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

We’d already heard a lot about them. Within moments of getting Tair-Ffynnon at the auction, a man had introduced himself, congratulated us on our success, and explained he’d been the under-bidder, representing a consortium of hang and paraglider flyers. Were we aware, he said, that Tair-Ffynnon was one of the finest paragliding sites in the country? Apparently the Hatterrall Ridge was the first significant geological barrier to east-flowing air after the Urals on the far side of the Russian steppes two and a half thousand miles away. The previous owner had allowed, even encouraged, parking in her field: would we consider doing the same? I mumbled something about being sure we could work something out, only to discover I’d entered a minefield. The site was popular because the combination of the track and parking meant pilots could drive their heavy gear all the way to the take-off point, something few sites allowed. But permitting parking encouraged greater use of the site, sending Ness, for one, crazy from cars driving up and down past her house all day. We decided the best course for the time being was to do nothing.

There’s no doubt they were a dramatic spectacle in the late winter haze. The brightly coloured canopies of the paragliders stood out against the bracken and lichen-covered stone walls, and across the hill drifted the murmur of voices punctuated by the crackles and soft wumphs of air pockets inflating and deflating. We counted thirty in the air simultaneously that day. They brought a note of glamour and contemporaneity to the ancient hillside.

By the third week of February, the Aga still wasn’t installed. We’d ordered one secondhand and it was supposed to have been delivered and fitted by Christmas. After the delivery driver had failed to find Tair-Ffynnon on his first attempt, then declared the track too rough on his second, his third attempt coincided with a hard frost, converting the wet lane into an impassable sheet of ice. A fourth attempt was finally successful, but unfortunately by this time we’d missed our slot with the fitter. The disembowelled cooker was heaped in the lean-to pending his return from his January break. When he finally arrived, fresh and recuperated, he informed us the parts were from Agas of different dates and incompatible. As we’d torn out the existing Rayburn to make way for the Aga, the house was distinctly chilly and unwelcoming without either, so after that Vez declared we should not return to Tair-Ffynnon until the correct Aga parts were ready for assembly.

Then the forecast promised snow in the south of England. During weekdays away from Tair-Ffynnon a curious imaginative process had started taking place. The less we were there, the more romantically unreal the place began to seem. Stuck in London, enduring yet another mild, drearily overcast day, what I wanted to know was: what was it like on the hill, in the high, clear, cold air there? I had no difficulty imagining that a place less than two hundred miles to the west of the capital and a thousand-odd feet higher could be experiencing an entirely different climate. I was convinced a frost in London must mean feet of snow on the hill. Indeed, it would have been but a step for me to believe woolly mammoths bestrode the ridge. I got sidetracked for almost a morning researching what kind of generator would be most suitable for the inevitable power cuts and how much snow chains would be for the car. So when genuine snow was promised—well, that could not be missed.

Thus it was against Vez’s better judgement that we descended off the elevated section of the Westway out of London that Friday afternoon, the car’s temperature gauge hovering at a disappointing +1°C. (I had become a compulsive watcher of the car’s temperature gauge, which routinely indicated a two-, three-, even four-degree difference between the bottom of the hill up to Tair-Ffynnon and the top.) By Reading, however, the digital display showed 0°C and big flakes started coming at us out of the night. Larger and larger, they made a soft, unfamiliar pfffffff … pfffffff … pfffffff … pfffffff …as they settled on the windscreen. The temperature started to drop promisingly…-1°C, -1.5°C, -2°C. ‘This is mad. We’ll never get up the hill. We should go back,’ said Vez.

‘Don’t be silly. What’s the point of having the place? Of course we’ll get up the hill. And if we can’t, I’ll get the Land Rover.’ The Land Rover now lived proudly in one of the sheds at Tair-Ffynnon.

‘We’ve got a four-month-old baby in the car and no supplies.’

‘We’ll be fine.’

By the time we turned off the main road, the countryside was white and so was the tarmac. At the bottom of the hill the temperature gauge showed a satisfying -4°C. As we turned up the unsigned lane it was hard to tell how deep the snow was, but there was enough on the ground to soften the edges between the road and the hedgerow banks. The lane led directly through the yard of a farm and we were about to join the road out the other side when the front wheels began to spin. We lost traction. I reversed back to try and gain momentum, but the wheels spun again. I tried a longer run-up, reversing all the way back to the turning. I could get no further. We were, indubitably, stuck.

Strapping on a backpack, and glowing with manly virtue, I crunched and squeaked my way up the hill through pristine powder snow. The clouds had cleared by this time, revealing a moonlit snowscape beneath an absurdly starry sky. Unfortunately, having reached the Land Rover, I found I had forgotten the keys, necessitating a slightly less satisfying trudge back down the hill to fetch Vez and Maya on foot. At length, however, we were installed in the house.

Next day I got the Land Rover out of its shed, but by then more snow had fallen and it was too deep for us to go anywhere. There wasn’t much to do except pass most of the weekend huddled in bed to keep warm. ‘I hope it was worth it,’ said Vez, a little uncharitably on Sunday, as we crouched over our fourth meal of canned soup, cooked on the old electric cooker, facing the space where the Aga was supposed to be. Eventually we trudged back down the hill to the car and returned to London.

The Aga in which we’d planned to cook our Christmas turkey was eventually installed and working in time for Easter and the spring.

Even when German bombing signalled the start of the Battle of Britain and fear of invasion spread, the Gardens Scheme carried on…

A Nurturing Nature: The Story of the National Gardens Scheme , 2002

I could now think of little besides Tair-Ffynnon. All other matters seemed an annoying distraction. I’d taken to carrying a camera whenever out of town, snapping odd things—ferns on an old chimney-stack, yellow lichen on a slate roof, rusting machines in corners of farmyards. I’d also begun tearing pictures out of magazines and newspapers, images of lonely crofter’s cottages, Icelandic turf-roofed churches, old tin frontier buildings. Lots of new things had become interesting, from old farm buildings and dry-stone walls to trees and wild flowers. I edited these cuttings into a scrapbook, which I could spend almost indefinite periods leafing through, daydreaming contentedly, shoving it guiltily away like porn if I heard footsteps approaching the door.