A Night In Annwn. Owen Jones

weather, but the wind, mist and drizzle that got over them landed on Jones’ Peak, from where they would descend down the hill to envelope the village, which he would be able to see in thirty minutes as they rounded that side on their corkscrew journey upwards.

      He checked his bearing and stood up straight. He had been finding recently that he had a tendency to stoop if he didn’t keep take care. He didn’t want that. He used a staff, but he always had done, ever since he was a boy. You could not be a proper shepherd or even an amateur hill walker without a decent staff. In the old days, he had used it to frighten off the occasional snake and tap a dawdling sheep, but he had never used it to help him walk, not like he did these days.

      He watched Kiddy race on ahead on the other side of the road – the safer side, away from the edge. She didn’t care for the view down like he did and preferred the soft grass beneath her pads. She had caught the smell of something and was looking for its source behind the rocks and boulders that lay scattered about. She was twelve years old, and so was technically older than he was by nearly twenty years, but she could still manage a turn of speed. A short burst when the excitement of the chase took her. This would probably be a rabbit or a hare, but she would chase off snakes too.

      It was a darn sight more than he could do these days, he thought sadly. He couldn’t even chase a pretty girl nowadays, but worse still, he wouldn’t even want to.. Where had all his energy gone? He had been able to run up and down this hill as much as he had wanted to for decades and now he was having trouble walking up the last section with a straight back and a stick.

      It was at times like these, when he was alone, which was most of the time now, that he wondered what the point of it all was.

      In a hundred yards, he would come to the boulder where he had first kissed Sarah, and where two years later she had accepted his proposal of marriage and made him the happiest man alive. He had never told anyone about that rock, because he was sure that his father would have told him that it had not always been there; that the army bulldozer had pushed all the rocks to the inside of the road rather than carry them down.

      He would have said something to spoil the memory and the dream that that smooth rock had been there for ever, or at least since the Ice Age, which was long enough ago for him to still think of as romantic. He had never witnessed one tender moment between his grandparents, on either side, or his own parents. They had been tough, hard, no-nonsense people, suited to their times, whereas he had had the relative luxury of growing up in the post-war years when there was hope and prosperity. Not that it had affected or even reached their little hill, but it was evident in the media that a New World had dawned.

      “About bloody time!” he remembered his father saying one day. “I hope it’s a bloody sight better than the old one!” His mother had scolded him for bad language and he had taken his pipe out into the back garden ‘for a bit of peace’.

      He reached the boulder gratefully and sat down. Kiddy put her paws to the surface beside him, stared at him with her still-bright eyes, surrounded by white-grey hair and panted. William was almost panting too, but he stroked her hair, as he had Sarah’s all those years ago, and she was just as happy as his then future wife had been.

      “There’s a good girl. You’re a good girl you are. A good girl!” and Kiddy appeared to show satisfaction with the praise by licking his forearm. He gazed out across the narrow road and wide valley before him. “My Mam and Da used to tell me that witches, fairies and pixies live in these hills and valleys… and my grandparents did! And I believed them…” he said to his dog. “Until I became all grown up and educated.

      “I didn’t want to seem like a stupid farm boy then… I was a New Man in a New World and the Old World was for silly old people. Aye, and so were the witches and The Fair Family – Y Tylwyth Teg. But, it’s funny, you know, Kiddy, my girl, the older I got the more them old stories made sense to me… and now? I fair believes ‘em again.

      “Are you with the Fair People, my lovely Sarah or are you back in the cottage. I would like to think that you’re sitting by me on our love seat of stone now…”

      Tears did not come, but he thought that they would have in ‘normal’ people. ‘Too much of my Da in me to cry in public!’ he said aloud, but only because there was no other human being for miles around.

      “I’m a silly old bugger, that’s what I am, aren’t I, Kiddy? A stupid, silly old bugger… Come on, let’s get on with it”.

      He slid off the rock to his feet and the dog put her front paws on his thigh, looking for another pat and thrashing her tail because she could feel her master’s mood lightening. They set off and he checked his posture again.

      Thirty-odd minutes later, they were walking across the patch of concrete on the summit of Jones’ Peak, or Bryn Teg – Fair Hill – to give it its real name. His goal was the bench in the corner of the concrete slab. In his earliest memories of the hilltop, the small shed where the army lookouts could get out of bad weather had still been there and when it had fallen into disuse, courting couples had taken it over.

      After years of complaints from parents, and more than a few shotgun weddings, the council had taken it down. It still made him smile to remember a letter some wag had sent in to the readers’ opinion column. He had likened the shed to a pimple on the bald spot of a middle-aged man’s head. Well, the pimple had disappeared now and to mark its historical role was this park bench. If you sat on it with your back to the mountains, you felt as if you were sitting on top of the world and could see for miles.

      As for the courting couples, they still went there but they all had cars these days, and contraception, or most of them anyway.

      It was a lovely day. There was the inevitable breeze, but it was as weak as it got. It made his hair fly about, but it was exhilarating and made him feel glad to be alive again, although he knew that the effect was only temporary. As soon as they left that magical spot, he would wonder what it was all about again. He had known when he had had a family, but he couldn’t remember any longer.

      “Come on, my lovely girl, let’s be heading back down”. It was a signal to her for a treat before starting for home. William usually took an apple or a bar of chocolate with him for energy for the homeward journey and he always gave his dog a biscuit as well. She came over to him wagging her tail in expectation.

      “Good girl, Kiddy”, he soothed stroking her head with one hand while she ate the biscuits out of the other. “That’s the lot, off we go”.

      As William was getting up, a car appeared on the concrete and it flashed its lights. A man of William’s age got out and so did a young girl.

      “Hello, Bill. The number of times I come up yer and don’t see anyone. Anyway, I’m glad I’ve bumped into you actually. It’s my birthday today and I’m having a little do in the village pub. I’m just showing my granddaughter the magnificent view from our hill, then I’ll take her home and go on down. Do you fancy it?”

      “I don’t know, Dai. Happy Birthday by the way”. He waved at the girl who remained the other side of the car stroking the dog.

      “Come on, I’ll take you and your dog down in the car. Better than watching daytime TV, surely?”

      “It is that without a doubt. Yes, go on then. My daughter asked me if I wanted to go down this morning. I said ‘No, I’ll leave it till tomorrow’, but this is a good reason to change my mind. You’re on!”

      “Good man! Good man! If you’d been on the phone I would have rung you to give you an invite, but you won’t have one will you?”

      “No fear! Bloody waste of money up yer, man… nothing works. No signal, no bloody electric half the time neither”.

      “No, the world that time forgot, that’s where you live. It’s like going back a hundred years up yer… maybe two hundred…”

      “If it wasn’t for this concrete slab, nothing has changed for thousands of years, Dai, thousands and thousands”.

      When Dai had shown his granddaughter around the hilltop,