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The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise
The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

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The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2018
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The effect of this was to make a place already enticingly elusive positively tantalising. What was this mysterious, out-of-reach farmstead like? By now I could think of little else. Sitting in London traffic, Vez got used to endless conversations prefaced: ‘Just say we got the place in Wales…’ Briefly, it looked as if it might really be coming to market. Ian sent us a small ad in the local paper formally announcing its sale, only to call, a few weeks later, telling us it had again been withdrawn. A third visit, six months later, prompted by a friend’s wedding near Hay-on-Wye, found the Black Mountains open and accessible again. Festooned with binoculars and cameras we walked up Offa’s Dyke footpath, looking forward to glimpsing for the first time the subject of so much discussion, only to find that due to a fold of the hill and some trees still in leaf, almost nothing could be made out except a collection of ramshackle outbuildings and tin barns clustered round a boxy house. Big dry-stone walls reached up the hill behind to claim green fields back from the gorse and bracken. To take too much interest, however, seemed like tempting fate. The place clearly wasn’t coming to market, so after a few minutes, we walked briskly on.

Abandoning hope, we left our names with other agents. But every set of particulars that arrived—for derelict water mills in dank valleys, remote farms beyond the protective cocoon of the National Park, medieval farmhouses way beyond our price range—just seemed to confirm the essential rightness of ‘our place’.

Then, unexpectedly, the day Vez went into hospital to have our first baby, particulars for ‘our place’ arrived. ‘Tair-Ffynnon’, we learnt it was called (formerly ‘Hill Cottage’). It was described as ‘occupying an outstanding rural location in the Brecon Beacons National Park, a good size, three-bedroom, detached, two-storey cottage in need of modernisation and improvement. The property occupies a spectacular position with outstanding views from its isolated location…approached via a stone track across the common…approximately 5 acres of sloping pasture…private water supply from a natural spring…For sale by public auction 3rd October.’ There was a smudgy photograph of the house but, it was pleasingly awful, it conveyed no sense to anyone who didn’t know the place of its remarkable setting.

And so, finally, with our daughter Maya just seven days old, we saw it properly. We drove through the hill gate, bumped up the track, and arrived, officially, to inspect my dream hideaway. Admittedly, to an impartial observer, the place’s appeal might have seemed obscure. The yard was littered with derelict cars and bits of twisted metal, jostling with random lumber heaps, rubble and old tyres. Geese babbled and puttered in the mud. A wall-eyed sheepdog ambushed us as we got out of the car with a series of terrific lunges to the limit of a long chain. The assorted outbuildings all looked on the point of collapse. As for the house, it was hard to say which side was ugliest. It had received a full 1970s makeover, burying all trace of the stone cottage it presumably replaced beneath breezeblock, render, concrete tiles and cavernous, flush-fitted windows. The fields around were so lumpy with anthills they appeared to have a kind of geomorphological acne, and ruckled up like bedclothes on the steep slope. There was a suggestion in the hulks of broken farm machinery that things had grown here, but it was hard to conceive what or when.


But I was not an impartial observer. I was in love. My only concern was that, with so much emotion invested, I might cock up the bidding. Which was why Ian had suggested Mr. Games as our man.


The Montague Harris office was exactly as I imagined an old established auctioneers and valuers (‘offices Brecon and Abergavenny, serving the Usk Valley’) in a rural market town should be. Its sash windows overlooked the cattle market, with (this not being market day) its metal sheds and steel sheep pens empty. A receptionist led us upstairs to Mr. Games’s office where, behind a panelled door, was a wide leather-topped desk, behind which was Mr. Games himself. The floor sagged, perhaps from age, perhaps from the weight of the desk and the hundreds of calf-bound volumes and racing calendars that lined the shelves behind it. Mr. Games, as he rose to greet us, contributed a considerable presence. His complexion was that of the pure-bred countryman, evoking the hills and the hunting field and dispersal sales held in all weathers, balanced and offset by his shoes, polished to a deep-hued patina somewhere between oxblood and mahogany. Those shoes were things of wonder: mighty, double-welted brogues against which the turn-ups of his heavy green tweed suit gently broke. ‘You’re the one wants that bloody place on the mountain.’ He looked me up and down. His eyes narrowed: ‘You don’t look mad. Are you mad?’

