Blaen Rhymni

"And yet I love to wander
The early ways I went,
And watch from doors and bridges
The hills and skies of Gwent."

Gwalia Deserta - Idris Davies

Words that echo across the years, these from 1938 so not really that long ago; but my landscape has changed much in my lifetime, so how much more the transformation of the valleys since 1938.

A day of immersion in the beauty of the uplands above Rhymney with cousin C, walking in the footsteps of the drovers, immortalised for me in "The Hosts of Rebecca", which I read in my early twenties. I often wondered how the inheritance of the valleys was a nonconformist streak and a rebellious nature. Read Cordells books about the history of South Wales and it's easy to see why.

The area we visited was farmed up until the early twentieth century apparently, with visible signs of the farm buildings and the stone wall enclosures, some now overgrown but visible by the shadows they cast in the sunlight. The line of Scots Pine formed a waymark for the drovers, to head for the farm where they could buy livestock on the way to market. The way they put their mark on the landscape to help navigate before SatNav and roads has a certain poetry to it at times. The area is still farmed of course, but not in the same way and the people who lived and worked these areas long gone. But for us it was a respite from the noise of the nearby roads and human activity, the silence emphasised by the occasional burbling of the larks.

Lunch sitting on the limestone outcrop "table and chairs" was sublime, and the rains held off until we'd returned to the car. Wonderful little interludes these for refreshing my connection with the family history and our connections with this landscape.