community

It’s much more international as a village than you’d imagine. Although there is a continuity in the village. Many people have had children who have studied and come back. There’s such loyalty.

(February 2020] Well yeah, I think we’d come together in a crisis. Because people here look out for other people. People who have lived here all their lives, like Shirley and Margaret, are always looking out for people who might need something. Very very sensitive to loneliness in others or just keeping an eye on things. It’s partly because they are all distantly related. I was chatting the other day about someone and she said ‘oh yes, they are my second cousin’.

[May 2020] This virus is really making people come together isn’t it? I offered to take shopping round to a friend, leave it on his doorstep, and he said oh its ok, the young couple opposite have already done it. The government weren’t doing anything were they, but people here started sorting things for each other. Not everyone - some people were annoyed that they couldn’t go to the hairdressers! But I think it might kill off the pub. I don’t see how that can survive. And that is at the heart of the community.

i know so many more people now [during the Coronavirus lockdown]. It’s like there’s a hunger for acting collectively isn’t it? So many people volunteered to help each other, and are looking after each other. People are seeing more of their families too aren’t they?

We’ve started going on a walk every day. As a family. We never used to do that! I think lots of people are getting more exercise than they would have before all this hunan ynysu. We see people and we chat over the road or the wall or whatever.

[January 2021] We’re just so lucky living here, I mean we can just go for a walk whenever we want can’t we? Its not like the first lockdown though. People are feeling a bit jaded. They are worn down by it. Even that really lovely little whatsapp group that was started in the first lockdown, with people sharing nice pictures and offering things like plants and collecting shopping, that’s now people griping about dog poo and fireworks. It’s like the community is fragmenting again.

We have opportunities here because buildings are cheaper. Like the chapel being sold - if people are together to make something happen there the benefit of people here, that’d be great.

The pub is going to have new landlords from February. There's mention of extended opening hours plus a small shop/general store within the pub too... great news for Trigolion Nant! It’s been weird seeing it empty all this time.

From the very beginning we’ve had a very strong sense of Nant Peris having a really lively, slightly eccentric community. When we first came here people were very welcoming in the pub, neighbours and so on… they did ask us whether we were church or chapel, even in 2006. But there was never any unwelcome feeling, no sense that if you are not chapel that there was any problem. Maybe because we were slightly different, we had a dutch number plate and things like that.

When we brought my parents to live in the cottage next door, my father had a housewarming, with people from the church, the pub and they were nearly all women. And my father was in his element. Afterwards my sister in law said ‘What an amazing village, what sassy women!’. She was really impressed with nant peris because of the women. It was people like Shirley, Margaret, wendy, iola, gwenda, val. It was such a hilarious evening.

The sense that there was a lot going on in the village we got from the people who sold us our house. They said ‘oh you’ll love this village, its lively, there’s a church, there’s the fiddle festival, and there was the embroidery/patchwork club in the chapel rooms, ffair nant. Just generally a sense there’s a lot going on here even though there is only it’s a tiny community about 200 people, only about 100 are in the actual village. We had a sense we were coming into a community. And just after that the book club started. I was tempted to start it, but I thought it wouldn’t be right as an incomer. I was eager to join, Val started it. It was good that someone who had been here longer started it. I was very happy about that.

I think there’s a generational change that’s going to happen soon. In that – the people who have lived here most of their lives, work at the quarry, talk about the fish in the well, related to loads of people here - they are, and I don’t know how to say this nicely, well they are going to die soon. And when they do, everything will change won’t it. The language, the continuation, the culture.

We just keep looking at all these empty houses [January 2021]: There’s just so many holiday homes and its really obvious now isn’t it, now that no-one is coming to them at all, that they are really fragmenting the village. My kids were born and brought up here - they want to live here but they can’t. We counted it up the other day - there’s only 107 people living here [Nant Peris]. Maybe we should just break in and live in them.

Another house was sold in the Terrace [Nant peris], the owner said they wanted it to go to locals, but that didn’t last long. Its now another bloody holiday home.

When my parents moved in, a few months after us, by then we knew a few people then, and it was a very horrible dark winter’s night, rainy, windy, one of those classic nant peris evenings. We got them in and settling them down and there was ring at the door bell, and little Robert, Iolo’s son, maybe 8 at the time, standing there in the dark, clutching – ‘this is a warm Bara Brith for your parents’. My father was asked one year to switch on the Christmas lights because he was the oldest person in the village. In fact it was his last Christmas, obviously we didn’t know, but he was so honoured, he got a little index card and wrote a little speech down, and one of the things he said was ‘thank you for making me and my family so welcome in this village’. That was really nice – he wasn’t always an easy person but he loved it here. And they really took him to their hearts. He learned a lot here. He found about people and their gifts. He’d led a rather rarified university life, and he met real people for the first time here and found they were clever, and sassy, and when he came to book club he was amazed that people who had never been anywhere near university could read books and talk so intelligently and with such insight. He couldn’t get over it. It was humbling experience and it made him gentle in his old age. They would hang onto his every word, but he would also hang onto their every word.

I was unaware that anyone spoke welsh til I came here. Then I realized I was in a minority. I find it really hard because I feel I’ve been doing this all my life, trying to fit in, and I’m quite shy, and I think I can come across as stand-off-ish and I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. It’s been a really slow process. I don’t really feel I’m embedded in Nant because I don’t really know how to do it. I’m part of a book club that meets in Vaynol every month. It’s all English speaking though.

