Welsh Views

We are in south west Wales, as we try to be at least once every year. We take the Old Ways, as Robert Macfarlane puts it, down the old A40, in preference to the faster routes and motorways further south. The scenery is spectacular, the towns and villages are charming, the sense of landscape history hangs like mist, the stress level is set at minimum

There is an old fashioned cafe in the old magistrates' court in Crickhowell. Cauliflower cheese; pasta, mushroom & spinach bake; vegetable bake - they all look much the same - cook until the cheese sauce starts to blacken on top and it's about right - fabulous. Treacle tart and custard; guilty as charged

Crickhowell is nestled between the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park to the west and the Wye Valley National Landscape to the east. The Labour leadership of the Welsh government have stated they will establish a new National Park in north east Wales (the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley). We stopped later in our journey and chatted with a friend who is intimately involved with this process - balancing landscape value, climate impact, biodiversity effects, infrastructure needs, national benefit, local opinion(s!), planning authority changes and many more issues, to advise the government on possible ways forward. It is immensely complex, internally conflicted and time consuming; the 'commitment' to achieve it within the current parliamentary term may be wildly optimistic

The subject came up because our route was peppered with signs (in English and Welsh) demanding 'No Pylons'. The Tywi valley, which the A40 follows, is the preferred route to take electrical power from the large-scale wind farms that are to be constructed on the hills of mid-Wales into the National Grid. A well organised campaign is resisting the installation of above-ground cables along this picturesque valley. One of their tactics is to push for the designation of the area as a National Landscape (what used to be called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), which would strengthen the case for expensive underground cables. Like the government itself, they may find it's not quite that simple, or fast

The leeks were destined for the courtroom cafe, freshly delivered... from Lancashire

Edit: Well, look what turned up in the morning news! Quite a good article but, according to our friend, 'biodiversity, river health and the climate crisis' are not part of the standard National Park remit, and you could argue that creating a new honeypot conflicts with those aims