Royal Baby & Others

Alongside the national rejoicing at the birth of Baby Cambridge we have had a flurry of babies locally. Two sets of friends & neighbours have produced thier babies in the last fortnight and we have our second grandchild due at the end of August plus other friends & neighbours are expecting at various times during the autumn. Babies everywhere!
We had a visit from one of the babes last evening. Tiny week old Theodore called in with his delighted parents to be introduced to us. He was beautiful, of course but one does forget how very small new babies are.

The weather of course is a continual topic of conversation and the intense heat lately has been very trying for our expectant mum (& our pregnant labrador!) and for the babies that have already arrived. Todya it is cooler and overcast though we have not had the thunderstorms that hve occurred elsewhere.
The Sons went off early this morning to the Royal Welsh Show at Builth Wells and they are fortunate that it has cooled off rather as a day at the show in searing heat is not pleasant. Now that the madness of the hay & silage harvest has ended the boys have taken a day off to go & gloat over shiny new farm machinery and talk techy stuff with reps. ...I doubt they will see much else other than a visit to the cattle sheds & possibly the beer tent! No flower shows or craft exhibitions for them!

'It's Too Darn' Hot!'

After nearly three weeks of scorching hot weather I am very appreciative of my large cold stone house. I do not enjoy very hot weather and so have been able to retreat most gratefully into my cool north facing domain. From this oasis of cool & shadow I have been supplying mountains of sandwiches & the inevitable cake for the Farmer & Sons who have been slogging away in their air-conditioned tractors everyday since this fine weather started.
The work of silage-  & hay-making for neighbours and ourselves has completely dominated these past weeks. Many hundreds of bales , indeed possibly a couple of thousand by now, have been made and everyone is so happy that we are having a 'proper' summer when winter feed can be made at a more traditional pace than in the last few years. To be able to actually make hay over several days is something we haven't done for so long.

We are beginning to watch our water supply carefully. One of the streams that flows down the farm has almost stopped running. There is slight trickle barely visible except for a slight glint of light on the thin run of water over the stones and if rain does not come before too long we may have to start rationing water in the house. The cows have to take priority in such times. Each dairy cow needs 10 gallons of water a day to drink plus all the water required for washing the milking equipment, parlour & dairy.
About 25 years ago when the Sons were little, we had long dry summers and I had to take the boys to friend's houses for baths and other friends were kind enough to do my laundry for me as we just did not have enough water here on the farm. I hope it will not get as bad as that this year.

Despite the intense busy-ness we have been able to take a couple of trips to the coast in the cool of the evening and last weekend we had a family outing taking the canoe and a picnic to Cwmtydu once again.
I even ventured into the water for brief swim...cool but exhilarating...and I never usually swim in the sea until September when the water has had a good long time to warm up. But this season seems to be making up for the lost summers of the past few years.

Summer at last!

Well, summer has arrived with a vengeance...although many things in the garden are very late the elderflowers are in their full creamy glory and in such a profusion. I must gather some for cordial and wine making in the next day or so.
I have been busy making jam over the last couple of weeks. I managed to get a large quantity of strawberries last week and made a a good batch of jam and yesterday it was the turn of apricots. I also bottled apricots, they are one of the best fruits for such a metheod of preservation.

With the arrival of the sunshine the Farmer & Sons are madly busy cutting , baling & wrapping silage all over the parish for their contracting customers.  It means many long hours sitting in tractor cabs and hoping there will be no break-downs.

Last evening we all took time to go to the beach for a picnic...the tractor driving had finished early for the day (for once) and so we had a family outing which does not happen very often. Our favourite beach is Cwmtydu, a very small beach within a tiny cove where we almost always see seals. There is often a large bull seal patrolling the waters keeping an eye on his beach.
 It is a fairly stony beach especially if the tide is in, but none the less a lovely place to spend an evening with small grand-daughter building sand-castles and eating gritty sandwiches.

TEIFI - FROM SEA TO SOURCE

It is always a good moment when a project comes to fruition & last night saw the culmination of what has been a long and fascinating experience in film-making.

The Farmer & I belong to an independent tourism group, the Teifi Valley Tourism Association (TVTA) which was set up 4 years ago to promote the beautiful part of west Wales in which we live. Four years ago the membership stood at 9 businesses, now it has over 70 small local businesses listed, mainly holiday accommodation providers, artists & craftspeople.

As an independent organisation we have without any grant funding or outside sponsorship, produced a film showing the wonderful and varied landscape of the the Teifi Valley from the air.

