Summer pasture

Hafod Tydfil. It's hard to convey the very special quality of this unique place.

Imagine a coarse brown expanse of hessian sacking with a single small patchwork diamond of bright green velvet and brocade. That's Hafod Tydfil, an isolated island of a few fields and trees pasted high on the moorland slope below the Preseli mountain range. This gives some impression of how it looks from a distance.

In times gone this was a hafod or summer dwelling, used when the grazing was good and the weather was kind. During the winter the conditions up here would be bleak, the place lost in mist or whipped by bitter winds, inaccessible in floods or snow. People and animals would retreat to the hendre, the old place or permanent dwelling lower down. This form of transhumance was practiced all over upland Europe once upon a time, the shepherds travelling long distances with their flocks via ancient droveways and living close to their animals in primitive dwellings for the duration of the summer. Sheep and goats would be milked and cheeses made for selling at the season's end. The tradition continues in a few Mediterranean areas and even in America it was featured not so long ago in the film of Annie Proulx's novella Brokeback Mountain in which two young men are hired to herd sheep in the wilds of Wyoming, and fall in love by the campfire as they guard the flocks.

Who knows what romances blossomed in the white nights here? All that remains now are crumbling walls and huge trees grown out of all proportion in the rich soil where animals were once housed and people went about their chores. It must have been a glorious place to spend the summer, looking down across the moorland towards the distant village but hearing only the sound of kites and buzzards, sheep and crows. Today one baby crow was calling testily from the nest visible high in the bare ash tree to the left of the sycamore that's already in leaf. Otherwise the place was deserted, peaceful and forgotten.