Y Felin

This unpretentious building in St Dogmaels, near Cardigan, is Y Felin (pronounced Uh Vellin). That, I well know, means The Mill as in Cornish it would be An Mellyn. The two languages really are quite similar. Indeed, I used to live a stones throw from Mellanvrane, in Cornwall – an anglicised rendering of Mellyn Vran, which means Crow Mill.

Mellanvrane is a mere shadow of its former self, but Y Felin is quite the opposite and rather special.  If you ring the doorbell of the adjacent house, Michael will emerge and (for a modest fee) show you around his beautifully restored mill.

There's another Cornish connection, for much of the restoration work was carried out by a gentleman by the name of Paynter.  "He must have been Cornish," says I, "for that's a good Cornish name," and indeed he was.

To begin our tour, Michael invited us to walk round to the back of the mill and view the water wheel, while he opened the sluice gate.

This is how it looked like after the sluice had been opened, but before the wheel mechanism had been set in motion. 

And here it is, in operation.

The mill pond, from which the water wheel is fed.

I'm delighted to report that Mr Paynter has done a fine job of restoration, as these photos from the Y Felin website site show
. 

I really should have taken a few photos of my own, but became totally engrossed in conversation with Michael about flour mills we have known and my dad's wartime work with Vickers Armstrong. I'm not at all sure how we got on the the latter, but it all made for a truly fascinating visit.

But what is Y Felin's product like?  Feeling the need to know, I bought a 1.5kg bag of wholemeal flour and put it to the test, pitting it against my regular Tesco Strong Wholemeal flour.

The Y Felin flour is on the left and the Tesco product on the right. There's not a lot of difference, though the Tesco one is slightly coarser and includes a few wheat husks. It would have been interesting to make a loaf with each flour but my Slimming World Healthy Eating Plan has severely limited my bread intake, so I just made one large loaf with Y Felin flour, using a bread maker and following my usual recipe:

310ml water, 15ml lemon juice,

450g wholemeal flour, 75g white flour,

20ml milk powder, 7.5ml salt, 10ml sugar,

25g butter, 7.5ml yeast.

Other recipes I've seen use a lot more sugar, but this one has never failed me in the past... and it didn't this time, either.  Here's the scrumptious result.

In this rather unscientific comparison, all I can say with certainty is that the Y Felin loaf is every bit as tasty as my usual Tesco ones — but who cares to support Tesco when one could buy flour that's been lovingly produced in an ancient mill that was restored by a Cornishman?

Club 10

Slimming World update: This evening I weighed in at 12st:8½lb which means that I've lost 10% of my body weight since starting the Slimming World programme on July 6th.  To mark my achievement I was awarded this certificate —

Before joining Slimming World I would never have imagined that simple card certificates could mean so much to me, but they do.  I now have 4 of them — ½ stone lost, 1 stone lost, silver Body Magic (for exercising) and this one, and they're all proudly displayed on a notice board above my computer desk.

After years of struggling with my weight, enduring withering frowns from company and practice nurses, and with only moderate success in dieting, I can hardly put into words how it feels to be making solid progress. In 9 weeks I've lost 20lb.

My weight loss graph on the Slimming World website shows that, if I keep this rate up, I'll hit 11 stone by the end of November. However, everyone I talk to says that losing weight gets harder as one nears an ideal weight, so I'm taking the graph's prediction with a hefty pinch of salt.

It would be lovely, though, to reach 11 stone before Christmas. That will give me a Body Mass Index of 24.1, which is comfortably within the healthy range (18.5 - 25.0). And there, I think, I will stop.

I don't plan to stop attending Slimming World though, as there's still so much to learn, and encouragement to be given and received.  My Slimming World group has transformed the way I eat and rekindled my enthusiasm for new and interesting recipes. To ruin it all by slipping back into my old ways is a prospect too ghastly to contemplate.

