Esmé Kirby
Conservationist, founder of the Snowdonia Society and (with her first husband) coowner of that most covetable of assets, a mountain.
‘ THE ENTRANCE TO Dyffryn valley is guarded by two lakes. The left wall of the valley is the long hump of Moel Siabod, and the right wall, higher and more rough, is the Glyders. Across the head of the valley stand Snowdon and her satellites, like maidens hand in hand.’
Turn into the valley at Capel Curig and you’re probably headed for one of those iconic peaks. What you might not know is you’re travelling through an extraordinary story, one that began when Thomas Firbank saw this same view in 1931. The road he drove still twists and turns through the broad, open valley with the waters of Llynnau Mymbyr to the left. Then up to the right you’ll glimpse a clump of trees and a house: this is Dyffryn, the farm Firbank purchased and the setting for his best-selling biography, I Bought a Mountain.
Stop for a walk in this ‘murmuring valley’ and you’ll discover there’s more to this tale than the entertaining hillfarmer and author. Further along the mountainside, almost invisible from the road, two large boulders sit atop a small cliff. They stand over the grave of one of Wales’ most influential conservationists, a woman once married to Firbank, a woman called Esmé. ▶
For sale: Glyder Fach
‘Didn’t you write the book about mountain farming?’
It was a question Thomas was often asked, but the purchase of Dyffryn almost didn’t happen. Blown into the farmhouse kitchen by a November gale, the 21-year old Canadian was greeted by a grizzled Welsh farmer and negotiations began. ‘I could pin him to nothing definite,’ Thomas wrote. ‘He would give no price, nor would he confirm that he wished to sell. At one time, I believe, he even denied ownership.’ When a bewildered Thomas stood to leave, the farmer mellowed and asked the shepherd to show him round the land.
Straight up the hill they went, on terrain so steep Thomas ‘was using my hands as well as my feet’. As they hit the skyline and the upper edge of the farmland, the ‘black conical giantess’ of Tryfan rose out of the vapour to the north-west. Leading west, the ridge carried Dyffryn’s boundary two miles to Glyder Fach – its shattered summit marking the limit of the farm. ‘Whether I knew it or not, I had fallen in love with the place during that wet scramble through the mist... the spell of Dyffryn strengthened over me, until my last resistance went and I became her servant.’
Buying the farm took his life savings of £5000, yet he still yearned to travel: ‘There was so much I wished to see. I wanted to go again into the stillness of the Canadian woods.’ Tragedy intervened. His first farmhand, Caradoc, died of heart failure following a swim in Llynnau Mymbyr. His second – Caradoc’s younger brother, Dai – had a leg amputated after a motorcycle crash. Thomas decided he must stay and learn to run the farm, and soon ‘found that while my eyes had been on the ends of the earth a thousand strange and interesting things were parading unseen by me past Dyffryn door.’
I Bought A Mountain is an honest, eloquent, often funny account of how he learned his craft, and how this outsider earned the trust and friendship of his neighbours. The book is also a primer on sheepfarming, as Thomas guides you through the cycle of the year, from lambing to dipping to shearing to sales. The weather – as anyone who has walked in Snowdonia will know – was a constant challenge. The gatherings of spring and summer, when neighbouring farmers came together to round each other’s flocks off the mountains, were social highs but also an anxious race against mist and rain. Winters could be brutal; in March 1937 they spent
21 days straight digging sheep from drifts of snow.
It was a hard life that brought Thomas a deep intimacy with the mountains: ‘I hammered the staples into the fence-post; took my dogs up the Glyders to the gathering; heaved on the calf’s slippery forelegs at a difficult birth; sliced the quaking marsh with an old hay-knife… toiled in the hay from dawn till the mountain dew came down at night. And I penetrated the indifference of Dyffryn and her hills, till I touched the warm heart.’
