O BYDDED I'R HEN WLAD BARHAU
"...I was born in 1905, at Rhewl Fawr, a couple of miles from Llanasa. At the age of three months, I was lifted up and deposited even nearer...in the White Lion Inn, Pen - Y - Maes, where I stayed put for nearly ten years: that is until we moved to Berthengam, again no further from Llanasa. From the age of five 'till the age of nine, I walked twice from Glanrafon...past Gyrn Castle...to Llanasa and back, for Sunday school and Evening Service at Capel y Groes. I knew that country road like my own hand; I knew every single telegraph pole, and could very nearly distinguish one black-faced sheep from another. And the view of llanasa, from the chapel on the hill, was part of my life.
But it never occurred to me, for a moment, that there was anything precious about the village and its surroundings; I knew no other landscape, and took it completely for granted. I suppose it's natural...even children brought up in spectacularly beautiful places like Venice or the Dolomites don't realise their luck. I took for granted the deep winding lanes, the dense leafy trees, the hedgerows, the swelling green of the fields, the weathered little stone houses, the sloping slates of the roofs, the tiny friendly church as old as time; I was too busy savouring one day after another, to stop and consider the fact that I was growing up in a bowl of peace, as gracious as it was unpretentious.
Years later, when I returned home in a professional capacity, I had travelled all over the world. I had seen cities deafened by noise, blackened by smoke, bursting with human beings packed as thick as ants in an ant heap. I had witnessed ravaged countryside with not a glimmer of green from one horizon to another. So when I set out to revisit my corner of Flintshire, I was filled with apprehension. Would I be faced with bungalows on every side? Caravans, pylons? Road-houses, gigantic car-parks? Would it be a nightmare?
It wasn't. Except for the inevitable minor changes, all looked miraculously the same. Not only that - as an adult I was able to appreciate things which, as a growing child, I had beem unable to take in: the richness of a rural heritage, the value the present must put on the preservation of the past, as a source of dignity and peace of mind - as a blessed heaven from the maelstrom which, around us from pole to pole, becomes with every year, louder, faster, more threatening. There have to be progressive developments, of course there have ...but let them not be destructive ones. Let the old village be fostered in its age-old setting of hill... and field... and tree: let it be cherished.
O bydded i'r hen wlad barhau.
[Emlyn Williams 1975]
