The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise. Antony Woodward
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weather hammering the windows. It seemed a straightforward enough fantasy, yet finding it had proved anything but. Scotland, Snowdonia and the Lakes were too far. The Dales and High Peak were too expensive. Exmoor wasn’t wild enough. Dartmoor wasn’t mountainous enough.
And thus my late twenties passed into my thirties, with me no nearer, mentally or financially, to finding my rural hideaway. So, my forties on the horizon, I compromised. I bought an ancient Land Rover and parked it in the street as a daily reminder that one day that’s where I was going.
Then I met Vez, who also worked in London, and thoughts of escape to remote rural hideaways seemed less urgent.
Until, out of the blue, my friend Mary called. She’d heard of a place in the Black Mountains, likely to be cheap, but we’d have to move fast. I’d not even heard of the Black Mountains, but spring was in the air and it felt like an adventure. So Vez and I dropped everything, called in sick to our respective offices, and next day drove down the M4 to Wales.
We met our mystery guide, Ian, in a pub. From the start a sense of intrigue and skulduggery pervaded the day, enough to make us feel, for once, we were on the inside track. In the pub, Ian spoke in whispers: ‘Keep your voice down, these walls have ears.’ Then he whisked us off in his car along a wide green valley of big fields, before turning up an unsigned lane, the sides of which narrowed and deepened as it began to climb until the car fitted it like a tube train. Up and up we went, the lane kinking and twisting past ancient tree trunks whose vast boles were sawn flush to allow just enough room for a car to squeeze by. Eventually the gradient eased and we emerged, blinking in the light, at a small crossroads. Ahead of us, framed through a gateway, rose a table-topped summit. ‘Sugar Loaf,’ said Ian.
He took a turning marked ‘NO THROUGH ROAD’. A dark mountainscape opened up on our left, completely different to the grassy valley where we’d started. A hairpin bend took us steeply uphill again. The hedges were getting scrappier now, and gateways revealed ever-more-dramatic panoramas of heathery hilltops above sheep-dotted fields. Up and up—my ears popped—until a quarter of a mile later the road ended at a gate between dry-stone walls. An embossed wooden sign read: ‘NO CARS ON THE COMMON. PRIVATE ACCESS ONLY.’ Beyond the gate a rocky track bordered by a stone wall continued upwards, curving tantalisingly out of sight between bracken-covered banks before disappearing into wispy fog. ‘That’s as far as we can go,’ said Ian at that point. There were complications. The house was being sold by Court Order: a bitter divorce. There was no question of actually seeing the place. We wouldn’t understand the niceties, he said, but he’d keep us posted.
And with that, we returned to London. But over the days and weeks that followed, phrases Ian had used kept drifting back. ‘Over a thousand feet’, ‘National Park’, ‘Offa’s Dyke’, ‘red kites’, ‘wild ponies’, ‘spring water’…Each alone was enough to send me into happy reveries. As it turned out, however, it didn’t come to market. ‘Don’t give up,’ said Ian. ‘It’ll happen.’
Our next attempt to see the place coincided with the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001. With the grand obliviousness to rural affairs that only the truly urban can display, we’d booked a B&B, packed walking boots and maps and arrived in the Black Mountains astonished to find every road into the uplands ending in sinister roadblocks plastered with yellow warning notices: ‘FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE. BY ORDER, KEEP OUT.’
The effect of this was to make a place already enticingly elusive positively tantalising. What was this mysterious, out-of-reach farmstead like? By now I could think of little else. Sitting in London traffic, Vez got used to endless conversations prefaced: ‘Just say we got the place in Wales…’ Briefly, it looked as if it might really be coming to market. Ian sent us a small ad in the local paper formally announcing its sale, only to call, a few weeks later, telling us it had again been withdrawn. A third visit, six months later, prompted by a friend’s wedding near Hay-on-Wye, found the Black Mountains open and accessible again. Festooned with binoculars and cameras we walked up Offa’s Dyke footpath, looking forward to glimpsing for the first time the subject of so much discussion, only to find that due to a fold of the hill and some trees still in leaf, almost nothing could be made out except a collection of ramshackle outbuildings and tin barns clustered round a boxy house. Big dry-stone walls reached up the hill behind to claim green fields back from the gorse and bracken. To take too much interest, however, seemed like tempting fate. The place clearly wasn’t coming to market, so after a few minutes, we walked briskly on.