And he didn’t work the farm alone. There was John Davies, the shepherd who always called the sheep ‘flamers’; there was John’s son, Thomas; and there was Esmé. He first glimpsed the diminutive actor with the ‘face of an elf’ on a midwinter day in 1934 and they were engaged within a week, sharing a love for adventure, the outdoors and fast cars. She was an indomitable spirit at Dyffryn, often coming up with ‘Ideas’ about how the farm might diversify from sheep. Pigs provided comedy – you try transporting them in the back of a baby Austin – but no long-term success. Thomas’s plan for keeping poultry ended in tragedy after they all contracted fowl paralysis, but a roadside kiosk selling snacks and home-baked goods was a huge success. They abandoned plans for a bigger café though, fearing it would be detrimental to the landscape they adored.
And how they loved it. Thomas’s book is rich with descriptions of Snowdonia: ‘Stretched across the head of the vale, like a hostess reclining on a high couch at a Roman feast, lies the range of Snowdon. Why must we call her Snowdon? Why not the real name, Eryri, the Place of the Eagles? To one side of her peak the precipice of Lliwedd falls… no robe ever hung so gracefully from patrician Roman.’
Thomas and Esmé spent days walking the mountains, many of them in training for the Welsh 3000s – a 24-mile route climbing 14 peaks over 3000 feet. In September 1938, Thomas and two friends shattered the record by two hours to set a new time of 8 hours and 25 minutes. Esmé smashed the old record too and set a new women’s time of 9 hours and 29 minutes – all with a strained leg ligament. The record-breaking walk made the national newspapers.
I Bought A Mountain concludes with Thomas and Esmé extending the farm to 3000 acres as they take on the lease of neighbouring land at Cwmffynnon, a great corrie cradling a lake above Pen-y-Pass. (You can reach it by a little path up behind the youth hostel there – it’s a great option when the paths across the road to Snowdon are packed.) With their farming empire complete, they settled down, seemingly content, as World War II approached. ▶
“Whether I knew it or not, I had fallen in love with the place during that wet scramble through the mist...”
Guardian of Snowdonia
Surprisingly, Thomas’s loving ode to Welsh hillfarming wasn’t written in these mountains; he completed it in the Pyrenees. Shortly before war was declared he left Esmé and set off for the south of France in an old Bentley, later joining the army. They divorced in 1942.
Yet Esmé stayed on at Dyffryn, undaunted even after John and Thomas Davies moved away for more profitable war work. Already skilled, she set about teaching herself everything she needed to run the farm successfully. She even moved into a caravan so she could let the house out, using a pool on the Afon Mymbyr for a bath and a rock for a toothbrush stand. The work and the gatherings continued, where Esmé often fed the hungry shepherds with rice pudding cooked in a dustbin. And in 1949 she got married again – to a Major Edward Lisle ‘Peter’ Kirby who she’d met when he was stationed in Capel Curig, at what is now the National Mountain Centre at Plas y Brenin.
Esmé didn’t care only for Dyffryn though; she cared for the whole of Snowdonia and fought to preserve the landscape we all adore today. The national park was designated in 1951 but by 1967 Esmé was worried by the level of development and formed the Snowdonia Society: ‘Unless we’re careful the whole of Snowdonia will be under bricks and mortar.’ Some campaigns were successful – Rio Tinto Zinc gave up plans to mine in the park; road building at Llyn Peris was blocked; a gondola at the old Clogau gold mine was stopped. Others failed: authorities could not be persuaded to bury the Cwm Dyli pipeline from Llyn Llydaw, and it still scars the view of Snowdon from the Nant Gwynant valley.
As tourism to Snowdonia increased Esmé campaigned for better mapping of footpaths, for funds to maintain them, and worked with other farmers to suggest routes and build stiles. She also created a Low Level Walk from Capel Curig to Peny-Pass, much of it across her own land. This ‘walk for those who do not wish to climb the heights’ was opened in 1996 by her good friend and walking boot designer Chris Brasher, and she wrote a 12-page booklet to guide visitors along the way.
