Incomers & the Welsh Language

This is one of the most beautiful times of year with birds singing, hedges greening up and the wild flowers beginning to weave their tapestry through the fields,woods and secret corners of the farm. Today the weather is lovely and the daffodils & narcissus are still coming into flower and lighting up the gardens and the drive with their golden battalions. I've found the first violets peering shyly on hedgebanks which are also starred with glorious gleaming celandines and tiny creamy wild strawberry flowers. They look like the exquisite paintings found in the borders of medieval manuscripts.

We have a Lady Artist from Suffolk staying in the cottage at the moment. She has come to Wales for a working holiday for a few weeks & is enjoying the sharp contrast of the landscape here to that of flat Suffolk. I hope the weather stays reasonable for her

Why do people come to Wales? It is a big and complex question.
When asked many holiday-makers say they come for the wonderful scenery and the quieter pace of life, but many have admitted to me that it is fine for a week but they couldn't live here. For those who think the opposite and do take the plunge and decide to re-locate to a part of Wales they have visited as tourists a few times, it can be a major adjustment not just geographically but culturally. Wales quite simply is not like England and for many incomers this is hard to understand. Many don't really try and feel the need to Anglicise their new environment. There are far too many old Welsh farmsteads that have had their centuries-old names 'translated' into English. I was told by one person who did this that they couldn't expect their visitors from England coming to stay in their converted barns to be able to find them if the name was in Welsh! Excuse me! Would they think this way if they had moved to France? I doubt it & it probably wouldn't occur to them do even give their French abode an English name. But in Wales it seems the language can be ignored as an inconvenience.
To the indigenous people, the locals, this arrogance and lack of appreciation of an ancient language & culture is deeply offensive...something that has been expressed to me many times by our Welsh-speaking friends. It is remarkable that the Welsh language, one of the oldest in Europe, should still survive here on the edge of the western world after so many centuries of aggressive attempts to eradicate it. The continuing energy within the Welsh-speaking community is a testament to how much it matters that minority cultures need to be kept alive, not by artificial means but by people living their lives. Welsh is the language of poets & I was fascinated to learn recently that the sale of books of poetry written in Welsh is proportionately greater than any other book in Wales. That must be reflection on how valued a language is by its speakers.

Whilst tourism is a major & vital part of the Welsh economy (and I am part of it, though not as an incomer nor as Welsh speaker but part of Welsh-speaking family) the risk is that Wales becomes a theme park and its language & culture quaint curiosities. The fact that life for many people, particularly in this part of Wales, is conducted almost entirely in Welsh, English only spoken when absolutely necessary, seems to be an irrelevance. If incomers could tap into the vibrant cultural life of their Welsh neighbours they would find a full range of activities carrying on very well without a word of English being used. However, this is sometimes seen as being exclusive and unfriendly...it is not, it is simply the local people getting on with their lives using their own language. For our guests coming to real Welsh Wales here in Carmarthenshire, it is a revelation to many of them that Welsh is a language in daily use & that Wales is more than just mountainous, green damp countryside & comic stereotypes. Of course, for most people the joy of coming to Wales is the diverse landscapes and to be somewhere different from home & the cultural issues don't impinge on visitors who are here for only a week or two & why should they? However, for those who choose to come and live here then a little more sensitivity, research & consideration for the native people of the foreign country that they have come to would not go amiss.

Lambing Finished, Signs of Spring

This is often the scene at my backdoor, although maybe not always so tidy! With three generations living on the farm we have wellies of all sizes that are in constant use and there are always spare pairs floating around for visitors who have not come prepared for the mud of a working farm.

Easter, with its excess of chocolate, has come & gone and we are now making the most of the good weather. Lambing is over and so the ewes and their tiny bleating satellites are out in the fields on lovely fresh grass and basking in the sunshine. The eternal round of the seasons is always punctuated by certain aspects of farming and lambing is one of them. The high calls of lambs and the deep-throated replies of the mothers is as much an indication that spring is here as are the daffodils & primroses and the song of the blackbirds. This morning the sound of the sheep was accompanied by the thrumming of a woodpecker in a tree at the edge of the field and then the panicking call of a pair of mallard disturbed from their lazy stop-off on the pond. The mallard rest on that particular pond quite often but rarely nest there, though they do nest on a more hidden and less-visited pond elsewhere on the farm & sometime manage to rear a brood of ducklings. On yet another pond we usually have Canada geese nesting and hatching goslings but sadly the fox is too wily for them and they rarely survive to fly with the parent birds. We are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first swallows...we usually see them about the 10th of April. With the hatching of the myriads of insects about to start as the weather warms up the swallows will be on their way to their abundant aerial larder and to give us their wondrous acrobatic displays as we, hopefully, sit out on balmy April evenings.

