Fairy Glen

Fairy Glen.

Everyone, well a lot of people have a ‘go to ‘ place they can retreat to. Be it to hide from the storm of life or simply to rekindle the calmness and tranquillity that only that place can offer.

I’m no different and whilst my retreat is a real, physical location I still go there in my mind.  For the ‘Fairy Glen’ a woodland path by the Ysgethin River in North Wales still calls me and is that place of refuge for my mind as well as having been for real for over sixty years and the place where my ashes will be scattered, permanently reuniting me with one of my greatest loves….Wales.

Nineteen sixty-six is probably marked in England at least for the winning of the football World Cup, but for me a small schoolboy cowering from the nightmares both at home and across the world of change and uncertainty, the Fairy Glen aside the Afton Ysgethin became my personal mecca.  A place of calm, regeneration and renewal.  It had been my second holiday with a friend and his family.  I didn’t realise at the time, but looking back he was probably an only child, not by choice, but by circumstance and it gave me a golden thread that has been woven into my life for which I will be eternally grateful.

Tal y Bont near Barmouth was chanced upon as we moved north looking for a camping field.  A quick decision to follow the lure of a badly painted sign that simply read ‘camping’ became a fork in the road so to speak that would lead me to my own Valhalla.

The footpath that ascends from the passing road to the majestic mountains of North Wales begins as it weaves around an abandoned watermill (now a pub)…the rest is a wooded glade that hugs the river, nurturing it’s sparkling torrents of unspoilt water as I hurries to the Irish Sea.  I walked that path as a pre-pubescent schoolboy; thirty years later I was to bring my own off springs along that hallowed path.  I could probably mark most of the Bard’s seven ages of man along that gravelly ascent and with each passing age my love for the Fairy Glen grows, not dims