Antony Woodward - The Garden in the Clouds - From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

His secretary was despatched to fetch a disclaimer form. On it there was a box for the highest bid we were prepared to make. The night before, I’d persuaded Vez that we must be prepared to pay what it cost, to remortgage ourselves for everything we had if necessary. We’d agreed on a figure that was absurdly high for a derelict smallholding in the hills; it would have required us both to sell our cars and probably our television too. I wrote in the amount. Mr. Games took my arm and led me over to the other side of the room, out of Vez’s earshot. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re bloody mad. It’s not worth it. You might think it’s alright now, in October, but get up there in the winter, in the mist and the rain and the snow and the mud. You don’t want that place.’ Evidently feeling he’d discharged his responsibilities as best he could, he watched as I signed the paper. Vez couldn’t bring herself to sign. When I proffered the paper, she turned away, pretending not to know. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you you’re bloody mad,’ said Mr. Games.

In the end, it was neither as cheap as we hoped, nor, happily, anywhere near as much as I’d have paid. Mr. Games sat silently through the bidding, before calmly rising to secure it with two perfectly timed movements of his hand.

And so, thirty days later, I got to drive my Land Rover to its new country home.

I usually skip topographical details in novels. The more elaborate the description of the locality, the more confused does my mental impression become. You know the sort of thing:— Jill stood looking out of the door of her cottage. To the North rose the vast peak of Snowdon. To the South swept the valley, dotted with fir trees. Beyond the main ridge of mountains a pleasant wooded country extended itself, but the nearer slopes were scarred and desolate. Miles below a thin ribbon of river wound towards the sea, which shone, like a distant shield, beyond the etc. etc. By the time I have read a little of this sort of thing I feel dizzy. Is Snowdon in front or behind? Are the woods to the right or to the left? The mind makes frenzied efforts to carry it all, without success. It would be very much better if the novelist said ‘Jill stood on the top of a hill, and looked down into the valley below.’ And left it at that.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS, Down the Garden Path , 1932

An obligatory requirement for any house in interesting country is a wall-map. Having made the satisfying discovery that Tair-Ffynnon was not only marked on the Black Mountains map, but mentioned by name—we were, literally, ‘on the map’—I wasted no time in pasting one up by the stairs. The map of the Black Mountains is a particularly pleasing one. The many contours make up the shape of a bony old hand, a left hand placed palm down by someone sitting opposite you. Four parallel ridges form the fingers, with the peaks of Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llangorse constituting the joints of the thumb. At the joint between the second and third fingers is the Grwyne Fawr reservoir, up a long no through road. Between the third and fourth knuckles is the one through route, a mountain road that passes up the Llanthony Valley, past the abbey and Capel-y-Fin (‘the chapel at the end’) and up over the Gospel Pass (at 1,880 feet the highest road pass in Wales), before switchbacking down to Hay-on-Wye.

Hay, at the northern end, with its castle and bookshops and spring literary festival, is one of the three towns that skirt the Black Mountains. Crickhowell is to the south-west, beneath its flat-topped ‘Table Mountain’ (‘Crug Hywel’, from which the town takes its name). With its medieval bridge, antique shops and hint of gentility, Crickhowell is to the Black Mountains what Burford is to the Cotswolds. To the south-east, Abergavenny is the town with the least pretensions of the three, sitting beneath the great bulk of Blorenge (one of the few words in the English language to rhyme with ‘orange’) as Wengen sits beneath the Eiger. Central to our new universe was the Skirrid Mountain Garage, a name which conjured (to me, at least) wind-flayed and hail-battered petrol pumps huddled beneath a high pass, but which, in reality, was a homely establishment facing the mountain, selling everything the rural dweller could need, from chicken feed to homemade cakes.

Until some basic building work allowed us to move properly—installing central heating, replacing missing windows and slates, moving the bathroom upstairs—we were still only visiting Tair-Ffynnon at weekends, armed with drills and paint brushes. Our first night on the hill, after weeks of B&Bs down in the valley, felt as remote and exciting as bivouacking on Mount Everest, especially when we woke to find a hard, blue-skied frost had turned everything white and brought five Welsh Mountain ponies with romantically trailing manes and tails to drink at the bathtub where the spring emerged. The same day we spotted our first pair of red kites, easily distinguishable from the ubiquitous buzzards by their forked tails, elegant flight and mournful, whistled cries: pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo, pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo.

Between DIY efforts, we explored. no one who hasn’t moved to a new area can understand the excitement that almost every modest outing brings, be it merely trying out a pub or seeking a recommended shop, and the incidental discoveries the journey brings in the form of new views, a charming farm or enticing-looking walk for some future date. Much of our delight came just from being somewhere we’d chosen to be, as opposed to somewhere foisted upon us by our work or childhood. From growing up in Somerset I knew it was possible to live in a place without feeling the slightest connection with it, and the experience had left me hungry for knowledge of our new locality. Skirrid, Sugar Loaf and Blorenge, as the three triangulation points visible from most places, had to be climbed. The Black Hill and Golden Valley had to be inspected to see if they lived up to their names. Expeditions had to be mounted to walk Offa’s Dyke, and to drive the upland roads where Top Gear tested their supercars, to check out Cwmyoy church’s crooked tower and Kilpeck church’s saucy gargoyles of peeing women. And when we heard that a cult porn classic had been filmed in 1992 exclusively around a particular local farm, naturally we hurried off to see that too. The Revenge of Billy the Kid * (plot: farmer shags goat; monstrous half-goat-half-man progeny returns to kill his family) may not rank directly alongside Kilvert’s Diaries , Chatwin’s On the Black Hill , or Eric Gill’s sculptures (not that Gill’s extra-curricular activities were so far removed) but it still supplied local colour.

After the auction, when I’d shaken hands with the vendor’s solicitor, he’d said: ‘If you’ll be wanting a builder up there, I can recommend a tidy one. Very tidy.’ Any impartial recommendation of a local tradesman was plainly useful, given our newcomer status. And I could see that the notion of a tidy builder—the phrase, after all, was practically an oxymoron—was praiseworthy. But even if the one he was recommending was exceptionally orderly, even if he dusted every finished surface and ran the Hoover round before leaving, was this feature, in itself, sufficient justification for recommendation? Surely the foremost qualities for a builder must be workmanship, diligence, reliability, integrity, value for money, and so on, all before the undoubted bonus of tidy-mindedness?