Tag Archives: Dyffryn Mymbyr

My New Favourite Wall – We Should All Have One ;)

May 5, 2015 Mike Howe 14 Comments

Built around 1760 this wall is 7 miles long and encloses the land on the lower slopes of the mountain (Glyder Fach). It was built in an attempt to improve the value of Dyffryn, the hill farm I have been writing about recently.

It is quite beautifully made with a skill and craftsmanship, not to mention strength and endurance, that boggles the mind of this 21st century pen pusher. It has merged into the landscape so much so that it now looks like a natural part of the mountain, and when examined up close you can see how the slow growing, hardy, slightly weird organisms we call lichens have colonised the stones and have made the wall their habitat for (hopefully) centuries to come.

Here you can see it snaking away up and across the mountain and get a sense of the scale of the job those wallers from centuries past undertook.

Iconic Welsh Hill Farm Part III – Paying My Respects

April 1, 2015 Mike Howe 23 Comments

You may have read my earlier posts about my conservation work for the National Trust on a famous Welsh mountain farm, if not you can catch up here and here….

At the end of my last post I mentioned that I had read that Esmé had been buried at Dyffryn and Peter’s ashes scattered next to her and that, had I known, I would have liked to have visited their grave.

In her biography of Esmé Teleri Bevan wrote…”On Sunday, 17 October 1999, Esmé decided to plant daffodil bulbs in the grounds around Dyffryn, ready for the spring. It was a mellow day and when the sack of bulbs had almost emptied, she was tired and content, ‘They’ll be really colourful’. She retired early to bed but in the early hours of Monday, Esmé died peacefully in her sleep, aged 89, with Peter at her side”.

“Peter fulfilled Esmé’s last wish, her burial place. She had chosen to be buried on a small plot at Dyffryn, and Peter had to persuade the relevant authorities for permission. The plot she chose many years earlier overlooked the valley, and it was near the sheep pens on Glyder Fach”.

I returned to Dyffryn earlier this week to carry on my research for the conservation land management plan that I’m writing for the National Trust, the new owners. The first place I wanted to visit was Esmé and Peters grave, but other than the description above I didn’t know where to find it, and it’s a very big farm on a very big mountain. I reasoned though that it must be fairly near to the house, or maybe close to one of the tracks leading from the road, so I made my way up to the nearest group of old stone sheep pens and looked around.

The wind was ferocious and squalls of sleet, hail and snow were falling from the heavy clouds scudding over the mountain peaks and ridges. I carefully examined the land around the pens, but I couldn’t see anything that looked like a grave site. I had been told that there was a simple stone marking the spot, but at Dyffryn countless stones and boulders litter the landscape.

I needed to change my angle of enquiry by looking at my surroundings and asking myself, ‘where would I have chosen to be buried had I lived here all these years?’. My attention turned to a huge rock outcrop and a kind of wide ledge rising up behind me. As I surveyed it something caught my eye. It was the bright yellow heads of hundreds of daffodils nodding in the blustery wind. Strange to see daffodils there I thought, and then I knew what I was looking at and where the grave was. My recollection of the story of Esmé planting daffodils the day before she died had led me to the spot.

I climbed up the steep hillside and there on the ledge, overlooking the valley, was the grave of Peter and Esmé Kirby of Dyffryn.

A simple plaque on a Dyffryn stone, and some juniper bushes planted at their heads to shelter them from the Dyffryn winds marked the spot.

As I studied the grave I was curious about it’s orientation and why it was slightly inclined downhill, but as I turned and looked in the direction it was pointing all became clear. This was the view that they wanted forever.

Daffodils, the Dyffryn “ffridd” where Esmé, Thomas and countless others brought up the Dyffryn lambs, and the twin lakes framed by the rocks and heather. Not a bad view for eternity.

I stayed for quite a while and then felt the need, despite the howling wind and showers, to climb up onto the plateau below Glyder Fach. I’m glad I did, the views were wonderful and the sense of elemental life almost overwhelming.

