A Ram in the Well

'Access is Difficult but Views are Panoramic', proclaimed the brochure, and so it was. 'Living in God's Pocket' was the Welsh expression for Hafod's idyllic seclusion halfway up a Denbighshire mountainside. Amid fields with ancient names like 'Place of the She-Bear' or 'Graves of the Warriors' and near the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey and the castle of Dinas Bran, June Knox-Mawer at once fell under the Celtic spell that entranced Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge. After years in Arabia and the Pacific, it was here that she set about replanting her roots. While facing unexpected hazards - a ram in the well, a swarm of bees in the bedroom chimney, an owl delivered by the postman - she knew friendships were to become the key. There was Will who braved the snow at Christmas to carry a freshly plucked turkey up to Hafod on his pitchfork, Megan, an avid collector of local lore, who knew the way to remote haunted barns and long-lost witches' cottages, her 90-year-old mother, matriarch of the valley, confiding her gossip of chapel scandals and courtship rituals, and the impassioned Dr Ivor declaiming George Borrow's Wild Wales.
Some days there might be a summons from gloriously eccentric Philip Yorke, the last squire of Erddigg, to share a Chinese take-away in the ramshackle servants' hall. There were also regular excursions to Llangollen market in the Why-Walk bus. Helpers appeared from nowhere - most notably Idwal of the Red Beard who built 69 steps up the mountainside single-handed, Huw Half-a-Day, and the burly Griff-the-Boots who could fell a tree with the same zest he had for throwing a quarrelsome Englishman in the river. In A Ram in the Well, June Knox-Mawer gives us a vivid picture of a way of life fast disappering, even in a country that cherishes the past as dearly as Wales.