Bred of Heaven (29 page)

It's not immediately clear which of the half-dozen buildings they would have lived in. Some of the boys certainly slept in a barn above the cattle. I walk back towards the mouth of the track and notice that the nearest ruin has a small sturdy porch. This must once have been the family's front door. Francis Jones, the author of
Historic Carmarthenshire Homes
, visited in 1980 and found the house ‘empty and deteriorating'. ‘The interior is roomy,' he writes, ‘there is panelling in the small entrance hall and some much older panelling on the left-hand side of the staircase. From the upper floor, a short flight of stairs leads to a commodious attic.' Panelling and stairs have both gone. Even the livestock, found grazing in the barns on previous visits by Reeses, have left them to crumble.

They always kept an extra place at the table, I've been told, for unexpected guests, who would have heard nothing but Welsh, even if the language was marginalised at school. Among themselves they continued to speak it deep into old age. The rain is coming now. I try to summon the ghosts of eight boys and a girl, raised on this farm among cattle and sheep, hens and geese, dogs and cats. It was here that Bert made his first extraction. It was here that Eliza must have died, probably in the same bed in which she gave birth nine times. In the early 1970s someone decided that it wouldn't do to live in this lonely impractical spot down by the river at the bottom of the hill, that a classic Welsh bungalow overlooking the sweep of Preseli and Pembrokeshire – Little England Beyond Wales – made a great deal more sense. So Corn Gafr was eventually abandoned by
all, if not forgotten. Percy built a home in Surrey and called it Corn Gafr. In New South Wales one of Bill's children called their dog kennel Meidrim.

From the porch I look at the Welsh Blacks. One or two of them look back at this interloper in a red rugby shirt. A notion nudges me in the ribs that the Reeses of Corn Gafr have somehow left these sentinels here in the yard to keep watch over the old place as another westerly breeze whistles along the valley and rain taps steadily on the old stones.

Hedd and I wander down the lane. A sheepdog tags along beside us. The sun is still caressing the walls and floor of the valley. We talk about this and that until we meet a tiny stooped figure wearing a bright-blue over-pinny and a thick woollen hat. She must be in the tail end of her eighties. Hedd introduces her as Beti.

‘Mae'n braf iawn cwrdd â chi,' I say in my politest Welsh.

‘How are you?' she croaks. At least I assume that's what she says: her English is so accented as to be impenetrable. Not that I can understand more than a word or two of her Welsh, as she and Hedd slip into a conversation about sheep. They've probably never spoken about anything else. She has a bucket of feed she is scattering over a fence to a tiny flock in a field at the mouth of her lane.

‘Wel,' says Hedd. ‘Rhaid dal ati.' Must keep going. I smile at Beti as we walk down the lane and Hedd explains that she has lived in Cwm Cywarch all her life, having never married. Since her brother died she's been alone. There's another farmer in the valley who's even older, he says, and still going at over ninety.

I ask him at what age he learned English. In primary school in Dinas Mawddwy, he explains. ‘I was about nine year old when I remember an English-speaking family moved to the village and we just couldn't understand them.' Did he find it hard? ‘Very hard.
After we went on to the Dolgellau school we were having English lessons.' Nowadays Hedd is president of the agricultural college in Dolgellau and is active in the National Farmers' Union so he mixes with English speakers a lot. He doesn't consider himself fluent. ‘There's a lot of people a lot more fluent than I am. Day to day we never speak English. If I was at home on the farm every day I could go for weeks without speaking in English at all.'

Up along the edge of the field a distant dog flies round the rim of a flock. The goal, says Hedd, is to move them on to a greener pasture. It's a wondrous thing to behold, I reflect contently, this age-old harmony, this trust nurtured across centuries between shepherd and sheepdog. Sheep have been cajoled and corralled in this way since time immemorial, I think. This is truly the Welsh way.

So much for my romanticism. Dewi and the quad bike fly over a brow in the field, bumping and throttling, scaring rogue elements of the flock into formation. It's mightily effective. They're through an open gate in a jiffy. The Welsh way, it seems, is essentially a partnership between man, dog and Kawasaki.

‘It's easier for the hills,' explains Hedd. ‘We've got a lot of land to get around.' As if to prove it, later in the day we head up in the other direction, past the farmhouse and into the higher, hillier fields towards the valley's cul-de-sac. My task is to be another mobile fence post discouraging the sheep from breaking formation. Hedd does the same. Owain is careering about on the quad bike while Dewi has switched to a bright-orange scrambling bike which whines and whirs across the open slope. The two dogs do their bit too.