I felt glad that I’d paid my respects. There is something dangerous about the work that I do. The land has been like this for thousands of years (there are the remains of iron age hillforts on the farm and a Roman camp just down the road), and countless generations of people have lived here and eeked out a living often under great hardship, only for someone like me to come along one day and prescribe a management plan. It doesn’t feel right unless you do it well, and therein lies the challenge. Do right by the land and the memory of those who came before you, and don’t be an arrogant prat. In finding and visiting the grave I felt like I’d opened a path, along which I might tread lightly and get on with the job that I’ve been given to do.

In the next part of my little story I’ll tell you about how I wanted to visit the great Dyffryn mountain wall that was built around 1750 and, in studying it up close, found extraordinary craftsmenship in such a challenging landscape.

Iconic Welsh Hill Farm Part II

March 20, 2015 Mike Howe 27 Comments

I mentioned in an earlier post that I am beginning work on writing the conservation management plan for Dyffryn Mymbyr, an iconic Welsh hill farm made famous by Thomas Firbanks book “I Bought a Mountain” which was published in 1940. Yesterday we climbed high up above the valley where the farmhouse sits and onto the imposing, rocky Glyder range which drops precipitously down into Cwm Idwal and the Nant Ffrancon Valley, a perfect u-shaped valley which was carved out by the glaciers that eventually receded around 10,000 years ago and which adorns the cover of many a geography text book.

Firbank beautifully described how, when the sheep needed to be gathered for lambing and shearing, the men and dogs from all of the farms in both valleys assembled high up along the ridge so that they could drive the sheep down to the pens for sorting. The flock had not been seen as a whole for months and, when the men reached their stations, the dogs were sent out to right and left and the line moved forward. The place is high, free and, when the sun beats down from clear blue skies as it did yesterday, glorious.

It was here, high up on the mountain, that a few years after the Great War a shepherd stumbled over the skeleton of a man. He had been lying there for about a year, and the crows had not left any flesh on the bones. No one ever discovered who he was or what he had been doing, and the few shreds of cloth that flapped in the wind gave no clue.

Sometimes the wild goats would appear on a ledge and the dogs became wildly excited. These goats were introduced thousands of years ago and have become feral in large herds throughout Snowdonia. And sure enough we came across a few shy individuals yesterday who made off as soon as we appeared on the skyline.

On the occasions when Firbank climbed to the ridge for the gathering he often mentioned the imposing, sheer rock buttresses of Tryfan, another peak which towers over the Ogwen Valley and which, yesterday, we glimpsed as we neared the summit of Glyder Fach.

The massive rocks on the summits of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr are a tumbling, sprawling mass of interesting shapes, sculpted by countless winters of wind, rain and freeze thaw, the most famous of which is the cantilever stone.

The route down for the shepherds gathering 3000 sheep must have been arduous and precipitous, but when they had brought the flock down below the mountain wall into the “ffridd” they returned to the farmhouse for copious amounts of jam and bread, cakes and cauldrons of hot sweet tea.

The house has been renovated by the National Trust and today is let as a holiday home. This is what Esme wanted and arranged before she died. She didn’t want the farm to be sold to the highest bidder and broken up and sold off in parcels, she wanted it to remain a working farm. And so it is. The tenant farmer still keeps a flock of sheep (although much reduced in numbers), and a herd of Welsh black cattle graze the lower slopes and valley fields. They keep the mosaic of rare and precious habitats in good condition as the peat begins to grow back, locking up carbon, restricting the flow of water and reducing soil erosion, and supporting rare and delicate upland plants.

Today, whilst doing more research, I learned that when Esme died, after living at Dyffryn for nearly 70 years, she wished to be buried in a small plot near the sheep pens on Glyder Fach. Had I known I would have liked to have visited her grave had I been able to find it. I can think of no more beautiful place to be buried, in the very earth that she loved so much.

Planning The Future of an Iconic Welsh Hill Farm

February 13, 2015 Mike Howe 33 Comments

I have the rare privilege of writing the conservation land management plan for an iconic Welsh hill farm, here’s my introduction….

