The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 174

traction: oxen were used for heavy work from the Bronze Age until a
few centuries ago. The boundary wall between the mountain and the
winter pastures closer to the house, he later told me, had been built to
allow the sheep to regulate their own grazing. It was banked up on the
downhill side, to allow the sheep to move onto the mountain when
their grazing in the lower fields declined, but not on the upper side, to
ensure that they could not return until the farmer wished it.
Clinging to the hillside below us were the crumbled walls of a small
stone building. 'That was the old goose house. Grandma used to walk
up here every night to shut them in. The geese grazed on the grass and
heather tips. The farming was more mixed in the past. Until 2000 we
had a small herd of Herefords, which had come down from my
great- grandfather's cows.'
Dafydd pointed out where the old farmsteads of his neighbours had
stood, in some cases just three or four decades before. 'At night there
were lights twinkling all along the valley. Now they've gone.'
He explained that this valley was once a busy thoroughfare. It was
used by people walking to the church, to school and to the pub, which
had now closed. It was used by the pilgrims who arrived at the docks
in Aberystwyth (which were demolished long ago) to walk to the Cis-
tercian abbey at Strata Florida. It was used by the drovers herding
animals along the old trails to Rhayader and then to London.
'Our history is carried by word of mouth, but it's anchored to the
land. The old boys used to play a game: one of them would leave his
cap on a rock, somewhere in the mountains. Then he'd go into the
pub and tell the name of the rock to a friend. That was all the infor-
mation they needed. The friend had to run out and retrieve it. All the
rocks had names. My uncle could remember all of them. They were
never written down.'
Listening to him, I realized that both of us were harking back to
something that is no longer here. His thoughts were filled by the days
in which the hills bustled with human life. Mine were filled by the
days in which they bustled with wildlife.
We came down the western side of the mountain, through low tus-
socks of gorse and heather, into the greener fields behind his house. As
we approached the farmyard gate, we met Delyth, driving up the hill
towards us on a quad bike with a trailer of hay, her white hair flying