St David's Head, a seal pup and few quoits

No holiday cottage would be complete without a large collection of brochures, describing local attractions. Ours was no exception and rummaging through it on our first evening I found a colourful map of St David's.  I really should have photographed it, but many of my best ideas arrive in my head too late. Anyway, on this map, and close to St David's Head was a symbol like this:

That's a quoit," I confidently declared, and in my mind conjured up visions of quoits in Cornwall that I knew so well... such as this one:

Chun Quoit, in West Cornwall

These neolithic burial chambers – usually referred to as dolmens, but always quoits in Cornwall – are thought to originally have been covered with earth, at least as high as the cap stone. I used to think that the Cornish ones were best, until I came across this monster in France. (I refer, of course, to the stones and not the stunning individual beneath!)

In truth, structures like these may be found in many countries, and the time was surely right to seek out some Welsh ones.

The nearest car park to St David's Head is at Whitesands Bay.  I paid £5 for the privilege of joining the crowds, then headed off along the coast path. In the warm, late-afternoon sun the view back across St David's Bay was magnificent. That's Ramsey Island in the distance.

In a little cove I spotted this seal pup. Three days ago there was a distressing news story about beach-goers in Cornwall driving a pup like this back into the water, believing it to have been abandoned. DON'T DO IT!  Its mum's milk is extremely rich. She feeds her pup for about 3 weeks until it's good and fat, then deliberately leaves it on the foreshore to fend for itself.  Soon this little creature will shed its fluff, take to the water of its own volition and hopefully live a long and contented life.

Soon, high on the hillside ahead of me and silhouetted against the sky, I spotted the quoit. O dear, it had partially collapsed!

On closer inspection it did turn out to be rather splendid, though. Further investigation on the Internet revealed it to be the Coetan Arthur Dolmen, or Arthur's Quoit. Whether there is any connection with the Arthurian legends of Cornwall I know not.  Perhaps someone will enlighten me.

My fascination with quoits (or dolmens) had now truly been rekindled, so every brown road sign pointing to some ancient burial chamber was enthusiastically investigated. A couple of days later I came across this little beauty in a small grassy enclosure, beside a housing estate in Newport (Pembrokeshire's Newport, that is).  Again, there's a connection with the mysterious Arthur and I think it to be the nicest I've ever seen... well, perhaps the nicest after Chun Quoit!

Carreg Coetan Arthur

 The grand-daddy of them all is surely this one.

Guide books wax lyrical about Pentre Ifan, and rightly so.  The massive capstone is reckoned to weigh 16 tonnes. Theories abound as to its original purpose, but most probably it was a communal burial site. It's certainly very large for just one body; but then, so are the Egyptian pyramids! A nice alternative theory is that it never contained any bodies at all, but was simply built to impress. Five and a half thousand years after it's construction, it manifestly still does.

In search of Llareggub

To begin at the beginning: 

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. 

Never can I read those opening lines of Under Milk Wood — Dylan Thomas's acclaimed 'play for voices' — and not hear the deep, mellow tones of Richard Burton. Click here and listen a while for yourself... but do come back.

The play chronicles a day in the life of Llareggub, a backward little town, somewhere on the West Wales coast. But where?

The place most closely associated with Dylan Thomas is Laugharne (pronounced 'Larn'), which he first saw in 1934 when he was 19 years old. Four years later he moved his family there, but had to leave during the war years. He longed to return and finally did so when a besotted patron, actress Margaret Taylor, bought the lease of the Boathouse for him. It's now a tearoom and a museum of Dylan Thomas's life and work.

In the prologue to his Collected Poems Thomas calls the cottage:

... my seashaken house

on a breakneck of rocks

tangled with chirrup and fruit,

froth, flute, fin and quill

at a wood's dancing hoof...

Just above the Boathouse is this cliff-side shed where he wrote most of Under Milk Wood.  

Locals will tell you that Thomas not only drew inspiration for Llareggub from the town of Laugharne, but that, to all intents and purposes, Laugharne is Llareggub. The poet himself disagreed... but if you wanted to live in peace in the town, you'd probably say the same!

————

The residents of New Quay disagree. I went there to check out their story.