We drove over the hills to Brecon to visit family, on Easter Monday and were surprised to find snow had fallen within about 5 miles of the farm and once we got within sight of the great Pen-y-Fan in the Brecon Beacons there was a spectacular view of the peak covered in thick snow and gleaming like an alp in the far distance. Our 5yr old grand-daughter who was with us, was thrilled as she has never seen snow (at least that she can remember), even at great distance. It was the most important thing to remember to tell her parents about when we returned home!

Spring

Lambing has finished and all is well. The lambs got off to good start with the lovely dry weather and even though it now has turned wet they should be alright. One of the loveliest things about my morning walks with the dogs at this time of year is hearing the lambs bleating along with the blackbirds singing, the hedge-sparrows squabbling and the geese calling as they fly up the valley to one of the many ponds. The daffodils have excelled themselves this year as have the snowdrops...last year both species did not exhibit themselves to their full glory, but this year they are more than making up for it. The blackthorn in the hedges is coming into flower and there are primroses peering out at the bottom of hedge-banks & I have seen the first of the wild strawberry flowers tucked away in a corner. The ornamental cherries are coming into blossom too in the gardens so spring is springing into its usual glory and cheering everyone up after what has been a difficult winter.

We have been struck with a foul lurgy over the past couple of weeks. The grandchildren started it off and I seemed to have come off worst of the grown-ups with a hideous cough that is lingering. I even had three days in bed which is unheard of! However, apart from the cough things are back to normal and we are preparing ourselves for a visit this afternoon by group of home-educated children from Pembrokeshire which should be fun although it is a pity the weather is dull and damp, still as long as they are properly shod in wellies and with waterproofs it should all be fine.

The holiday cottage is full for Easter and I then have an artist staying for the whole of April which should be interesting.
With Easter almost upon us I must get on with decorating my Simnel cake and doing some general baking and filling the tins which are somewhat depleted. In fact I might make some traditional Easter biscuits which always go down well with cup of coffee.

Lambing Time, Winter Winds

The sheep are now safely ensconced in the newly re-covered polytunnel and lambing is well underway. We are having good big strong lambs, with several sets of twins and triplets. We are lambing only about 50 ewes and so far it is going steadily with no mad rushes.

Today is calm and warm-ish with sunshine and quite a lot of blue sky. A total contrast to yesterday when I was bullied and buffeted down the fields by an icy wind with teeth of iron whilst walking the dogs before breakfast. The wind was very strong and unpleasant to be in but it brought a savage beauty to the fields as it flew across the grass making it shimmer with shoals of silver as the light caught the rain on the sward. The leafless trees were swaying and moaning as the wind tormented the branches and many twigs and some larger boughs were tossed to the ground and through it all the blackbirds were singing and a pair of Canada geese on their way to graze in our top fields called to each other as they flew on the back of the wind.

Much-needed Holiday, School Visit

A cold but sunny Sunday morning, blue skies and nodding daffodils with blackbirds trilling and the occasional clarion of Canada geese travelling overhead to the river.

The Farmer & I have just come back from a much-needed few days away in Dorset. An invitation to a party in Lymington combined with visits to family & friends near the New Forest & a niece at university in Winchester made for a busy holiday but it was time away from the farm and a change of scene in a lovely part of the country.
We went to see the renowned Badbury Rings near Dorchester. An extraordinary place which when it was built must have been a truly impressive sight when it was constructed in about 800BC using the white chalky flint of the area,and would have gleamed & shone out of the landscape, visible for many miles.
Spring was no further on in the south of England than it is here and we had lovely sunny days and no rain though the drive down was wet all the way with really awful driving conditions on the motorway which was ghastly.
Our time away was certainly well-filled and we ate too much in some very good pubs, but catching up with old friends was great and the Dorset/Hampshire borders are beautiful and very different to West Wales...but the traffic!!! It made us realise how very lucky we are to live where we do, away from constant streams of cars & lorries and ceaseless noise. When all one can hear each day is the sound of birdsong and the distant rumble of tractors it is quite a shock to come across the intense busy-ness of the outside world!

The day after our return we hosted a visit by a primary school from Gorseinon near Swansea. A group of 30 or so 4-6 yr olds arrived clad in wellies and warm coats for a walk around the farm and a chance to see cows at close quarters. The first thing we do when they get off the bus is take them into the fields and let them just run & run...it is lovely sight and the joyous shouts of small children expending energy in a vast green field is one of the reasons we have such groups come to the farm. Urban children have so few opportunities to enjoy large open spaces & the teachers who accomapny the children are always thrilled by them being able to run freely to say nothing of splashing through mud and seeing a real working farm.

