Y Graig

Image: © Rhandir Taken: 17 Aug 2007

I remember this simple lane, with its stream on one side, as a fabulous green palace filled with nuts in autumn, with masses of bluebells in spring. We used to climb one of the big trees and sit in it for hours. Apparently, there used to be a woman who lived in one of the more modest cottages up there, who appears in one census as a ‘pauper’. And then when you got to the top of the tunnel of trees, and through the rusting black iron wicket gate on the old right of way. There were the brambles on one side and gorse on the other, and the path going straight up to Cribyn Farm – and the much more fascinating one dipping down and over the stream via two great flat stones, and up again to where the carpark opposite the community centre is now. Then it was just fields. But the real kick was from turning upstream into the huge great green, clean cathedral of trees on either steep mossy ferny bank. Which is still there, only deprived for some municipal reason of its river, and so now has to make do with piles of fly-tipped rubbish. It does seem obvious why the Baptist Revival was so popular hereabouts during the time when the temples of industrialisation were making many places was very black and smoky. I remember being very young and being carried/dragged by – I think – my sister and cousins across those stepping stones with the water splashing underneath, and assuming that this was the very stream from the nursery rhyme ‘Gi Ceffyl Bach, yn Carrio Ni'n Dau.’: ‘Dwr yn yr afon, a’r cerrig yn slip..’ These were the very stones, my mother knew them, and was making up songs about them for me. At least, that's what I assumed. They were certainly ‘slip’.

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