Felin Wrdan
My years and reflection have imbued it with new meaning and deeper understanding, though at the time we simply called it home. These were the “idyllic” years as my sisters and I describe our childhood and youth on the farm called Felin.
Felin translates from the Welsh or Cymraeg to English as ‘mill’. In this instance it speaks to a flour mill, the water-driven mill which from the sixteenth century which until 1946, when my parents bought the place to farm it, served to grind grain into flour for the entire community surrounding it. Five footpaths and horse-cart lanes led to outlying villages and farms, evidence that this was once a well visited hub. The granery, mill, numerous farm buildings and house clustered centrally on the land, solidly arising on a rocky and sloped outcropping that drained south toward the River Nevern. No doubt a deliberate siting which served to protect the homestead from weather extremes, the times that the river flooded its banks and rose across the broad green meadow to within a few yards of the field gate at the bottom of the farm yard.
In those times it was unsafe to cross the meadow to go to school and livestock would have to be rescued from the small islands of high ground that were surrounded by the roaring and foaming brown torrent. 
All evidence of the river’s banks temporarily obliterated except for the dense sketch of trees that marked its edge. It was thrilling to experience the high energy flow of the river, its pure force left me breathless with the excitement that embroiders the edge of fear.
The farm’s origins trace to the eleventh century. Its stone and earth walls, slate roofed and timbered ceilings stand as testament to centuries of occupants adding shelter for people and animals as need, resources and time permitted.
Fields, patterned on the land like leaves, edged with hedgerows that, like the buildings themselves, are built of earth and stone, though here the ratio of earth to stone was higher, an invitation for plants and animals to inhabit them, to become established and permanent. Over time these bands became the wild corridors that connected vast lands, a network of largely undisturbed habitat that today, where they remain, continue to support the remnant wild creatures and plants of the British Isles. Hedgerows are home to full grown trees, shrubs, forbs, grasses and flowers; they host burrowing animals, birds and insects and they break the force of wind and the slide of erosion. On the down slope they gather soil at their base and can cause water to pool. They define human boundaries and are containers for livestock and crops. Like those fields of our neighbors each bore a name that emerged from its character or some other defining landform or quality: the meadow, stack yard field, three corner field, cnwc-y-moel and so on.
In places a footbridge connected Felin’s fields from one farm to the next or a stile of stones protruding in a particular rhythm from the hedge would require a youthful stretch to clamber up, over and down the other side. In another place it was a pair of mature ash trees whose trunks vee’d in such a way that our small bodies could squeeze sideways through their massive forms, but sheep would stick. It was a matter of management and sheep were always the ones to put the strength of a hedge to the test. Managing hedgerows became a prideful art amongst the farmers throughout the Isles and each year various community wide gatherings would pit neighbor against neighbor in friendly competition: hedging, sheep dog trials, ploughing and the livestock of course. There would be foods prepared from the crops produced, as well as the innumerable home gardens of both farm and village, and proud displays of skilled work that inspired improvement year upon year.
Tables laden with eggs, fruits, vegetables, butters, breads, honey dripping from the comb and some fluid, golden in their sparkling cylinders; cakes dusted with sugar and wines imbued with the essence of place, made of the wild flowers and berries gathered in summer’s sun. Jams and jellies, cheeses and beers; garments, crafts both useful and decorative. The display threatened to burst the seams of the walls that contained it, it was the best of our abundance, beautifully made by hand right here in our community by our friends and neighbors and ourselves. What we displayed was our commitment to this kind of life, resiliency and generations of experience and know how. This is how we told of a shared love of this life, the love of this land and the respect for one other.
These were always times of celebration and jovial conviviality. 
The best mannered four leggeds, unsullied for today by mud or muck, lolling tongues pink and moist, move with their masters, a sea of burnished faces, tweed-capped and best-booted, wearing a smile lightly lubricated by some yeast-ed home brew; more conversation in a day than perhaps was had over months, fodder for thought for the long dark months of winter.
Business conducted on this day would play itself out in the months and years to come. A keen eye would find a breeding match to improve a bloodline, recipes would be exchanged and an eye would contact another, sparking hormones and causing neurons to make new and thrilling connections, opening a pathway to a fresh network, to another level of resiliency in the community with a summer wedding.
Felin was built at a time when there was only one way to live: self sufficient. I could count on one hand the times when we would go to a shop in the span of a year, to town only twice and it always involved the dreaded dentist.
Our world did not revolve around currency or consuming. We did not hanker for television or new things. We played outside and knew trees and secret places, the one place on sixty four acres where the four leaf clover grew. We all learned to make butter and bread, to gather eggs and spin honey combs in the extractor. We watched with interest as berries ripened in summer, and when the wasps haunted the plum tree we knew we had best gather what we could, and fast as the fruit was heavy with sugar and soon it would be too far ripe to be edible. We shook the tree and laughed as we were showered with their purple juiciness, darting after them like chickens chasing bugs, stuffing ourselves until we had no more capacity to do so.
We gathered wild strawberries, the size of a fingernail, their scent, unbearably beguiling. We would thread them on a blade of grass like a string of rubies until there was enough to satisfy our salivation for their intense flavor, though we always longed for more.
The scent of fresh mown hay and the work of gathering it in, the excitement as neighbor after neighbor arrived to help with its harvest before the rain came and wet it again. Watching the loose, dry grasses and legumes rise into an enormous stack in the sheltering barn until the whole was done and it would be our turn, my father or his student returning the favor, off to help the neighbors bring in their crop in the momentary blessing of sunshine. The barn never lost that scent and we would revel in it on rainy days and goad each other to do the forbidden, climbing up the top of the rick on the fifty rung ladder.
Chicks hatched under hens that escaped the security of the night-time pen, others hatched in the wooden incubator. We never became complacent about new life, it was always magical to witness each arrival, and the longing to be close to newborns tantalized us. 
A sick animal or too many offspring would mean an opportunity to bottle feed a lamb or a wriggling pink pile of piglets. Calves needed to be introduced to drinking out of a bucket and our fingers were surrogate teets, lowered into the cream white warmth of the mother’s colostrum, the first immune-boosting milk. The scents and sweetness of those experiences are as embedded in my cells as vividly as any recent event and I wonder how children can grow in a world apart from something so essential and so vital.
It was here that we were taught to wild craft, to know what was edible and when to harvest. Leaves, roots, berries and mushrooms. Some plants could be made into salve, or soup when we got sick, some would soothe the skin. Some were deadly poison and it was the billy goat that drove the point home when he died from it. The lesson was underscored again and again.
The long pantry, screened windows at each end was a place of endless fascination. Like a chemistry lab there were bottles, jars and barrels everywhere. Each one curing, fermenting, aging. Warm grey slate pans, cool to the touch, lined the walls with their shallow forms. These curing pans sloping to the center and wider than my reach, held a spider in the open bung hole. This was a place where alchemy, food alchemy dominated the scene.
