Wales, September 2010

I spent a day in North Wales early this month. Why? Mostly, I suppose, because in the 1960s we spent a lot of our summers in this cottage. A little wintertime too. Fifty years ago it was like this (taken with the camera on the right).

That's almost how I remember it, too - black and white. My memories adapt to to the photographs.

Now ...

It looks green, and it is. It rained the whole time I was there. If this part of Wales had a theme, besides 'austere beauty' it would be 'rampant growth' and 'abandoned stuff'.

Green is my valley; lift your gaze and the hills are rocky and exposed.

The cottage is a mile or so from Llanfachreth, population 90. The attraction of Llanfachreth used to be Mrs Jones's shop. She was behind the counter in the 1950s; she was still there in 1998. It still looks like a shop, kind of.

The region is centred on Dolgellau, which is much unchanged, though quieter than I remembered, and some of the shops are vacant.

Did I mention shops? It took me a while to realise what was strange about them. Not a single chain. (Unless you count the post office.) No Tescos, no John Lewis, no MacDonald's. More or less, the shops you would have expected 50 years ago.

Many of the businesses had indeed been there since at least the 1950s, but not, sadly, Roberts hardware, which was still trading in 1998, when the woman who worked there had been in the shop for 52 years.

Now it is a decent coffee shop.

One thing certainly hasn't changed. Dolgellau lies below Cader Idris. This is how I remember it, catching the clouds as they pass.

When I was 8 or so, we climbed Cader Idris, taking the frontal route past the crater lake and up the broken edge of the caldera. Sheep happily ran across the ledges on the crater's rim, hundreds of feet almost vertically above the lake, but for humans it was not a place to take lightly. The walk down was gentler, on the green back of the mountain, but our nuts and apples and chocolate ran out and in the end it was a very long day, ending up with a hitched ride in a VW Kombi not much better than the abandoned ones you occasionally see even now.

So many trips to Wales, so little exploration. I barely knew Barmouth, just 15 minutes away by car, with its -(insert cliche and superlative)- beaches. I was there not long after sunrise.

Beyond Barmouth, winding coast roads, winding coast, Harlech. Empty and derelict, but still in command.

The only real shelter from the rain was inside the walls.

All ceilings and floors must have fallen centuries ago. Even without a roof it was dark.

Weather was closing in again, time to move on.

This website was created by Justin Zobel. All views expressed herein are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the School, NICTA, or the University.