After ructions developed within the society – not everyone appreciated Esmé’s forthright nature – she formed the Esmé Kirby Snowdonia Trust in 1990, whose work ranged from stopping the straightening of the A5 round the Padog Bends to the current red squirrel breeding programme. In fact, Esmé and the trust were responsible for the eradication of grey squirrels on Anglesey, the return of reds to large swathes of North Wales, and even the development of a vaccine for squirrelpox.
Through the decades, her love for these mountains never failed. In 1950 she wrote of the Glyderau for an anthology, Portraits of Mountains: ‘I could walk on some part of them nearly all the year and always find them looking different, never dull, never feeling I knew all there was to know.’ On her 80th birthday, Peter surprised her with a helicopter ride to Castell y Gwynt on Glyder Fach, where a group of friends waited with cake to celebrate.
In the 1980s, advancing years forced Esmé to consider Dyffryn’s future. In 1984 she employed Geraint Roberts as a tenant farmer, and he still works the land today. In one of the few letters which she and Thomas exchanged in the late 1990s, she said
“She cared for the whole of Snowdonia and fought to preserve
the landscape we adore today. ”
that if the farm were put on the market, it ‘would almost certainly be broken up and sold in lots, cottages, houses and parcels of land and I want Dyffryn to continue as a farm as we knew it for the foreseeable future’.
As a conservationist, there was really only one new owner Esmé wanted for Dyffryn: the National Trust.
I walk a mountain
Stories about escaping to the country are ten a penny today, but I Bought a Mountain was one of the genre’s pioneers – a tale that had fascinated me ever since I discovered a dusty copy in a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. I had so many questions. Aside from a brief Wikipedia page, nothing is known of Thomas apart from what he revealed in his books. I’ve not even been able to find a published photograph of him. And what about Esmé? There’s one slim biography – The Guardian of Snowdonia by Teleri Bevan – but few seem to know her name or her work. Was there even anything left of her Low Level Walk?
From the OS map it looked like I might be able to get close to Dyffryn farm – most of the mountainside is open access land – so I set off from Capel Curig to see what I could find. No path was marked, so I was surprised to discover National Trust waymarkers. Simon Rogers, the National Trust’s Cwm Idwal Partnership Officer, explained when I met him later: “It’s a shame that more people don’t know it exists and choose to walk along the busy A4086 instead. The path’s condition means it’s unsuitable for huge numbers of walkers but we’re working hard to restore it.”
It’s a slow process though. All the original bridges over the many streams have rotted and replacing them means bringing in civil engineering contractors. “Each year when we get a pot of money we do one or two,” Simon explained. There are 13 in total so it will take another few years. “We’re going to link all the paths between them and make improvements, but there’s no point doing that until we’ve got the bridges done.”
As I approached Dyffryn, I was thrilled to discover how close the path goes to the farm. Here was the great stone wall that marked the farm’s boundary; there were the sheep pens, and the farmhouse just as Thomas described it: ‘The plain house had character by virtue of its very unpretentiousness. It possessed strength and utility and seemed to say ‘Well! Here I am. Take me or leave me. I’ve no frills but I know my job.’’
But how much of Dyffryn Mymbyr is the same as when Thomas and Esmé lived here? Surprisingly, a lot. Even the sheep you see are direct descendants of those that Thomas bought in 1931, the bloodline only watered down by the occasional introduction of fresh rams. This lineage is important. Much of the mountain farm is unfenced and it’s therefore essential that sheep stick to their own patch of land. A homing instinct is passed from mother to young ewes, moving down the generations in a process known as hefting, or in Welsh farming, cynefin. “Cynefin means quite a lot of different things in Welsh,” explained Simon. “It’s one of these Welsh words that doesn’t have a direct English translation. It means ‘heft’ but it can also mean ‘ecosystem’ and ‘community’.” ▶
Thomas’s other works include
I Bought A Star about his army days; Log Hut about his life on Dartmoor; and A Country of Memorable Honour, a history of Wales told via the landmarks he passes on an epic walk from Llangollen to Newport via Conwy, Aberystwyth and Cardiff.