In our Sunday fashion we sat long after breakfast glued to the
television set, today keen to hear the commentary following the cabinet meeting
Theresa May had convened at her country residence in order to whip them into
some sort of cohesive group regarding the Brexit plan. As I have said before,
we are political tragicks, adopting an interest in whatever country we happen
to be resident, albeit temporary.
Although lunch was packed in the eski and already stowed in the back
of the car, I gave The Chauffeur the opportunity to remain home for a sport
packed day in front of the set, with the British Grand Prix to add to all the
rest going on. He assured me he wanted to go out touring, good companion that
he is, although the tour-bus speed we raced from one spot on my list to the
next, with few opportunities to even snap a photo, suggested he was making a
reluctant compromise. Of course there will come a day when he will read this,
and deny this was so.
Our day’s itinerary took us east, away from the coast and across
lovely farmland and down into the wide Teifi Valley. The patchwork of fields
spread out before us in gold and brown, dry for lack of rain, bordered by
hedges still green, were most picturesque. Here after just weeks of no rain,
the farmers are crying out for rain; Antipodean farmers wait for months of
drought before they reach such anxiety levels.
As we crossed the rolling hills, we spotted several red kites
wheeling about searching for prey; here they seem to be more common than other
places. We did check our bird book to make sure we were correct in our
identification, the “forked” tail is a dead giveaway. But absent from the
landscape were sheep, and even the cattle were few, just a few small herds
tucked away in far fields.
We travelled via the B4338 through to Lampeter, and passed through
with all too much haste. This small town on the River Teifi is best known as a
remote outpost of the British University system, known as Trinity St David. It
was founded in 1822 by the Bishop of St Davids to aid Welsh theological
students unable to travel to England for their education. Our guide book suggested
this to be a lively place, full of students, graduates who forgot to leave,
hippies and farmers. Very few of these were about today so we motored on
through.
From here we continued on down river on the A485, then the B4336
to Llandysul, this highlighted for our tour as “sitting pretty above the
Teifi”. As we crossed the river, here such a narrow channel, we noted the slalom
white water course. Today it seemed so
small with the water levels low that one struggled to imagine this to be an extreme
event.
A little further on, we came across a very smart new school, a
massive complex with the word “Bro” in its name. I had seen this elsewhere and
checked the meaning, given that it has a rather base slang meaning where we
come from; a term suggesting a relationship between down and outers. Here it
relates to “region” which fitted with the name of this new Welsh medium school
which takes in children from primary to secondary level. No doubt smaller
traditional schools have been closed to accommodate the arrival of this, just
as we discovered here in the village of Cross Inn.
Certainly in a country of unimpressive villages, the pastel
painted houses of Llandysul spotted en route did make for tourist attention, and
had the river levels been higher, we might have lingered although I still
believe the day’s sport scheduling was paramount in The Chauffeur’s mind. We
pressed on to the next place on my list; the National Wool Museum.
Here we did pass some time, and well spent it was. The National
Wool Museum is situated in DreFach Felindre closer to Newcastle Emlyn than
Llandysul. Tucked away behind a row of modest buildings, we found a spacious
car park and picnic spot, where we lunched at leisure under the shade of
well-established trees and tried to identify the birds that happened by.
The museum proved to be a real treasure, and not just because it
offered free entry; we would have been willing to pay a reasonable entry fee.
This is the site of authentic history, the wool processing factory of the
Cambrian Mills, one of forty three
working mills once in and around the village.
It was a chap named David Lewis who built the mill here for mass
production, on the site of a small water powered weaving workshop. The reason
for locating the mill here was that there was plenty of water for washing,
dyeing and finishing the wool process. Local people already had the skills, from
spinning to weaving, and goods could be easily shipped from nearly Henllan
railway station. Lewis had some experience, running the small but successful
Pantglas Mill at Cwnhiraeth (don’t you love the Welsh place names!), mainly
supplying drapers in South Wales with clothes and blankets.
Post-war saw a downturn in the industry, the demand for woollen
fabric uniforms now gone, and insurance companies recipient of many dodgy
insurance claims that followed. In July
1919 a massive fire broke out at Cambrian Mills woollen factory, damaging some
of the most valuable and modern machinery in the Teifi Valley. Damage was
reported at an estimated £20,000 with cause unknown.
In 1950 Johnny Lewis, son of the mill founder, was considering
retirement, obviously with no children lined up to take on the burden of
running such an establishment. Despite
past successes, the mill had struggled in recent years and lack of money during
the strikes in the south Wales coalfields in the 1920s were blamed for affecting
the traditional customer base.