Abandoning hope, we left our names with other agents. But every set of particulars that arrived—for derelict water mills in dank valleys, remote farms beyond the protective cocoon of the National Park, medieval farmhouses way beyond our price range—just seemed to confirm the essential rightness of ‘our place’.
Then, unexpectedly, the day Vez went into hospital to have our first baby, particulars for ‘our place’ arrived. ‘Tair-Ffynnon’, we learnt it was called (formerly ‘Hill Cottage’). It was described as ‘occupying an outstanding rural location in the Brecon Beacons National Park, a good size, three-bedroom, detached, two-storey cottage in need of modernisation and improvement. The property occupies a spectacular position with outstanding views from its isolated location…approached via a stone track across the common…approximately 5 acres of sloping pasture…private water supply from a natural spring…For sale by public auction 3rd October.’ There was a smudgy photograph of the house but, it was pleasingly awful, it conveyed no sense to anyone who didn’t know the place of its remarkable setting.
And so, finally, with our daughter Maya just seven days old, we saw it properly. We drove through the hill gate, bumped up the track, and arrived, officially, to inspect my dream hideaway. Admittedly, to an impartial observer, the place’s appeal might have seemed obscure. The yard was littered with derelict cars and bits of twisted metal, jostling with random lumber heaps, rubble and old tyres. Geese babbled and puttered in the mud. A wall-eyed sheepdog ambushed us as we got out of the car with a series of terrific lunges to the limit of a long chain. The assorted outbuildings all looked on the point of collapse. As for the house, it was hard to say which side was ugliest. It had received a full 1970s makeover, burying all trace of the stone cottage it presumably replaced beneath breezeblock, render, concrete tiles and cavernous, flush-fitted windows. The fields around were so lumpy with anthills they appeared to have a kind of geomorphological acne, and ruckled up like bedclothes on the steep slope. There was a suggestion in the hulks of broken farm machinery that things had grown here, but it was hard to conceive what or when.
But I was not an impartial observer. I was in love. My only concern was that, with so much emotion invested, I might cock up the bidding. Which was why Ian had suggested Mr. Games as our man.
The Montague Harris office was exactly as I imagined an old established auctioneers and valuers (‘offices Brecon and Abergavenny, serving the Usk Valley’) in a rural market town should be. Its sash windows overlooked the cattle market, with (this not being market day) its metal sheds and steel sheep pens empty. A receptionist led us upstairs to Mr. Games’s office where, behind a panelled door, was a wide leather-topped desk, behind which was Mr. Games himself. The floor sagged, perhaps from age, perhaps from the weight of the desk and the hundreds of calf-bound volumes and racing calendars that lined the shelves behind it. Mr. Games, as he rose to greet us, contributed a considerable presence. His complexion was that of the pure-bred countryman, evoking the hills and the hunting field and dispersal sales held in all weathers, balanced and offset by his shoes, polished to a deep-hued patina somewhere between oxblood and mahogany. Those shoes were things of wonder: mighty, double-welted brogues against which the turn-ups of his heavy green tweed suit gently broke. ‘You’re the one wants that bloody place on the mountain.’ He looked me up and down. His eyes narrowed: ‘You don’t look mad. Are you mad?’
His secretary was despatched to fetch a disclaimer form. On it there was a box for the highest bid we were prepared to make. The night before, I’d persuaded Vez that we must be prepared to pay what it cost, to remortgage ourselves for