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In 1963 I started a new job in Liverpool. My wife stayed in Sussex, selling our house there. One weekend she came up to see me, and to see what sort of place she was coming to. I showed her the delights of the Wirral in a hired car, and then we went to Snowdonia, via Denbigh and the Hiraethog Moors.

I stopped the car at the highest spot on the A543, just about where the threat of a wind power station would occupy my mind nearly 40 years later, and we got out. In all directions the wet brown moors stretched out around us. On every horizon, mountain ranges gleamed and glistened in the winter sunshine - the Carneddau, Moel Siabod, the Berwyn, the Clwydian Hills. The sky was enormous, towering white cumulus clouds piling up to heaven.

There was not a breath of wind anywhere. We looked around us, a couple of English southerners, silently. It was the most perfect place we had ever seen. 'It's not a bit like Sussex," said Mary.

© CCW/John Osley
	"Hiraethog oludog lys; rhydd dalaith yr hedd dilys"

Later, in my lunch hour, I went to the library in Liverpool and looked at Highways and Byways in North Wales, published in I898. I read A.G. Bradley's beautiful metrical English prose:

'The purple table-land, the silent wilderness of the Hiraethog, where fairies dance beside the banks of lonely lakes, and belated travellers see uncanny sights, and packs of white dogs with red ears go howling through the mist on the track of phantom deer and relics of the prehistoric age lie strewn on every side.'

Over the years, I have fished in the River Alwen, whose clear cold waters tumble down from these wet moors. I have followed beagles in an always futile attempt to catch hares, tramping through the bog in canvas shoes, soaked to the skin - and ended up, thankfully, in the Sportsman's Arms. I have admired the Llynnau (or Lakes): Alwen and Aled and Brenig and Bran. I have walked round Llyn Brenig more times than I can remember. And I have tried to understand the spirit of the place.

I have tried to understand how little it has changed over the years. It must have looked much the same (with perhaps a few birch trees) in Bronze Age days, when men sat by the river Aled chipping away at flints, making arrow heads; and made houses at Brenig, living and dying in this bleak landscape. Perhaps they survived by catching phantom deer with their red-eared dogs. it must have been a hard life without the Sportsman's Arms to comfort them.

The population has probably declined since those days, Now a few cattle and a few sheep graze there. A few farmers, fiercely proud of their sodden land, scratch a precarious CAP-dominated living. Modern Man comes in his car for a picnic, and goes home refreshed, having marvelled at the views that Bronze Age man saw, and which made my wife and me catch our breath.

We must ensure that future generations can catch their breath as well. Hiraethog is one of the very last unspoiled wild places in Wales, indeed in the UK, and we must guard it well. The way to guard it best, is to just leave it alone! Any sort of change here, any sort of development, and the fairies dancing besides the banks of those lonely lakes will all go away.

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