The Long Unwinding Road Marc P. Jones

(Calon, £18.99) HE author, a travel writer, was brought up in Cardiff and family holidays generally involved turning right across the Severn Bridge, but rarely north—his first visit to Snowdonia, aged 11, felt like stepping into a science-fiction landscape. Here, Marc Jones travels across Wales for some 180 miles on the A470 in an amusing attempt to dispel stereotypes about sheep and singing and to rediscover a sense of ‘brotherhood’ about his homeland.

The road takes him through the stoic former mining communities in the Rhondda, including the little village of Cilfynydd where a terrible gas explosion caused the death of 290 men and 123 horses, and he concludes that this part of the principality is being left behind. Then there are the uplifting Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog), where he stays in a Brecon pub that was the birthplace of the 18thcentury actress Sarah Siddons, and on through the upper Wye Valley and the rural county of Powys, where he sees the site of the huge operation that is the Royal Welsh Show. Despite glorious scenery, Mr Jones learns that Welsh farming is the least profitable of the four UK nations and that locals are being outpriced and holiday homes are taking over, turning some places into ghost villages in winter.

Things becomes more distinctly Welsh in the Cambrian Mountains —the national language is heard regularly in shops and pubs— before Dolgellau, gateway to the north, Snowdonia (Eryri) and a whole new atmosphere of myth and mountains, a strong sense of history and, at times, deep bleakness, before the feeling subsides on reaching the Victorian seaside town of Llandudno. The result of these perorations is thoroughly readable; the author admits that he didn’t discover the country of his ‘loose imaginings’, but he did find his pride in it.

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