Celtic Fringe

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The Edge of Snowdonia
    I was just randomly musing on where we are currently, on life's path, if you like: as you do when time is plentiful and things aren't quite as you ordered them at the checkout of youth. We chose to come and live in this extraordinary place quite by happenstance. A meeting up with Jones bach for a long weekend in Carneddi turned into a lifelong love of North Wales and home.
    I travelled up in September 1980 to sort out our cottage rental for when I came up to Bangor University to do Postgrad Linguistics in the October.

The Best of Myles - bought at Bookland in Bangor September 1980

    Forty years have passed - well in September at least, since we upped sticks from Birmingham and moved here in a tiny van with all we could carry, two cats and Pete & Sheila - Pete driving. An eventful journey, to say the very least, we eventually disembarked and set up camp in Braichmelyn; to be our home for the the next year.
    That evening we decided to walk down to the Douglas Arms at our end of the village. A watering hole much favoured by ex-pats from across the Dyke and beyond, it was full most nights - apart, as I've mentioned elsewhere, from on dry Sunday. I spoke about the prevailing economic/alcoholic climate in those days in a previous post.
    The introduction to village life as it was then was a vibrant, eccentric, warm and extremely entertaining one and was our first exposure to one of the many, now sadly gone characters, Gordon. I'll leave him for another post - he really deserves a bloody biography, as Bethesda does a proper history of its people, not just written into the books as the victims of oppression and social injustice at the hands of the landowners (again this will be the subject of another post).
    Suffice to say, we've lived most of our lives in this beautiful corner of the so-called Celtic Fringe. I would prefer to call it The Heartland. Our Land. Tir ni.

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