Y Filltir Sgwâr

In an attempt to avoid a slide into despondency, I’m taken on a mystery tour - a mystery to G as well as me! We end up on a deep-banked tarmacked track that leads steeply up a hillside, frequently blocked by farm gates that I have to open and close for us to pass. Of course, the weather’s stunning, revealing the full glories of May’s prime, the vegetation rich and green, the air thick with blossom scent and birdsong. 

Suddenly, we spot a gate leading to a ruined cottage, and as there’s room to leave the car, we stop and walk along the disused farm track. Immediately we’re plunged into a world of peaceful ghosts, the human dwellers long since gone, replaced by sheep who roam amongst the ruins, one teenage lamb seeming to play ‘perk-a- boo’ with me as I photograph him through some fallen branches. 

Long abandoned, skeletons of rafters still cling on, and shards of glass remain in windows now taken over by wild flowers. Relics of past life are scattered through what might once have been the farm yard; ancient rusting nails, paint-peeled wood, and crumpled corrugated iron lay almost hidden in the grasses.  

But what a place to live! The view before us is sublime; trees frame the rich green vegetation leading to the distant blue-hazed mountains of Eryri, Tryfan’s jagged outline unmistakable, and we sit drinking in the scene while listening to the layered melodies of bubbling water and a symphony of birdsong.

So what of my title for today? ‘Y filltir sgwâr’ translates as ‘the square mile’; in Welsh, the label ‘dyn y filltir sgwâr’ is applied to a person who has lived a simple, geographically limited life, never moving from the local community - probably the type of life many of us would have lived had we been born a generation or so back. It’s certainly the way three of my four grandparents lived in rural Anglesey, brought up in cottages like this, large families of farmers for whom the weekly horse drawn trip to market would be the furthest they would travel.  

And it’s this life that today’s find seems to symbolise - self sufficient and simple, undeniably hard in winter’s icy winds, but in today’s sunshine, just idyllic. And it’s a local life I need to find contentment in whilst, right now, travelling is far from easy. 

Thanks so much for your kind comments, stars and hearts for Saturday’s’Water Nymph’ - and please excuse today’s rather indulgent derelict set! This place has thrown up so many different types of shots, I agonise to find the one I like the best, dithering as usual before deciding in a window garden (best viewed large)