I was the producer & scriptwriter and our good friend G. of Maesyffin Mushrooms who had in a previous life worked in film, directed & edited the film. Another friend who owns a small light aircraft was drafted in to fly the entire 75 mile length of the River Teifi with a small but incredibly clever camera attached to one of the wing struts of the plane. This all sounds very Heath Robinson but in fact with the state-of-the-art technology of the camera it was anything but.
The resulting footage was superb. What was a 2 hour flight following the course of the river from the estuary in Cardigan Bay to the source in the hills of mid-Wales has now become a beautiful 35 minute journey through a dramatic and ever-changing landscape.

The filming was only the start of a very long process involving many months of editing, script-writing & hours sitting at the kitchen table researching the history & stories of the valley & continuous emailing over small points of editorial and details in the script.

In addition to the narrative script we recorded music of the valley, some of which was played by the Farmer on fiddle. We were incredibly fortunate to be given permission by Ceri Rhys Matthews, of the acclaimed Welsh folk band Fernhill, who lives in a small village near by, to use some of his recordings and also a talented harpist Harriet Earis arranged some traditional tunes from the Teifi Valley and recorded them for us. As result the sound track for the film is as beautiful & haunting as the landscape it portrays.

Our script was read for us by the actor Richard Mitchley who lives in the valley & we were given permission to use a poem about the River Teifi written by a noted Welsh bard 'Cynan'. The voice-over is a lovely mix of English interspersed with romantic rolling Welsh poetry.

The cover illustration was supplied by the local artist Diane Mathias. She allowed us to use one of her lovely paintings of one of the many handsome bridges that span the Teifi.

As you can see the emphasis was very much on keeping the whole project as local to the valley as possible.

Last evening we had the premiere of the film at a delightful venue, Waunifor Centre near the village of Maesycrugiau, in the heart of the Teifi Valley. As well as showing the film for the first time to the members of the TVTA we had invited lots of friends. local press & community councillors from the length of the valley. After a welcoming buffet of  biscuits & local cheeses washed down with a glass of wine the film was played to what turned out to be very appreciative audience.

As a project run on minimal funding and many hundreds of voluntary hours the end result was well worth the effort and goes to show that all that is required is enthusiasm, energy, imagination & a commitment to producing a good a piece of work using the skills of a network of people who believe in the project & have an understanding of a sense of place.

Croeso i DyffrynTeifi.

DVD copies of the film are available from me @ £6.20 incl. postage (UK)

Please email fadog@tiscali.co.uk to order a copy.

Diolch yn fawr.

The film can also be viewed on http://vimeo.com/teififromseatosource

Holiday Cottage Spruce-up, Silage Making

The last three days have been spent doing some much needed renovation & maintainence work on the holiday cottage.
This work is usually done in February when we have very few booking but this year of course the weather was so atrocious that it was impossible to do anything. So, this week with lovely dry weather & a gap in the bookings  we got on with the replacement of rotted window frames & the threshold of the front door.
Of course the whole job just growed like Topsy as it always does until I found that I completely re-painted all the windows front & back and the front door several times over... primer on the sections of new wood, undercoat, top coats x 2 on everything and various little touching-up patches around the whole building.
I was out at 6.30 in the mornings wielding my paint brushes like a woman possessed in order to get the requisite number of coats on and dry before the arrival of our next guests today. Considering the work started on Thursday evening I've done jolly well, though I say it myself.

With the wonderful weather the Farmer & the Sons are frantically busy making silage. They mowed last night & this morning and now just after lunch they are out picking up with the forage wagon. It seems there is good crop despite the gloomy forecasts after the desperately slow late, cold spring.
The Sons have been off doing other peoples silage since the beginning of the week and as soon as our own crop is in the clamp & sheeted up they will setting forth again to various neighbouring farms.

Really Wild Festival, Rhod 2013

We are back with cold wet weather after what was a stunningly gorgeous weekend.
The Farmer & I went down to St. David's on Sunday to the Really Wild Festival (www.reallywildfestival.co.uk) which was being held in the beautiful ruins of the Bishop's Palace adjacent to the cathedral. A more perfect setting would be hard to find. The small medieval-style  pavilions set up by the Meibion y Ddraig Archers looked amazing in the walled enclosure overlooked by grinning gargoyles and ancient stonework. As well as archery demonstrations there were falconry displays, gun-dog displays (by our friend Meurig Rees of BASC, see last post) and most fascinating of all a shoe maker who specialises in making historic shoes for museums, theatre and re-enactment groups. Ana Deissler (www.anaperiodshoes.co.uk) makes shoes from earliest stone age foot-coverings to Tudor style shoes...they are beautiful and she is so knowledgeable on the history of footwear and the  technique of making period shoes, the Farmer & I were talking to her for ages.
We also spent along time talking to someone from Coppicewood College (www.coppicewoodcollege.co.uk) which is not far from where we live. The college offers courses in a wooodland near Cardigan using traditional tools and covers all aspects of coppice practice and craft., from spoon carving to natural dyeing & charcoal making.
It is extraodinary how small circles of acquaintanceship reveal themselves...we had a number of mutual friends with N. from Coppicewood College and he had in turn heard of us. Wednesdays are open days at the woodland centre and we  must go over sometime to catch-up again and continue the debate over power tools (the Farmer) and traditional non-powered tools (Coppicewood College). I must admit to being more on the side of pole-lathes & hand carved spoons than chain-saws and power lathes...I find them much too noisy & scary to use whereas a pole-lathe is quiet and rather soothing in its action.

