A New Look

One of the great joys of exploring our countyside is the variety of landscapes within a short travelling distance, but in the middle of this variety many of those individual landscapes are graphic examples of the delights and dilemmas of understanding and conserving rural Wales.

My family has farrmed in the Dysyrni Valley for generations. My grancfather came to Hendy in theearly 1870s. Every rnorning, if minded, be could look at the farm on which he was born, a mile or so the distance across the Broadwater, where the river channel broadens and becomes tidal on the flat expanse of land due north of Tywyn.

However the landscape he saw then and others now, is a dynamic one. Major changes have taken place within a relatively short time span. Geraldus Carnbrensis during his 13th century journeys recorded Tywyn as one of the five major ports of Wales. Today the church and the oldest part of the town are almost a mile from the sea. The estuary has silted up. Only the cormorants carry on as if nothing has changed, flying, each morning and evening, the seven miles or so across the flat valley floor to the sea from the colony their forebears had established on what was then, a wave lapped rock.

Further changes occurred during the late 18th century when pioneering drainage schemes turned peat bogs into productive agricultural land, often by raising the level of the ditches above the level of the fields.

It is important to remember that it was the pursuit of farming fertility as well as a natural process that helped form the beauty that we now enjoy. Similarly it was the practical demands of pastoral systems that created the need for hedges and stone walls not the pursuit of the aesthetic. In a very real way, the Dysynni Valley looks as it does as the result of a carnivorous system. That rather begs the question, what would it look like if our taste for beef and lamb diminished as a result of fashion and escalating food scare stories? Supporting organisations that aim to protect these landscapes without eating the products that maintain them is hardly the most practical of options!

There are two further intriguing twists in this tale. The first is that in the past, significant amounts of outside money financed many of the attractive man made features like the large farmhouses, traditional buildings and broadleaf woodlands that are a feature of the valley rather than farming profits or tenants' rents. A similar system is underway now during this deep agricultural depression when large amounts of outside money are being invested in land by the beneficiaries of a booming service economy. Will this trend reach as far as this fairly remote spot on the west coast of Wales? What will this new generation of land owners seek to do with their new acquisitions? Could we be about to embark on the second golden age of landscape gardening?

Those of us who are involved in tourism as well as farming are well aware of the economic benefits of a quality landscape. Indeed with the growing financial importance of agri-enviroment schemes like Tir Gofal - whose early version called Tir Cymen was piloted in Merioneth - farmers are now encouraged to maintain and re-create their hedges, walls and small woods.

The second is that both our attitudes to some of these features and their actual location changes over time. The planting of many a hedge, two hundred years or so ago, that we view now as an environmental benefit, must have been viewed then, by most of the local inhabitants, as an act of aggression as their traditional rights held "in common", were extinguished to enclose fields for the local landlord and his tenant farmers.

As to their mobility - whilst researching into the age of the original farmhouse which we have recently renovated, I came across a map in the National Library which showed that a house was on that spot in 1760 but that most of the field sizes and shapes were completely different. Over a period of time they have been squared and their sizes made more uniform. Now their composition is also changing. My father never allowed a elder to grow in a hedge because its quick sappy growth weakened the hedge's stock proof ability. Now that hedges are themselves protected by fences, the elder's copious berries make it an ideal hedgerow species for birds.

As the pursuit of change increases, we should heed the old Latin phrase, non nova sed nove, as a way of protecting what we love and look not at new things but in a new way. A Welsh hill farmer with Latin O-Level! Well, people, like landscapes. are seldom as they first appear.

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www.cprw.org.uk/magartcl/lloydjones.htm 18/11/00