His secretary was despatched to fetch a disclaimer form. On it there was a box for the highest bid we were prepared to make. The night before, I’d persuaded Vez that we must be prepared to pay what it cost, to remortgage ourselves for everything we had if necessary. We’d agreed on a figure that was absurdly high for a derelict smallholding in the hills; it would have required us both to sell our cars and probably our television too. I wrote in the amount. Mr. Games took my arm and led me over to the other side of the room, out of Vez’s earshot. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re bloody mad. It’s not worth it. You might think it’s alright now, in October, but get up there in the winter, in the mist and the rain and the snow and the mud. You don’t want that place.’ Evidently feeling he’d discharged his responsibilities as best he could, he watched as I signed the paper. Vez couldn’t bring herself to sign. When I proffered the paper, she turned away, pretending not to know. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you you’re bloody mad,’ said Mr. Games.

In the end, it was neither as cheap as we hoped, nor, happily, anywhere near as much as I’d have paid. Mr. Games sat silently through the bidding, before calmly rising to secure it with two perfectly timed movements of his hand.

And so, thirty days later, I got to drive my Land Rover to its new country home.

2 Tair-Ffynnon


I usually skip topographical details in novels. The more elaborate the description of the locality, the more confused does my mental impression become. You know the sort of thing:—Jill stood looking out of the door of her cottage. To the North rose the vast peak of Snowdon. To the South swept the valley, dotted with fir trees. Beyond the main ridge of mountains a pleasant wooded country extended itself, but the nearer slopes were scarred and desolate. Miles below a thin ribbon of river wound towards the sea, which shone, like a distant shield, beyond the etc. etc. By the time I have read a little of this sort of thing I feel dizzy. Is Snowdon in front or behind? Are the woods to the right or to the left? The mind makes frenzied efforts to carry it all, without success. It would be very much better if the novelist said ‘Jill stood on the top of a hill, and looked down into the valley below.’ And left it at that.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS, Down the Garden Path, 1932

An obligatory requirement for any house in interesting country is a wall-map. Having made the satisfying discovery that Tair-Ffynnon was not only marked on the Black Mountains map, but mentioned by name—we were, literally, ‘on the map’—I wasted no time in pasting one up by the stairs. The map of the Black Mountains is a particularly pleasing one. The many contours make up the shape of a bony old hand, a left hand placed palm down by someone sitting opposite you. Four parallel ridges form the fingers, with the peaks of Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llangorse constituting the joints of the thumb. At the joint between the second and third fingers is the Grwyne Fawr reservoir, up a long no through road. Between the third and fourth knuckles is the one through route, a mountain road that passes up the Llanthony Valley, past the abbey and Capel-y-Fin (‘the chapel at the end’) and up over the Gospel Pass (at 1,880 feet the highest road pass in Wales), before switchbacking down to Hay-on-Wye.

Hay, at the northern end, with its castle and bookshops and spring literary festival, is one of the three towns that skirt the Black Mountains. Crickhowell is to the south-west, beneath its flat-topped ‘Table Mountain’ (‘Crug Hywel’, from which the town takes its name). With its medieval bridge, antique shops and hint of gentility, Crickhowell is to the Black Mountains what Burford is to the Cotswolds. To the south-east, Abergavenny is the town with the least pretensions of the three, sitting beneath the great bulk of Blorenge (one of the few words in the English language to rhyme with ‘orange’) as Wengen sits beneath the Eiger. Central to our new universe was the Skirrid Mountain Garage, a name which conjured (to me, at least) wind-flayed and hail-battered petrol pumps huddled beneath a high pass, but which, in reality, was a homely establishment facing the mountain, selling everything the rural dweller could need, from chicken feed to homemade cakes.