Coming up against huge systems. I increasingly feel we need to be more local. Things need to get smaller and not bigger. Because the kind of drive of capitalism – which is fundamentally the world we live in – is to get things bigger and bigger. Well, what I like about being up here – like Bangor, there’s lots of independent cafes and things.

It takes a huge group of people who are willing to bash their heads against bureaucratic walls endlessly to make things happen. And in order for that to continue on a community basis needs an awful lot of ambassadors with time, energy, money…

I don’t really want to say. The community is too riven. You don’t know who is related to who. It’s very easy to upset people.

I guess we are all conflicted as individuals living in society between our individual desires and society’s desires. And that’s even highlighted in this new situation we are in – we might want to do something but its to the detriment of society. Or society might want you to do something and its to your personal restrictions.

I immediately knew if you did something in the village everyone would know. You didn’t even have to tell anyone.

That sense that the pub was the centre of good activity. So when we had a bad snowstorm, and a power cut, they had gas in the kitchen, they made soup and took it to people they knew were on their own in their houses. There was a real sense that it was a social responsible centre for the village. So when we heard that Ann and Jim were giving up the pub, that was a moment of real anxiety for me. We were really worried. But then John came and he also has a strong sense of commit,ent to the community and loves it when we have church events there. He’s very supportive, socially conscious. Used to drive Ken Beudy Mawr home after drinking so he was safe. If John said he was moving on we’d feel anxious about that. We want to keep the pub because its really important to the community.

Why do new houses have to be so big? In the 11 new houses in Llanberis - each one 4 bedrooms, there is just one person in each. They cut down a lovely wood to make room for that. It doesn’t seem right.

I really want to know what is happening with Capel Rehoborth. A group has bought it - people who live here - haven’t they? But what’s going on? I think it could be really important, a hub. I know lots of people were worried it would just be bought to make a holiday home or flats or something. I’d like to see it turned into some kind of space which brings people together - a space for creative things, or something that means we don’t have to go elsewhere for things. Something that is respectful of what the Capel was, but bringing it into the present day. For years there were services with just 6 or 7 people…

I think changes in our international relations are going to unavoidably bring more people in from the outside. We are going to feel noticeably less like incomers and more like the gnarly old residents because there are going to be many more wanting to come to this lovely cool, mavarick, slighty off the beaten track, out of the way of globally inflated house and land prices, where there is still enough space to… It’ll follow people coming to visit.

The smallest scale of civic entity in which I have to sit with my neighbours in is too big - not just Brynrefail but Dinorwig, Deiniolen all the way to Rhiwlas. If you click on the voting wards, you can see the extent of the landscape that is the community council. It doesn’t make it easy to come together to work out what to do.

Just trying to build better bonds with people. I do see the community – community resilience is the other thing that will help us survive in the future. There’s this thing that happens – I don’t know if it is just with capitalism – but there’s this thing that people are all inherently bad, they would turn against each other. Even now with the Coronavirus, there’s this panic buying, which is understandable but they are like ‘oh we must have it all, before someone takes it all from us’. Capitalism seems to have sold it to us that it is inevitable. But it isn’t inevitable – communities have always been able to band together and help each other and help each other. And knowledge sharing of that is what hopefully will help us in the face of change.

One of the things that brings us all together in the long valley is social events that are organized by the church but not necessarily for the church – like concerts, events. Today we had a ministry area Sunday lunch after all the services in the morning, at the Gwynedd in Llanberis because it is St David’s day. And at the end we were read a poem about St David, in Welsh, and then his last sermon! It was very very nice, a little celebration of the patron saint.

Its so wonderful about the plans for the new chapel [Nantperis]. I think the pub, the church, the chapel in its new guise, really might be the centre of the village. We’d like to see the church used for things that aren’t just church-related, make it a social space. We’re going to try to get a toilet installed.

There’s so many community things going on – like community gardens, Heblig in Caernarfon, working with volunteers, getting people to engage. sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming. I suppose I wonder if there are so many different local community projects, that community arts projects, community wildlife projects, I wonder how sustainable they are, or whether it is just piecemeal. Maybe there’s always a tension between the organized super structure and the local. I suppose maybe a lot of them are grant funded and just there for a bit – people put a lot of effort into them for a short time and then enthusiasm wanes. How many community gardens set up still look good in 20 years?

It has to start locally. I think quite a lot of people have got a sense of that from the lockdown. My street is quite chatty and friendly and there is an app called Next Door. So we sign up and you are allocated a patch and during lockdown it was going beserk. Someone might say ‘has anyone got any ibuprofen because my partner has COVID and we can’t find any’ and half a dozen people left packets of paracetamol on their doorstep. Or I can’t find a plumber and I’ve got a leak can someone come and help. And neighbours – we had our book club in the front yard, you know, socially distanced, and neighbours just came, they were walking past and they sawy, and said oh that’s a nice idea and came with a glass of wine. So I think lockdown did make people think more about their communities. I was idly wondering how could you tap into it and keep it going. And certainly there was lots of cutting and plant sharing going on. So there’s that but it could be the start of a local energy network, so you buy in solar panels if somebody has the energy to keep it going. But I alway think people who volunteer are few and far between. When I was involved in development trusts, for the civic trust, the most extraordinary development trust had the most extraordinary people leading them. But those people are few and far between. And actually most people are happy to leave it to those social pioneers. But if you could find a way of paying people, just a little bit, for volunteering, keeping something going, I think that would be hugely transformative. People do need an incentive – it doesn’t need to be paying, it might be bartering, or membership of something or access to something.