Dylan Thomas came to live in New Quay in 1944 where, says this guide book, he made a start on Under Milk Wood. The guide goes on to say:

Much of the topography of Llareggub ... is like that of New Quay, the cliff-perched toppling town. So are many of the play's characters: Willy Nilly, Tom Fred, Cherry Owen, Captain Cat and Polly Garter were inspired by real New Quay people who are still remembered in the town today.

For instance, there's the The Hungry Trout restaurant, which used to be the Post Office. Jack Lloyd was a postal worker there in DT's day and was also the town crier. In Under Milk Wood, says the guide, postman Willy Nilly had a role like that of a crier. Well I couldn't find a line in the play like that, but I'm sure it's there somewhere. And so the claimed associations continue.

The cliff-perched, toppling town... (Under Milk Wood)

The Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant and 
the Star of Wales tilt and ride... no more. Today the harbour is a haven for pleasure craft.

In truth, the claims of both Laugharne and New Quay have merit.  Like many accomplished writers, Dylan Thomas drew inspiration from the people and places that he knew well and there's doubtless a good dose of both towns in Llareggub.  However, quite why either place should wish to be closely associated with that backward place remains a mystery to me!

This story does, however, have a twist. In 1971 Lower Fishguard was chosen as the location for the film Under Milk Wood, starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole. Fishguard is perhaps best known as the location, not for a film, but of the last successful invasion of Britain by a force of 1400 French soldiers. They sensibly surrendered two days later.

This is Lower Fishguard, a place blighted these days by the main A487 trunk road that threads its tortuous way on narrow streets between the old houses. Now I must choose my words carefully, so as not to offend any locals that may perchance alight upon my little corner of the Internet, but I think you will agree that there's not a lot there. Indeed, you might even say that there's b.g.er all!

Bosherston and Stackpole

A few weeks ago I let it be known that I would soon be holidaying in West Wales. “You really must go to Bosherston and Stackpole,” declared my ukulele-playing friend Cherry. “You love walking, so you're sure to enjoy it.” Another friend agreed and gave me a sheet about Bosherston from her old copy of No Through Road. After that, there really was no doubt about it; I would be visiting Bosherston!

The landscape around Bosherston Ponds was created in the late 1700's by the Earl of Cowdor, a Scottish peer whose family have been connected with this part of West Wales since the 17^th Century. The family's stately home at Stackpole was built on a grand scale — rather too grand as it turned out, as it became prohibitively expensive to maintain and was demolished in 1963. However, the parkland that the good earl created lives on, now under the care of the National Trust.

From the NT car park in Bosherston I made my way around Bosherston's Lily Pond, crossing two long foot bridges that only have a handrail on one side – perfectly adequate until one tries to pass some rotund individual who is clinging hard to the rail! Thankfully, I survived without a ducking and continued on my way towards Broad Haven beach and Stackpole Warren.

NB. This is not the rotund individual mentioned in the text!

Broad Haven Beach

In a brave attempt to maintain my Slimming World eating plan, lunch of 2 Ryvitas, ½ a tub of cottage cheese and a peach was consumed on the warren, overlooking Church Rock.

I then continued along the cliff path, over Barrfundle Beach and on to Stackpole Quay, where I ruined it all by buying a very, very yummy double ice cream cornet. Well I am on holiday!

Barafundle Beach

The short overland walk back to Bosherston was interrupted with a diversion to see The Devil's Quoit. In my native Cornwall, quoits are usually impressive neolithic burial sites... but not this one. All the Devil had to offer was this standing stone. I gave it a hug and thanked the devil for his modest efforts before heading back over Eight-Arch Bridge to the car park.

The Devil's Quoit - rather huggy and friendly.

Eight-Arch Bridge

I reckon that this circular walk, including the diversion to The Devil's Quoit, was about 5½ miles long, so quite a gentle day's stroll. If ever I'm in the district again, I shall definitely return and perhaps extend the walk along the coast to Freshwater East.  There is also a network of paths in the woods, near the old stately home, that might be good to explore.