Until some basic building work allowed us to move properly—installing central heating, replacing missing windows and slates, moving the bathroom upstairs—we were still only visiting Tair-Ffynnon at weekends, armed with drills and paint brushes. Our first night on the hill, after weeks of B&Bs down in the valley, felt as remote and exciting as bivouacking on Mount Everest, especially when we woke to find a hard, blue-skied frost had turned everything white and brought five Welsh Mountain ponies with romantically trailing manes and tails to drink at the bathtub where the spring emerged. The same day we spotted our first pair of red kites, easily distinguishable from the ubiquitous buzzards by their forked tails, elegant flight and mournful, whistled cries: pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo, pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo.


Between DIY efforts, we explored. no one who hasn’t moved to a new area can understand the excitement that almost every modest outing brings, be it merely trying out a pub or seeking a recommended shop, and the incidental discoveries the journey brings in the form of new views, a charming farm or enticing-looking walk for some future date. Much of our delight came just from being somewhere we’d chosen to be, as opposed to somewhere foisted upon us by our work or childhood. From growing up in Somerset I knew it was possible to live in a place without feeling the slightest connection with it, and the experience had left me hungry for knowledge of our new locality. Skirrid, Sugar Loaf and Blorenge, as the three triangulation points visible from most places, had to be climbed. The Black Hill and Golden Valley had to be inspected to see if they lived up to their names. Expeditions had to be mounted to walk Offa’s Dyke, and to drive the upland roads where Top Gear tested their supercars, to check out Cwmyoy church’s crooked tower and Kilpeck church’s saucy gargoyles of peeing women. And when we heard that a cult porn classic had been filmed in 1992 exclusively around a particular local farm, naturally we hurried off to see that too. The Revenge of Billy the Kid* (plot: farmer shags goat; monstrous half-goat-half-man progeny returns to kill his family) may not rank directly alongside Kilvert’s Diaries, Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, or Eric Gill’s sculptures (not that Gill’s extra-curricular activities were so far removed) but it still supplied local colour.


After the auction, when I’d shaken hands with the vendor’s solicitor, he’d said: ‘If you’ll be wanting a builder up there, I can recommend a tidy one. Very tidy.’ Any impartial recommendation of a local tradesman was plainly useful, given our newcomer status. And I could see that the notion of a tidy builder—the phrase, after all, was practically an oxymoron—was praiseworthy. But even if the one he was recommending was exceptionally orderly, even if he dusted every finished surface and ran the Hoover round before leaving, was this feature, in itself, sufficient justification for recommendation? Surely the foremost qualities for a builder must be workmanship, diligence, reliability, integrity, value for money, and so on, all before the undoubted bonus of tidy-mindedness?

Having, nevertheless, taken up his recommendation, over the succeeding weeks we heard mention of tidy jobs, tidy places, tidy machines, and it dawned that ‘tidy’, of course, didn’t really mean tidy at all, but was local vernacular for ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. As, in due course, we learnt that ‘ground’ was the term for ‘land’, cwtsh (pronounced ‘cutch’ as in ‘butch’) for cuddle, trow for ‘trough’, ‘by here’ for ‘here’ and so on, my favourite being the localised version of good-bye, the delightful ‘bye now’, as if parting were a mere trifling interruption, that resumption of contact was taken for granted. Phones, too, were generally answered with a joyful ‘’Alloooo’, as if you caught the recipient moments after his lottery win. The accent’s combination of Herefordshire and a hint of West Country, with a sing-song Welsh lilt, made communication easy on the ear, if periodically incomprehensible.

It also highlighted we were not just in a different place but in a different country, with a different language. ‘ARAF’ painted on roads at junctions meant ‘Slow’, while the word ‘HEDDLU’ appeared on the side of police cars. Signposts to bigger villages carried place names in both English and Welsh, however similar. The sign into our local village was large to accommodate (for absolute clarity) both ‘Llanfihangel Crucornau’ and ‘Llanvihangel Crucorney’. Cash machines offered Welsh instructions. Station and Post Office announcements were in Welsh as well as English. All official council, government or civil service documentation was bi-lingual, more than doubling its length. Names of smaller villages and individual properties tended to be in Welsh. In fact such a bewildering profusion of the same words kept cropping up again and again, of Pentwyns and Bettwses and Llanfihangels and Cwm-Thises and Nanty-Thats, that we bought a Welsh dictionary for the car. A new world emerged. In combination with words for ‘big’, ‘little’, ‘over’, ‘under’, ‘near’ or numbers, a poetic topography of landform sprang out.* Yet, despite this, and despite a general allegiance to Wales (especially evident during televised rugby finals), we soon discovered next to no one spoke or even understood Welsh.