Most of the fifty staff at Cambrian Mills were by now in their
fifties, younger people hard to attract to rural mills such as this. But a year
later there was great excitement; a new buyer had been found for the Mill.
Davi Evans Bevan Limited, who already operated a variety of
businesses, including breweries, hotels, brickworks and a coal mine, came to
the rescue, and you really have to wonder why! A new manager arrived followed
by several Dobcross looms from Yorkshire, and with great enthusiasm for the
future of the mill.
But by May 1965 the mill was up for sale yet again, now with a
reduced staff of thirty, and with no buyers in the interim, in 1976 the site
was opened up to the public as the Museum of Welsh Woollen Industry, a less
than perfect rescue, because just eight years later, in mid-1984, Cambrian
Mills was bought from the Official Receiver by the National Museums and Galleries
of Wales (NMGW) hence it is now related to the national museum we visited in
Swansea.
Nowadays both the mill and the village of Drefach Felindre are a national
heritage site, reopened in March 2004 as a National Wool Museum following a two
year two million pound refit partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. I
would suggest that the balance was met by hand outs from the European Union,
but that is only my opinion.
It is a surprisingly interesting museum, well curated and offering
an interesting range of information, starting with the wool industry of old,
when this part of the world was the centre of several droving routes, with wonderful
old films of sheep being “washed” by being encouraged to swim in rivers cleaner
than they are today, and shepherds on coracles guiding them to safety and
prodding them into bathing mode. Dog trialling is briefly mentioned and wool
gathering of old when women used to follow the drovers and shearers or simply
walked along traditional routes known as woollen paths. These women would
gather the scraps of fleece from the fields and hedgerows and even from the
backs of dead animals constantly bending, reaching and plucking every piece of
precious wool. Along the way they might stop at farms exchanging shelter, food
and local news in return for odd jobs.
The women would carry their gathered wool in great sacks upon
their backs until they reached their homes, where it was washed and spun by
hand, and then from the knitted products sold at local markets, they eked out
their modest existence.
One of the buildings of the complex is the site of a working commercial
weaving business, Melin Teifi, who for six days a week allow their workings to
be observed from a mezzanine floor. Today being Sunday, all was quiet, which probably
makes for a more pleasant visit. On working days there are six people and five
looms, Jacquard and Dobcross, plus several other machines for warping and
winding to demonstrate the industry as it was in yesteryears and still goes on
in this little micro-industry of modern times.
Up in another section of the museum we were treated to a Curtain
of Poppies created by volunteers for the Wonderwool Wales Centenary Textiles
project to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War; so very many
knitted red poppies!
If you hadn’t already guessed we were both impressed with the
Museum and Chris so much so, he was ready to head home after so much excitement,
but my itinerary was not complete.
A little reluctantly, he agreed we should press on to “just one
more” which I managed to extend to two more. We continued on downstream, with
few glimpses of the river, its low levels making for a sluggish flow.
Newcastle Emlyn deserves more credit than I will give it here,
because we drove through here on a Sunday afternoon, when most rural Welsh folk
have better things to do than wander about their rural service centre, so I
shall say no more and allow tourists to search for the wonders of this town
themselves.
Just a few more miles on we arrived at Cenarth, apparently a lure
for tourists since the 19th century. Certainly there were more about
here than there had been in Newcastle Emlyn, although I suspect those who had
ventured beyond their own gardens today had headed for the coast, hence we had
delayed our own costal exploration for a weekday. Here there are sometimes“rapids”
although not today. The River Teifi falls through a series of cascades cut
through the rock, and one could see that they may well be quite spectacular in
flood.
Below the “rapids” and the bridge several family groups had set themselves
up on the river banks, children venturing into the water of pea soup consistency
and colour, some to attempt net fishing and some to play or swim. Alarmingly we
discovered a notice along the riverside path warning the public to avoid
contact with the water:
'This river
periodically suffers from serious agricultural pollution consisting of animal
sewage, which may include antibiotic materials, pesticides, herbicides and
other matter potentially harmful and animals.
The most
severe pollution occurs when agricultural waste disposal is followed by heavy rain,
but harmful residues will continue to be present during low water conditions
and will be manifested by bad smelling slime on stones and gravel.
Contact
with the water is not advised without proper protective clothing and any
contact should be followed by thorough cleaning of the area of the body affected.
Ingestion of the water may produce serious stomach disorders and you should
immediately contact your GP in the event of such symptoms following immersion.
Riverwatch
Wales.co.uk'
I
saw no evidence of protective clothing, not even a rash suit to protect the children
from the ultra violet rays of the sun. Would you swim here?
And with that we headed home, back to camp where we checked out
the ice-creams on sale in the camp shop; a little disappointing but not so much we were
unable to find something to tempt us.
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