Gorgeous Morning, Wales v. Scotland, Open Mic; Local Entertainment

A beautiful clear blue morning after a cold night of frost and hail. The daffodils are bursting into flower all over the farm making pools of gold in otherwise dark wintery corners.

With the improved weather over the past few days the Farmer has been able to replace the cover on the polytunnel after the old one blew away. Now we have a lambing shed ready for the end of the month, thank goodness.

Younger Son has returned home having been working in Wiltshire for a week and attending a wedding in Cornwall and then this weekend going to see Wales beat Scotland in the 6 Nations game at the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff...a pretty mad week all in all. He said the game was great, (though it was a hard call for this household being Scots living in Wales!)and of course the atmosphere in the Millenium Stadium with 80,000 spectators must have been amazing especially with Wales playing on their home ground.
Younger Son is now straight back into his tractor to go carting slurry for the day; it never stops!

On Friday evening we went to the Ceridwen Centre (www.ceridwencentre.co.uk)which is just 5 minutes up the road for an Open Mic night. It was wonderful, there is an astonishing amount of varied musical talent in the Teifi Valley!
The Farmer played his fiddle, playing some traditional Welsh dance tunes, there was an 8 piece band doing covers 'Mustang Sally' & 'Valerie' amongst other, an amazing guitarist who played the guitar as a percussive as well as stringed instrument...brilliant, and several guitar and drum duos. There was trio of a singer, drum, and guitar singing tradtional old Welsh folk songs and to top it all off there were two poets reading their lovely works. A full evening's entertainment and right on our doorstep. It was fine example of local people getting together to play and sing for the pleasure of the community...as someone said, 'Who needs the X-Factor when all you have to do is go a village hall in Wales?!!

I am now off to prepare the cottage for guests who arrive later in the week. It has been empty for a few weeks now and so needs airing and dusting and generally made warm and welcoming.

Storm Damage, Organic Milk, Stained Glass

Following last evening's beautiful flamingo-tinted skies at sundown we have a lovely clear frosty morning which cheers everyone up after the seemingly endless miserable weather that we have had to endure for months. Daffodils are flowering everywhere and the snowdrops are beginning to show their cool-white streaked with green in patches around the farm & on the verges and hedgerow bottoms & birds are singing. However, we must not think that Spring has arrived, February & March can turn out to be harsh and cold. We shall just have to wait & see.

At the beginning of the week we were battered by Storm Imogen which resulted in the second polytunnel being badly damaged, though the plastic sheet did not fly off the frame but was ripped and pulled away from its anchorages. It will be a fiddly job to get it back and patched up which we must do otherwise we have nowhere to bring the sheep in for lambing at the the end of the month having lost the whole sheet on the other tunnel in previous storm. The Farmer is just waiting for a calm wind-less day to put the replacement sheet on. Unfortunately today though dry is not without a breeze.

As from the beginning of February we are now full members of OMSCo, (Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative)(www.omsco.co.uk). We ended a 56 yr contract with First Milk (formerly the MMB)along with 40 other organic milk producers across the country to become part of OMSCo who have been buying our milk through First Milk for anumber of years anyway. It just seems to make sense that we sell directly to them as full members rather than as associate members. They supply milk to Yeo Valley Yogurt amongst other organic dairy processors & are doing lots of good work in the USA with British manufactured organic cheese, Kingdom Cheese, which is proving popular.

Yesterday I spent a lovely long day at Cariad Glass (www.cariadglass.co.uk), a local stained glass studio, making a rather pretty, though I say it myself, coloured glass hanger. It is very intense, satisfying creative process from choosing glass from a huge library of incredible colour, variety & texture, to cutting out the shapes, and then leading them into place. It was my second time on a Cariad Glass course and so I was able to make a rather more complicated design than my first one.

Straw Delivery, Early Spring

A busy start to the day with the arrival of a load of straw. An artic. and drag lumbered its way up the drive and onto the yard with its vast load of straw bales, 24.3 tonnes brought from Stow-in-the-Wold. The bales, although very securely fastened with ratchet straps, always look to me as though they are are about to topple as they sway with the undulations of the roadway...quite unnerving. One of our big tractors has replaced the lorry tractor unit to take the loads to the sheds at the other side of the yards where the straw will be unloaded and stacked in a shed. There is enough bedding for the cattle for a couple of months and by the time it has all been used up it should be turn-out time.

The first of the snowdrops are beginning to appear along the drive although this year they were pipped to the post by daffodils which is ridiculous. I have even had a solitary tulip flowering in the garden. With this mild damp winter many plants are getting very confused and things are flowering months ahead of what is normal. The two days of frost last week were so lovely but we are now back to www...warm, wet & windy.