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place. The low nobbly hill facing us, he told me, belonged to a farm
which was mentioned in the Mabinogion , Welsh legends some
1,500 years old.
Beside the path was a pile of stones, sketching the barest outline of
four walls, now sinking back into the close-cropped grass. 'That house
was last inhabited in 1916, by the old cook who worked at my mum's
school.'
I followed him up the side of the hill to a patch of brighter grass
and soft-centred rush. This, he said, was the remains of an old hush-
ings. It was either Roman or medieval: the archaeologists had not
been able to decide. I confessed that I did not know what the word
meant.
He explained that it was part of the valley's old lead-mining system.
The miners built a dam above the deposits they wanted to expose, and
channelled water through a leat into the pond it held. When the reser-
voir was full, they would breach the dam and the water would rush
down the hillside, sweeping away the overburden. This was, in other
words, the method I had seen deployed in the goldmines of Roraima,
but without the use of diesel pumps.
Both the grass and the land it covered became rougher as we
climbed. Dafydd explained that, to obtain green subsidies,* he had to
keep his sheep off the mountain in the winter. He led me up into his
summer grazings on Mynedd yr Ychen, Oxen Mountain. Short tufts
of heather, still in the black mourning clothes of winter, survived amid
the grass. Last year's dried flowers rattled on the stems. As we reached
the crest of the hill, the great yellow plateau opened up. It rose towards
that least distinct of mountains, Pumlumon Fawr, which, upwelling
gently from the massif, always looks smaller than it is. Its grey and
yellow flanks were patched with artless blocks of spruce. But for the
wind, the land was silent. As usual in the Cambrians, no birds called
and nothing rustled in the grass.
The heather on this pasture, Dafydd told me, might explain the
name of the mountain, as cattle need a large amount of copper in their
diet, and heather is a rich source. That it was called Oxen  -  not
Cattle - Mountain suggested that the name pre-dated the era of horse
* Pillar 2 payments.
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