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in the wind. She looked like Boudicca on her chariot. 'I hope you'll
stop for lunch. It's ready now,' she said.
'I'm trying to limit the physical work she does,' Dafydd told me.
'But farming's in her blood and you can't stop her. She's only rolled
the bike four times.'
When she had fed the sheep, Delyth ushered us into her parlour
again and served us cawl made from one of her own small flock of
turkeys, sweetened with swede and carrot, and brown bread, still
warm from the oven. She and Dafydd began to tell me about the his-
tory of their farm and the community.
They explained that the estates started to form in the 1640s. The
people here were not cleared, but had to pay to remain on the land
they were already farming and had long seen as theirs. The first
landlords were members of a Welsh aristocracy  - Prices, Vaughans,
Johneses - families which had supported Owain Glyndwr's uprising.
They helped to keep the culture and language alive. At Hafod Uchtryd,
the great estate which had owned the eastern half of the farm, the
Johneses kept a Welsh printing press in the cellar.
In 1833, the Duke of Newcastle took over the estate. Delyth
explained that attending the Anglican church rather than the Method-
ist chapel was a condition of tenancy: if you disobeyed the rule, you
lost the farm. 'Dafydd's great-grandfather was worshipping and recit-
ing in a language he didn't understand. But his great-grandmother
insisted on going to chapel: she wouldn't speak to her Lord in English.
It terrified her husband: we could have lost everything.
'Our knowledge was not valued,' Delyth went on. 'The story was
that people who stayed on the farms were the dimmest of all - so their
knowledge must be dim as well. No one thought of writing it down.
My father hardly wrote. He had to remember all the sheep figures, the
prices and everything. There's not the same need to use our brains now.'
Dafydd was teaching himself the old Welsh counting system. Based
on multiples of 10, 15 and 20, it was designed by shepherds for count-
ing animals. 'You can juggle the numbers between the fingers of your
two hands, totting the blocks on one, the individuals on the other. It
allows you to count very quickly. In the new numbers, you can't count
fast enough to match the speed that sheep run at. So you have to slow
them down through the gate. From the 1970s onwards, Welsh learners
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