Editor

Our family wants to protect Wales. We’ve got the t-shirt (“I promise to f****** stay home” supporting frontline workers in Wales).

And we’re not the only ones who have missed Merddyn, our family’s ‘second home’ for the last 54 years, in the hills above Arthog.

In 1908 Henry Lloyd’s poem, Ar Dwyni Grug y Merddyn, wistfully remembering his childhood home, was published in the Aberdare radical weekly,Tarian y Gweithiwr. In that grim industrial area he was working as a journalist and teacher, becoming a celebrated poet, his bardic name ‘Ap Hefin’.

But how he missed the heather hillside of home.

Border controls, quite rightly, should we attempt now to reach Merddyn ourselves, mean we turn to his poem. All 26 lovely verses of it and the Englynion y Maes that completed his published book and are now being translated for us.

Granddaughter Naomi Siân is sketching the gorse, butterflies and ash tree she remembers there too.

We’ve inherited a love for Wales from our Gran, Jenny Pritchard Williams, who left Blaenau Ffestiniog to become a governess in Harrow.

Saving this hillside hafod from ruin, always working with local builders, electricians and plumbers to maintain it, supporting local business and services and inspiring the next generation to nurture its precious woodland and wildlife, we are not the only ones.

And we long to return following every regulation when you are ready for us. Are we really the exploitative threat the term ‘second home owner’ now seems to imply?

Janice Gardner

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