The area seemed to be in the grip of a benign, easygoing, low-level identity crisis. Keen to learn a few basics, I spent an afternoon in the local reference library. The three classic guidebooks, A. G. Bradley’s In the March and Borderland of Wales (1905) and P. Thoresby Jones’s Welsh Border Country (1938) and H. J. Massingham’s The Southern Marches (1952), devoted pages simply trying to define where they were talking about. Everywhere there were signs of Welshness, or Englishness, or of a confusion between the two. Despite the unambiguous geophysical boundary of the ten-mile Hatterrall Ridge, the actual border with England ran only part of the way along its length, before descending to make various arbitrary and unpredictable kinks and turns, with the result that a short drive ‘round the mountain’ to Hereford or Hay crisscrossed the border repeatedly. So, not surprisingly, at least as many people seemed to be called Powell and Jones and Davies in neighbouring Herefordshire as in Monmouthshire. It was similarly interesting, if a little bewildering, to be given the option in every newsagent, however small, of nine local papers: the Abergavenny Chronicle, Monmouthshire Beacon, Abergavenny Free Press, Hereford Times, Brecon and Radnorshire Express, Western Mail, Western Free Press, Gwent Gazette and the South Wales Argus. For leisure moments, these were supplemented by the magazines Wye Valley Life, Usk Valley Life, Monmouthshire Life and Herefordshire Life, plus, for the macro view, Welsh Life. Whole sections of most newsagents were set aside for this remarkable array of verbiage. Even Abergavenny’s slogan—‘Markets, Mountains and More’—on signs hanging off lampposts and on its literature, suggested a certain doubt about exactly what it was the place stood for.

This uncertainty was echoed by the physical landscape. Upland or lowland? Sheep or cattle grazing? Hedge country or stone wall country? On the last question, most fields seemed to be a mixture, as if, halfway through walling, the waller had thought: ‘Sod this. Why don’t we just plant a hedge?’ Then, fifty years later when the hedges weren’t doing so well, another generation had said: ‘Hedges here? What were they thinking of? This should be a bloody wall.’ Even the birds seemed confused. At Tair-Ffynnon there were few trees but we had several fat green woodpeckers feeding off ants from the anthills, along with treecreepers and nuthatches. We had mountain birds like red kites and ravens, and moorland ones like red grouse and merlins. Yet we also had farmland birds like redstarts and fieldfares, water birds like yellow wagtails and herons, and garden birds: tits, chaffinches and blackbirds (though no songthrushes, strangely).

It was Border Country alright. Monmouthshire, a county in-between. But tidy, nevertheless.


My father and brother Jonny came to inspect the place. ‘D’you think my car will recover?’ said my father, parking his Fiesta after picking his way up the track. He looked well, but then he always did. Now in his eighties, he hardly seemed to have changed in the time I’d known him. Largely bald with white Professor Calculus-style hair, he’d looked old when he was young, but as his contemporaries aged, he’d just stayed the same. I bent down to kiss him, giving Jonny the usual curt nod. ‘Wonderful view. What a hideous house,’ said my father, fastidiously surveying the yard, taking in the scrap metal and the junk, as I helped him out of the car. ‘And what an appalling mess. What possessed you to buy this place, darling?’

I’d known my father wouldn’t like it. He loathed disorder, crudeness, ugliness. His relationship with the countryside was one of suspicion bordering on revulsion, and I guessed this counted as extreme countryside. I was impressed, frankly, given how bad the track was, he’d attempted it at all.

