Cartref

One thing that has struck me both about my own sense of place in the world, but also in looking back at my family's origins and movements over the last couple of centuries, is that the latter could be seen as informing the former. Both sides of my family seem to have been both drawn and cleaved, to liminal spaces of one sort or another. Most of us are from a corridor stretching from north-east Wales, and down through the Welsh Marches into Gloucestershire, via Shropshire and Herefordshire, with forays into Staffordshire, Warwickshire and back over the years.

I've always felt best at home in these borderlands, but never so much as here, the ultimate liminal space, between the sea and the mountains of Eryri; and that my place of birth, Birmingham, seems almost accidental somehow: a product of the economic migration of previous generations, out of expediency in order to escape the penury of working-class rural life at the time. I knew very early on that I wanted to migrate myself, either to the Marches or North Wales, and having lived here in Llanllechid parish for most of my life, it is intrinsically a part of my identity. Wedi fy ngeni yn lloegr ond cymraeg yw fy nghalon...