Tree house

On the way to pick whinberries we spotted this and had to stop to explore. It's an abandoned smallholding that stands beside the lonely mountain road. Its name, Tafarn y bwlch, reveals that it was formerly an isolated inn offering a pitstop to travellers and sheep drovers on their windswept way across the Preseli hills, where weather, weariness and wicked outlaws all posed a threat, miles from the nearest village.

Its final years as a small farm must have ended a decade or so ago, the last occupant apparently confined to downstairs, judging by the position of the light switch cord in the front room. Since then the place has hosted a multitude of swallows who have welded their nests to the rafters and to whatever old bits of agricultural clutter remains hooked to the ceiling: in one case a small hanging sieve provides the ideal receptacle.

This view is the rear elevation looking across the sweeping hill slope towards the distant Teifi valley. The garden is deep in convolvulous and Japanese knotweed. The roof, still sound, is long and low to provide the least wind resistance, inside the window recesses are deep and the upper floor is partitioned with varnished tongue-and-groove planks in the traditional fashion. The (fairly recent) bathroom fittings are smashed but the place is too isolated to have been much vandalised and is ripe for conversion into a desirable holiday home.

~~~ Afterword~~~

I've noticed that a common reaction to images of dereliction and ruin is one of sadness. I don't share this feeling - unless the damage has been perpetrated by aggressors in an attempt to cause suffering and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza at present. Human dwellings follow a comprehensible trajectory: they were built where resources (land, water, roads and so on) provided the possibility of making a living, maybe for many generations, but when economic circumstances change the inhabitants, younger ones especially, vote with their feet and move elsewhere. Post-WW2 the bottom dropped out of hill farming but long before that these hills were depleted by migration to the industrial valleys of South Wales (or overseas) where more, if not easier, money was to be made. Scraping a living from this rough land, without the benefit of combustion engines, electricity, and easy access to shops, schools and healthcare made life a constant struggle for survival. It would be necessary to work from dawn to dusk, all the year round, and in winter cut off for weeks on end, food supplies running low, animals suffering and human emergencies with only neighbours to help out.

Nowadays, small farming has been replaced by tourism in Wales, as in many rural areas, and there are rewards to be had from selling or converting picturesque old dwellings. Even ruins that are little more than piles of stones can be recreated on the old footprint provided they are in accordance with the traditional building style. Whoever takes over this abandoned homestead will, I'm sure, lovingly restore it as close as possible to its original state - but they will have cars, computers and financial resources that come from somewhere else entirely.

I've put up a Flickr album here with some more images of the things I have mentioned plus a collage of the delightful wallpaper with which the place was decorated.