IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Blaen Nant, LLANELLI, SA14 8HB

The 1960's housing estates grew around it. I clearly remember the old couple who lived there. Us children back in the 60's and 70's gave them the name Granny and Grandad Grumbles. Looking back it was most unfair - the poor couple had to contend with a growing band of children who were rather partial to scrumping their apples in the orchard! I expect they longed for the tranquil, rural bygone days!

Once through woods and fields, the path now squeezes between the rear gardens of 1960's houses. Where there was once chain link and wire there is now a higgeldy piggeldy mismatch of different fencing.

As we knew the area as children. To the right there used to be a stream, since piped in, which was a magnet for us children. We climbed trees and made swings across the water. It was an exciting place to grow up. Sadly the appeal has gone now that the stream has gone. The sense of adventure has been taken away and the area sanitised.

It may be just my fanciful imagination in a reduced light, but this gnarled tree seems to have morphed into an alien life form!

Ifan Richards was already an old man when I first met him as a small child. He lived like a hermit in a corrugated iron shack that was soon swallowed up by the new housing estate. Us children knew him well but our parents, confined to their neat new patches knew him just a little. In this day and age people would be horrified to learn that their children would visit an old man who lived by himself in reduced circumstances, but Ifan was a lovely, gentle old man who bothered no-one. He lived in one room with a wood burning stove and a ready supply of firewood and grew all his own vegetables in a patch about 25'x 15'. There were always chickens running around. He gave me a tortoise one day, but Mum made me take her back. She could still be alive! Ifan died peacefully in a home after an attack of appendicitis in the late 1960's. I sometimes think of him and wish I'd known more about him and his past and how he ended up where he did. According to the older residents of Llethri Road, there were other men living in similar circumstances, some with better facilities, some with less. On a recent family visit I was so surprised to see that there were still remains of his home and that his garden hadn't been assimilated into those that surrounded him. Brought quite a tear to my eyes!

The views are lovely. Worm's Head on the end of the Gower Peninsula is across the Loughor Estuary.

A fantastic place to grow up in the 1960's and 1970's. An area full of young families with children. There was very little traffic back then, and certainly no cars parked on the road. It was safe to cycle and rollerskate to our hearts content!

Cerddwyr yn dilyn Ffordd Sant Illtyd wrth iddo fynd drwy ystad yn Nyffryn y Swisdir. Walkers following St Illtyd's Way as it goes through an estate in the Swiss Valley.

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’.