Dyffryn Mymbyr is arguably the most famous farm in Wales, possibly in the whole of the UK. It was made famous by the international bestselling memoir of Thomas Firbank, who bought the farm and the flock of Welsh Mountain sheep as a very young man in 1931 and ran the farm, latterly with his new wife Esmé, until he went to fight in the Second World War in 1940. During the war years Firbank and Esmé divorced and he never returned to the farm, leaving it to her to run which she did, often under great hardship, until her death in 1999 at the age of 89.

In the intervening years Esmé Kirby (as she became known following her marriage to Peter Kirby whom she met at the Sandhurst Military Training Camp (now the Plas Y Brenin National Mountain Centre) at Capel Curig) became a tireless campaigner for environmental issues and founded the Snowdonia National Park Society in 1967 with Dyffryn as its headquarters, and the Esmé Kirby Snowdonia Trust Fund in 1990. Esmé fought countless campaigns against developments which she felt threatened to undermine or destroy the natural beauty, character and heritage of her beloved Snowdonia. Whilst these campaigns sometimes upset and disturbed some people, her integrity and passion always ensured her the utmost respect from everyone who came to know her.

Firbank’s book “I Bought a Mountain”, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and still in print, is widely regarded as one of the best accounts in literature about a working Welsh hill sheep farm. It beautifully describes the knowledge and skills accrued by generations of hill sheep farmers over centuries, bringing them to life through the characters of the numerous shepherds and neighbouring farmers who all helped each other with the continually daunting, but obviously fulfilling, task of rearing sheep in such an inhospitable and challenging landscape.

Sadly all of those people are gone now. The old farmhouse at Dyffryn is 500 years old, and the farmer who built it then was probably shepherding sheep in the Glyders much as Thomas, Esmé and all of the others did. As Esmé wrote in a Snowdonia Society Annual Report in 1975, “those who ‘own’ the land are only life tenants. They cannot take it with them, they must leave the land behind. We must think of these places as great treasures of incalculable value, to be lovingly cherished and respected and handed on unspoilt to the next generation”.

Thomas and Esmé left us, through their written words, a humbling insight into a wild and passionate life and culture shaped by the rocks, the wind and the rain of an iconic Welsh landscape known to millions of people around the world. For Thomas and Esmé, Dyffryn was typical of many mountain farms. Remote and rugged, their home was a solid stone house perched above the Dyffryn Mymbyr valley. The entrance to the valley is guarded by two lakes. The southern wall of the valley is the long hump of Moel Siabod, and the northern wall, higher and rougher, is the Glyders, Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr, both over 3000 feet high. Across the western head of the valley stands Snowdon and the mountains of the “Snowdon Horseshoe”, Y Lliwedd, Snowdon, Garnedd Ugain and Crib Goch.

Above the wall the open mountain had for centuries carried a permanent flock of sheep which knew the boundaries (the boundary of Dyffryn is the ridge culminating at Glyder Fach at over 3000 feet). Each year the ewe lambs were kept to enter the flock, and the four-year-old ewes were sold off to make room for them. Thus there were always 4 generations of sheep on the mountain. The permanent flock stayed at home by a mass heredity, each ewe having her own beat and always being found near the same grassy hollow or sheltered gully. She brings up her lamb on her little range and when in time she is sold the lamb carries on the tradition and eventually bequeaths the domain to her own offspring. This legacy, multiplied by a thousand individuals, tied the flock to its home.

In her book “Esmé, the guardian of Snowdonia”, Teleri Bevan writes that “Esmé had long admired the work of the National Trust, in particular their respect for the Snowdonia landscape and the ancient farming practices of the mountain terrain. She had a warm friendship with Fiona Reynolds (former Director of the National Trust)…who visited Dyffryn many times, and in 2005 after the death of Peter Kirby, Dyffryn was bequeathed to the National Trust for safe keeping. And so a new chapter for this sometimes cruel but always beautiful land begins.