Country diary: The mimicry of a sedge warbler drifts in this quiet place | Jim Perrin

Maelor Saesneg, north-east Wales: This is lake country, haunting and fascinating, and strongly Welsh despite being a stone's throw from EnglandThe English Maelor! It's the appendix to Wales that dangles off the bulge of the Welsh north?eastern border and reaches almost as far as Whitchurch in Shropshire. DH Lawrence regarded this as a strongly Welsh-flavoured county, and some of the earliest Welsh poetry, dating back perhaps to the sixth century, locates here. Remember the line from the 9th/10th-century Heledd saga, "Wylaf wers, tawaf wedyn?" ("I will weep for a while, and afterwards keep silence.") What forgotten, deadly skirmish along these blood-soaked borderlands inspired that tragic utterance?The great Welsh warrior chieftain Owain Glynd?r, at the end of the 14th century, also rode this way, past the deep and phragmites?fringed lake, to marry Margaret Hanmer. Six centuries later, the outstanding feminist literary critic Lorna Sage (1943?2001) was brought up in nearby Hanmer, and her award?winning memoir Bad Blood (2000) leaves a vivid impression of the place and her childhood there, before she moved on eventually to Durham and then to the University of East Anglia, where she was tutor to our distinguished diarist Mark Cocker. Continue reading...