Although, technically, we’d all grown up in the country, in as much as our house was located in rural Somerset, ours wasn’t a rural existence. My father would vastly have preferred to live in the town. We were there entirely on my mother’s account, because she was obsessed with horses. Although dedicated to his garden, his interest was in abstract, strictly non-productive gardening. Most day-to-day aspects of rural living my father cordially detested. The getting stuck behind tractors and milk lorries. The smell of muck-spreading. The filth and slime with which the lanes steadily filled from December to March. It was a point almost of pride that he possessed not a solitary item of the default green country wear sold by shops with ‘country’ in their name. He was repelled by traditional rural activities such as hunting, shooting and fishing and would not have dreamt of attending an event such as the Badminton Horse Trials, had the latter not been forced upon him by my mother. Visiting churches, distinguished gardens and occasional walks up Crook’s Peak were the extent of his rural ambitions. We kept no animals, other than horses, and grew no fruit or vegetables. He wished for no contact with country people and did not enjoy having it foisted upon him (such as when he answered the door to find Ken, the farmer at the top of our lane, following one of the periodic shoots through the adjacent wood, bearing the unwelcome gift of a brace of pheasants). He made no secret of the fact that he was in the country on sufferance and would have preferred to occupy a terraced house in Bristol or Bath. Maybe it was from him that I acquired the sense of rural root-lessness that had driven me up a Welsh mountain.*

Although, technically, we’d all grown up in the country, in as much as our house was located in rural Somerset, ours wasn’t a rural existence. My father would vastly have preferred to live in the town. We were there entirely on my mother’s account, because she was obsessed with horses. Although dedicated to his garden, his interest was in abstract, strictly non-productive gardening. Most day-to-day aspects of rural living my father cordially detested. The getting stuck behind tractors and milk lorries. The smell of muck-spreading. The filth and slime with which the lanes steadily filled from December to March. It was a point almost of pride that he possessed not a solitary item of the default green country wear sold by shops with ‘country’ in their name. He was repelled by traditional rural activities such as hunting, shooting and fishing and would not have dreamt of attending an event such as the Badminton Horse Trials, had the latter not been forced upon him by my mother. Visiting churches, distinguished gardens and occasional walks up Crook’s Peak were the extent of his rural ambitions. We kept no animals, other than horses, and grew no fruit or vegetables. He wished for no contact with country people and did not enjoy having it foisted upon him (such as when he answered the door to find Ken, the farmer at the top of our lane, following one of the periodic shoots through the adjacent wood, bearing the unwelcome gift of a brace of pheasants). He made no secret of the fact that he was in the country on sufferance and would have preferred to occupy a terraced house in Bristol or Bath. Maybe it was from him that I acquired the sense of rural root-lessness that had driven me up a Welsh mountain.*

Jonny, on the other hand, was in heaven, as he methodically inspected every inch of the place, shed by shed, rusty wreck by rusty wreck. For fifteen years, Jonny’s day job had been as a Formula One motor-racing mechanic, at one time ending up as head of Ayrton Senna’s car—thus maintaining the Woodward tradition of having a job sufficiently specialised to be utterly meaningless to other members of the family. He was so shy, with us at least, he’d never, under any circumstances, contemplate leaving answerphone messages. Yet his spiky handwriting, indenting at least three sheets of paper beneath the one he was writing on, hinted at his determination once he’d set his mind on something. In recent years we’d bonded, bizarrely, over an affection for old farm machinery; the key difference between us being that he was a mechanical genius. Machines in his hands sprang back to life, as plants did in my mother’s, and as they died in my own.

‘Pick-up cylinder off an International B74 baler…radiator off a David Brown…top link arm…link box flap…hitch and footplates off a Super Major. Did you know your hay trailer’s the converted chassis of a Bedford Army Four-tonner?’

I could tell Jonny was as approving as it was possible for him to be.

‘I just do,’ said Jonny.

We went into the house for lunch. ‘What’s going there?’ asked Jonny, indicating the empty space left for the Aga.

‘An Aga.’

‘An Aga? How awful,’ said my father.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I rather like an Aga,’ said my brother. ‘What colour are you getting?’

‘Cream.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’

After lunch, Jonny returned to his inspection outside, exactly where he’d left off.

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