. Two men ride on a vehicle which is little more than a mower on wheels, one to guide it and one to bind the sheaves with twisted straw. Half a dozen hands wander abgut picking up sheaves, apparently at random, and placing them by hand into insecure-looking stocks of three sheaves each. A man with a scythe follows, gleaning any corn left standing. Just before this wild landscape gave place to • fairylike region- of oak woods, ferns and waterfalls, we took shelter on a tiny bleak farm, consisting of two sloping meadows for half a dozen cows and 20 sheep. It belonged to a stout-hearted widow named Mrs Jones, who, with her daughter, makes some kind of a living there in the shelter of the bar-

Near Bettws-y-coed we came upon the home of an artist whose studies of the Welsh hills have . hung in Royal Academy shows for many years; changing fashions in art have brought him' to a roadside studio and the guineas of the wealthy tourist in search of “views.” We took tea in a woodland studio, with trees almost barring the door and a vine trained from the door to the rough stone fireplace, making a charming pattern of greenery, and we were not surprised that he seemed to look upon the change in fortune with philosophic composure. On another journey we passed the great slate quarries, whence all the schoolboys of Great Britain once received their supplies of writing tablets and squeaky slate pencils! The substitution of paper scribblers has made quite an appreciable difference to the Welsh industry, but still there are houses to be roofed and walls to be built from the heart of these great mountains, zig-zagged as they are with futurist patterns of past and present workings. The reddish grey of Welsh slate in the vast mass of a whole mountain side is an imposing and beautiful thing to see.

I do not regret a glimpse of this country’s more formidable side, in a rainstorm in Llanberis Pass. There, where the whole world presents a front of flinty grey, where boulders like small hills seemed to have been hurdled down the slopes by some primeval and gigantic race—even, there the indomitable Welsh have won a tiny holding here and there among the rocks, divided the hillside with neatly piled slate walls, and set a few dozen sheep to pasture. The Welsh sheep,' by the way, are the only creatures in this country which do not fit into the majestic landscape. Very small, very neat and t white, with long tails and faces of kitten-like demureness, they look for all the world like the sheep that Little 80-Peep tended, and not at all like the wild and hardy flocks of primitive pastoral life. The Welsh Highlanders themselves have one characteristic of an unconquerable people; they have kept their own language. Although all but the old people can speak English well enough for all their needs, they never dream of speaking it to each other, and we hear not a word but Welsh as we walk through the smaller villages.