Across the day and into the next, a pattern begins to develop. Flock A needs moving from field B to field C to join flock D. Flock E needs its daily ration of vitamin-enriched sheep feed in Field F.
Ewe G and her lambs H and I need shifting from barn K to paddock J. Pasture L containing flock M needs its newly born lambs counted. Fields N, O and P need to be checked for orphans and dead, but I misunderstand the instructions in Welsh and also check fields Q and R. Flock S needs to be returned from the yard to field T. Sheep U belongs to neighbour V and needs catching but it's a cussed bugger and escapes from sheep truck W, leaps over drystone wall X into field Y, where the person tasked with bringing it down is farmhand Z. Me. Owain and I corner sheep U in a field and when it attempts to sidestep through a gap I dive headlong across the grass, grab it by the fleece and wrestle it to the floor. Resistance is futile. I lie there smothered in a kicking sack of wool. Owain has a top tied around his waist which he places over the head of the sheep.

‘Iawn sefyll nawr,' he says. It's OK to get up. I let go and stand. The sheep's head is obscured by the material. She won't move, Owain explains. They're so stupid that if you cover their heads they just lie there.

Meanwhile, the barn brings out one's maternal side. Past the huge corrugated flap which constitutes the barn door is a maze of pens and runs constructed of iron gates and wooden wickets. This is where I meet Hedd's wife Sian, who seems to be in charge here. Sian is a teacher's assistant in Dolgellau, but the school holiday coincides with lambing so she spends her Easters in the shed trying to persuade orphaned lambs to take on sustenance. I can't quite decide who the boys look like. And then I realise that it's an uncanny combination of both. Hedd and Sian are one of those couples who must have instinctively gravitated to each other at least partly because, with strong cheekbones and beady eyes and pleasant open faces, they look wonderfully alike.

Radio Cymru blares out of a wireless on a ledge. The floor is carpeted with straw and an occasional topsoil of hay. In one large
enclosure a bunch of ewes are waiting to drop. In another there's a collection of motherless lambs. They've either been rejected by ewes, or the ewes have died out in the field. The five under my feet come in various sizes. The littlest are ineffably sweet, quivering in corners on pipecleaner limbs. There's a thuggish-looking class bully type that, if it had only two legs, would be in borstal before the summer's out. As it's got four, it will be on someone's plate instead.

I tell myself not to forget this. The Pughs certainly don't. First thing one morning Dewi and Owain are in the yard sifting ewes brought down from the hills. They grab each under the forelegs, kick away the hind legs and upend it so that the undercarriage is exposed. They feel the belly and squeeze the teats and if there's a milky excretion it is consigned to one pen. If there's none it goes to another. These are the barren ones whose pregnancies, at least this year, have failed. A dozen or so have been rounded up to be moved up the road into a field.

‘That's about £400,' says Hedd, pointing as unaccusingly as he can manage at the ewes responsible for the lost revenue.

No wonder, back in the barn, the orphaned lambs are carefully nurtured through their loss. They fight over a pair of rubber teats sticking through a fence and attached to an upturned flagon of high-protein milk substitute. The thug gets it all unless you drag it out the way. Which I do, assertively, for the whole week. The tiny one needs a bit of guidance. I grab it by the neck and force its mouth onto the teat. After a few seconds it loses concentration and after further force-feeding you have to conclude that actually maybe it's just full. Other lambs, either rejected or orphaned, are thrust upon new mothers. It's the sheep-farming version of an adoption agency. The only way to get the mother to accept her new charge is to pin her in the corner of her pen with an iron crook so she can't turn and shove the interloper away. I do quite a lot of iron
crook work across the week. Eventually, says Sian, the ewe will accept the lamb once it smells of her own milk.

Regularly at midmorning, I follow Hedd across the yard and into the old two-storey farmhouse. Boots are left outside, hands washed in a cluttered anteroom. The kitchen is snug, with a square table. A tin of biscuits is proffered with a pot of tea. There's the local paper to read – in Welsh – and S4C is on in the corner. On the wall is the clock Hedd won as Welsh Rural Community Champion (there was also a cheque for £500). At lunchtime Sian serves up hearty pies and stews followed by filling puddings. I look at Owain's whippet frame and wonder how long it can last. Maybe he eats less as an agriculture student in Aberystwyth.

