Up here at Rachub, on the north-western slopes of the Carneddau, there are wide vistas of the tumbling, wooded country between Snowdonia and the Menai Strait. A blackbird sings a plaintive evensong over a cottage garden bright with Oriental poppies, Welsh poppies and apple blossom. A final shaft of sunlight peeps from a break in the blue-grey clouds that hang above Anglesey. From the bedroom window the far blue cone of Holyhead Mountain is punctuation above the broad, green counterpane that is the face of Ynys Mon, so-called "Mother of Wales".
From the back window we look upon the slopes of Moel Faben, where the slate tips of earlier quarrying activity come right down to the cottage back gardens. These piles of shining slate represent the former wealth of the Pennants of Penrhyn Castle: now they are the early summer haunt of adventurous lambs and cuckoos and a prowling fox or two.
All these tumbling hillsides above Rachub and Bethesda lie within the boundary of the half-century old Snowdonia National Park, where there's currently so much debate on the future of hill farms. A certain clique now resident in these hills but originating in the urban world proclaims that hill farms such as these in highest Snowdonia have no future whatsoever, that the slopes should revert to a pre-medieval wilderness. One ill-informed commentator refers to the hard working sheep farmers of these and other mountain areas as "subsidy junkies".
Such arrogant opinion is, of course, the child of ignorance. You only have to stand in the delightful pastures of lower Llanberis Pass, around Nant Peris, to see the successful husbandry of centuries. Then cross the Llechog ridge into the high, grim valley of the Afon Arddu where most of the little hill farms were abandoned long ago. It's a prospect of bog and brown rushes and spreading bracken. The pretty fields of Nant Peris are replaced here by neglect and a forlorn melancholy. So much for the suggestion by some that our hill farms be abandoned to nature, that the hard-working upland farmers give up their particular hard-won paradise.
Ah well, it takes all sorts - and all manner of silly, selfish, eccentric, sensible opinions about the future of upland use. I bet, though, that many years from now the hills will still be farmed by livestock husbandmen and women, inevitably supported by subsidies - long after the current generation of idiot commentators have quit the scene.
