Country diary: the loneliest house in Wales?

Cefn Garw, Migneint, Snowdonia: Decades ago old Mr Roberts, who shepherded on horseback, departed his remote tyddyn, leaving the moor to fox, raven, pipit-hunting merlinThere are places among the Welsh hills where you may "grow rich/ With looking". In my copy of RS Thomas's Collected Poems, the verse from which that's taken is marked with a curlew's feather, picked up by Cefn Garw, perhaps the loneliest house in Wales. I've often followed the four-mile, climbing track to it alongside the Serw river. Rough ridge, place of quagmires, silken stream - such perfect simplicity in the way Welsh toponymy describes landscape's essence. Continue reading...