On Sunday evening on our return fromSt. David's we went just couple of miles up the road from the farm to art exhibition to which we had been invited.
A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from an Italian artist Rebecca Maria Bellestra who was the artist -in-residence at the Rhod project in Glonc Mill,  Drefelin (www.therhod.wordpress.com). She spent the day talking to us about sustainability, ecological matters, organic farming, the future of farming, all the things that we spent so much time discussing with many of those who end up sitting around our kitchen table. The difference on this occasion was that this conversation was filmed for her project which has taken her all around the world.
Part of her project was shown at the exhibition but most of the work on display was by the Rhod group of artists .
 The theme was Future Nature Culture & to quote from the programme notes,
 'Rhod is a place for encounters between art, nature and people...the artworks...have been made in response to the site of the mill and its grounds...The artists have eschewed grand gestures and definitive statements in favour of sensitive interventions in which the work is completed by nature.
Future Nature Culture is arejection of the pastoral which idealises and aestheicises nature as something separate and other from human beings. We are animals too.'
There were some beautiful and strange and interes
ting pieces of work including a piece wood cut from the middle of a fallen branch, that had been french-polished, and looked wonderful, but was then put back in its original place in the wood by the stream where of course the french-polish would very quickly deteriorate in the damp and so the wood would  eventually rot away like the rest of the unpolished branch as though man had had no part in its existence.
It was a thought-provoking evening with lots of good conversation.

BASC, British Association for Shooting & Conservation

It is always  rewarding when we are able to introduce any of our visitors to country sports. Today for the benefit of the children from a high school in Cardiff who come regularly to the farm I had arranged for Meurig Rees the Director of the British Association for Shooting & Conservation in Wales (BASC),(www.basc.org.uk) to come to talk about shooting and to demonstrate his lovely gun-dogs.
Meurig spoke of the importance of gun safety and the law regarding possession and misuse of firearms and then the children were shown how to use an air-gun and were allowed to fire at target papers. They loved it of course and asked

sensible questions and responded well to the experience.
After the talk of guns we moved onto the training and use of dogs in shooting. Meurig gave a wonderful demonstration with his beautiful dogs Ceri & Sky, a mother & daughter team. The children were involved in the demonstration when they were required to throw dummies and walk the dogs around...of course they all thought it was great and were very impressed, as were the Farmer & I at the level of discipline of the dogs. We think our own dogs are pretty good in terms of obedience and working ability but compared with Ceri & Sky we have barely started!
As well emphasising the rules of handling guns Meurig also explained how shooting and conservation go hand-in-hand, how shooting ensures that there is a healthy wildlife population including quarry species and well managed habitats which  results in the well-being of the countryside. No political axe was ground and the children were given facts and information on an aspect of country life that they in all likelihood would not experience any other way.
At the end of their visit the teacher in charge, the wonderful Mr. C. said that it had been a brilliant day, which is all we can ask.

May Day, Beltane

'Welcome, with your lovely greenwood choir,
summery month of May for which I long.'
From a 14th century Welsh poem

May Day! A glorious golden 1st of May but this photograph shows what was happening last year in May & it certainly won't be this year. The season is so slow that it is reckoned to be 20 days later than last year which is going to have severe knock-on effect on the harvest. Many farmers will struggle to get third cut silage and that will have a serious impact on the fodder supply for next winter.
It may seem a bit mad to be thinking in these terms on such a beautiful day but this is our livelihood and having just gone through a very long winter the prospect of a short summer is worrying.

Here in west Wales the trees are only just beginning to show signs of life and whether it will be the oak or the ash first is anyone's guess at present.

May Day is of course the ancient festival of Beltane when fires are lit to bring the power of the sun to the Earth and was regarded as a blessing from the gods to purify & sanctify the community.
Beltane fires were kindled using nine sacred woods, their names preserved in an old Scottish rhyme, but the ninth will always remain a mystery;

Choose the willow of the stream,
Choose the hazel of the rocks,
Choose the alder of the marshes,
Choose the birch of the waterfalls.
Choose the ash of the shade,
Choose the yew of resilience,
Choose the elm of the brae,
Choose the oak of the sun.