HISTORY OF DERNOL

EXODUS or GENESIS?

The smaller upland farms of Mid-Wales are emptying of people, and good hills become sheep walks. This poses many questions we cannot afford to leave unanswered, for this story of a Welsh valley is only one example typical of many. But the problem is one of humanity rather than of farming.

By C. S. SMITH

This is the story of a valley. It is also a phase in the evolution of hill farming life, for however unique in character it is far from unique in its experience.

It is a tributary valley of the upper Wye, taking its name from the Dernol brook that forms the boundary between Radnor and Montgomery. In it we find exemplified the words of the Mid-Wales Report of the Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission … the established pattern of hill farming is in an advanced stage of disintegration due to the unwillingness of the younger generation of hill people to live in remote and lonely places with little hope of modern amenities.

Once – not so long ago – there were ten farming families in Dernol. Now there are seven. Once, in the days of big families, a score of children ran and shouted in the grass playground by the school. Seven years ago, only five children were left; the school was closed. It sold for £300; it is used now as a fishing lodge a few times a year by an owner living hundreds of miles away.

The Welfare State seems to have overlooked this outpost of civilisation. There is a doctor but he lives in the town several miles away. There’s not a telephone in Dernol, only a kiosk on the main road between Aberystwyth and Rhayader, over the Wye, two miles away. There is no bus service on this road.

Not a farm in Dernol has a bathroom (” the old house isn’t worth it “). One has a portable tin bath, and there are five children in that house. True, there was no freeze-up in February’s bitter weather, but that was because none of the houses has tap water. Usually it’s a spring, feeding into some sort of stone basin, with an old iron saucepan, or a copper, to collect the domestic supply.

Sewerage is primitive – just a closet on the hillside, open to the gales that sweep the mountains, the “sewer” feeding eventually into the Wye, one supposes. Lighting the house is by oil lamps; cooking on the big inglenook (”we don’t dig peat now – we buy coal and pay dear for it “) or by oil stove. The hard road finishes two farms up the valley. For the rest there are gated tracks on the steep hillsides; and two fords, very deep when the Dernol is in spate, have to be passed to get to Trafelgwyn, last farm up the valley.

Twice a week the bread van gets to the hard road by the Wye, but food costs more, for this transport must be paid for. Once a week the eggs are collected and often bartered for groceries.

If you want a lift into town (Rhayader, eight miles, or Llangurig about four) you get a lift in the van. But you have to hire a taxi to come back at night; he’ll drop you on the main road and you must walk in the darkness through the Wye valley, across the river and home.

There are no sale crops from these hill farms. The oats, kale, rape and turnips (and not all can grow them) are needed for wintering stock.

Yet these folk are the most self-contained of all our race· The “cow for the family” provides butter and cheese; they have eggs, there’s always a side of bacon hanging, and the occasional sheep killed. They grow enough potatoes and some swedes for their own needs, and “carrots on Sundays” are a weekly luxury. Fruit is almost unknown, but on the whole the diet is well balanced.

Television hasn’t reached them; not all have wireless. One farm has car, owned by the farmer’s son. This is an advance for Dernol; its owner can get to town at least once a week.

There is no communal life, no village hall or institute. If you want company, you go to your neighbour’s house of an evening – if you don’ object to the long walk back< up the valley and through the fords.

None of these farms is small or necessarily uneconomic, but as you pass down the valley so the farming changes. At the highest farm, the stock is simply Welsh Mountain sheep, selling draft ewes and four-year-old wethers. Farther down you come to farms that can winter – and wintering is the crux – Hereford cattle; finally to a more wealthy sheep (crossbred Kerries) whose lambs can be fattened on the crops grown there.

So the movement of families has been always down the valley – to bigger communities, better land, more amenities. The Wye is their Jordan, the Promised Land the next village.

So it is likely to go on, leaving bigger holdings as the farms are merged. With that comes a demand for farm workers, until peasant owner-occupiers surrender their cherished status as landowners, and for the first time get a weekly wage.

This is a vicious circle. Amalgamation is no answer – unless it retains labour. The more folk leave these valleys, the more remote they become for those who stay, until they in turn follow suit. Soon it must empty of population. I talked to an old man of 84 still farming. Retiring? “No, I must farm or starve.” He had the advantage of living on the main road.

I talked to Miss Mary Bywater (76). What will happen when she goes? “I suppose the farm will go down like the rest.”

The farmhouses, stone built and structurally sound for the most part,sell for a song – holiday homes for suburban car owners. The land reverts to sheep walk, if it isn’t merged with the next farm. And if the owner’s foot is the best manure then these sheep walks may revert rapidly. Bracken that is not cut regularly spreads quickly, it is spreading now. Sheep on free range can’t keep hill grazings open – but they need little labour.

What will the country lose if these valleys are denuded of population? It will lose a race of people as remarkable as their native sheep for hardiness. In a country where thrombosis, cancer, ulcers take a toll of urban population in middle life, these people live to great ages and die of sheer old age. While industry is plagued with strikes and discontent among men working regular hours and getting holidays with pay, these people of the hills work untold hours, often out of doors in the worst weather, for comparatively small returns.

They are individuals, for there is no standard type among them. They take a pride in knowledge for its own sake. Yet modern education has passed them by.

As owner-occupiers they complain of high taxation, as well they might. These taxes pay for the Welfare State, for housing and services and higher standards of living. And in these things they have not shared.

All over the country are new towns, vast council estates, community centres for urban populations bristling with television aerials. Compare these smart new houses, provided out of the public purse, with the homes of those who farm the hills. And then say who is feather-bedded?

Are there no subsidies? Surely store sheep and cattle have been making good prices for years? True enough, but costs have risen too. Hill sheep payments are not an annual occurrence. No farmer may plan his farming relying on that income. The hill cattle subsidy has brought cattle back to the hills – if your hill is good enough or your intake land adequate to provide winter keep for them. But as farms become empty, the cattle depart and sheep stocks become fewer. Yet there is a demand for more meat.

Livestock Rearing Act grants? Only one farmer in Dernol has put up the other 50 per cent, and his farm is better situated than the rest.

Farm subsidies account for considerably more than half of the net farm income of all the farms in this country, but only one-third of the net income of those whose farms come within the Livestock Rearing Act comes from subsidies.

It isn’t the farming, nor the poorness of the return, nor the hard work that is driving folk from these hills.

If the hill peoples were given the wherewithal to furnish themselves with some of the things they lack, would this stop the slow exodus from the hills? Would tractors, cars, telephones be the answer, even without larger communities?

Or would new blood from distant parts, a different species of human beings, be content to live and farm where the natives have departed. Are the larger farm, the wealthier farmer, a worker’s wage instead of a small owner’s title deeds, the cure for the ills of remoteness?

These are some of the questions posed by Dernol. They need answering.