The Pughs acquired the farm from an uncle and aunt of Sian's in 1985; her father was born here. A photo album shows the work that went into renovating the place. Hedd previously had worked on his father's farm, three miles away at the bottom of the valley. The farm cost £100,000 for a thousand acres. ‘It sounds a big farm,' he says as we get into the 4x4 and head off down Cwm Cywarch, ‘but it's mostly mountain.' A sheep per acre is the accepted norm on a hill farm, he explains. Five years later they expanded the flock and the farm by renting 600 further acres. By then the boys had started coming. At three or four they were already helping and in due course it became clear the older two wanted to go into sheep farming too. ‘Once you have boys you're thinking if they want to farm you've got to find land for them.'

The 4 × 4 noses along the lane. We pass Beti on her corner and wave. The sun seems insistent on hanging around. I've barely seen a cloud since arriving. Round a pair of bends we come to a small chapel, long since closed, where they used to take the boys to Sunday school. Google's Street Search cameras filmed this far and no further up the valley. ‘We're in no-man's-land,' says Hedd. He
doesn't have to add that that's how he likes it. We reach the main road and drive south-east for twenty miles. The landscape grows notably tamer, the hills more reasonable. Eventually Hedd pulls in at a caravan park, heads up the hill into a network of four or five fields and proceeds to drive very slowly around the perimeter. Sheep look up at us inquisitively, trotting out of the way where necessary. This, Hedd explains, is one of his farms, acquired four years previously.

‘There was no land going for sale by us so you've got to expand and buy wherever you can find it.' He barely gets out of the car. This is purely a tour of inspection. With the rising cost of petrol, coming here every day must be ruinously expensive. ‘That's why we brought the sheep from this farm home to the shed for lambing.' Every time he shifts a sheep from one farm to another he has to fill in a form. We spend no more than half an hour at this farm before, the inspection completed, we head back the way we came. I ask Hedd if in his time farming has changed.

‘I think we've had the best times for farming, especially the hills,' he says. ‘I used to produce, produce, produce, and then the emphasis changed to conservation. Going back about twenty years ago. It works well with us. We've done double fencing, looking after hedges, planting trees. You've got to make sure that you don't put too many sheep on the mountain so that the heather comes back. There's a new scheme coming out now. The new scheme is going to be on water quality and carbon footprint. At the moment I can't see getting into the new scheme. It's voluntary. If I can't get into it I'll be losing 40 per cent of my income. And without that I haven't got a chance of surviving. What we get from selling the lambs is not enough to survive on.' He and Sian restrict their holidays to a couple of days at the Royal Welsh each year. But then you'd have to travel a very long way to find anywhere more peaceful than
Blaencywarch. Does the beauty ever pall? I ask him. ‘You get used to it,' he says with a smile.

A few miles from Dinas Mawddwy Hedd pulls off onto a narrow road and follows a tight valley for a few miles until at a tiny village called Abercegir he parks at a pretty whitewashed farmhouse. This is yet more land owned by the Pughs, acquired twelve years back. We load a couple of sacks of sheep feed on a quad bike and head up the one-in-three slope. After a climb of 300 metres or so a column of sheep is chasing along behind the quad bike. To a chorus of bleating I get off and distribute the feed along a line of about five metres. The trick is to make sure the lambs get some too. Back on the quad bike we climb higher and higher until the slope starts to level out and we are near a ridge. Hedd directs me to go up and have a look. I do as I'm told and all of a sudden am overwhelmed by a panoramic view of bristling peaks. I unfurl a map in my head and start ticking off the mountains. To the south is the bare mound of Pumlumon, to the north-west the triangular crag of Cadair Idris, to the north the bristling ridge of the Arans, which sit just above the Pughs' farm. In the distance a NATO fighter takes its regular route over Cwm Cywarch, sound trailing behind it like a dog after sheep. It's up here that I have my answer to the question I've been meaning to ask Hedd. Why is it that sheep are so embedded in the national consciousness of Wales? The pretentious urbanite in me is hoping for a riveting answer which I can scope for embedded meaning. But while the ancestral heart of a bard beats somewhere inside every Welshman, hill farmers are above all practical people. Hedd sits on the quad bike and surveys the magnificent array of mountains rising in every direction.