There seems to be a lot more rain. Probably down to climate change. Flooding. Short wet summers. As a kid you’d get 6 weeks of sunburn in the summer….
In that last storm [February 2020], loads of water came into the house and attacked the chimney and I’d had it newly plastered, and this horrible soot water flooded the house. I’d never seen it like that before.
There’s an old guy at the end of the lake [Brynrefail] and his family keep a line to show the highest floods. The highest line was from 200 years ago, but 7 years ago the flood went a foot over that. They cleared a load of trees at the end of the lake then, I don’t know what they were thinking! then last year, 7 inches higher again. Yeah, so I think flooding is getting much worse. People have been saying to dredge the river and get rid of the trees here [below y Fricsan, Cwm y Glo]. They’re thinking it’d be better to let the water go past as fast as possible. But they did that in Nant Francon years ago, I think the 60s, and straightened the river, and it made the flooding so much worse they put it all back again. All the bends and vegetation. This land here is like a sponge. I am leaving it all to grow back, to do what it wants to do, and you can see how everything is flourishing. Just see how much water sinks in here compared to the other side of the river where it is grazed.
Afon Peris used to have loads of salmon. I used to fish here. But there’s hardly any anymore. I don’t think anyone knows why its happening. Eels are starting to come back though, so that’s a good sign.
Its brilliant you saw an eel the other day. We haven’t seen them for years. But that pool down there, by the bridge and weir bit, we used to call that Eel Pond. That was maybe 25, 30 years ago…
One of the things about coming back into Wales is how green it is when I come back from other places. Down to the amount of water here. I always feel ‘ah, thank god’! Once I came back, and everywhere was yellow and I thought oh no, its changed, what’s happened, and I didn’t get the same relaxing feeling.
This lake [Llyn Padarn] is meant to go all the way up to Y Stablau, to Cwm y Glo, but it doesn’t. You can see photographs of it extending to Cwm y Glo. So that’s just 100 years ago, not thousands of years ago. You can imagine how big a reservoir of water that was, which is there no longer. So therefore the water carries on. Thankfully Llanrug is on a plateau, but if it was a flood plain village, it would have had it, time and time and time again.
People don’t seem to think about where the water is going. They don’t clear the drains. The council - the Park - don’t seem to be consistent. And sometimes they make it worse. The farmer of those fields [the flood plain in Gwastadnant] was forced to clear his drains, he didn’t want to. Then they said not to drain the land! Do they know what they are doing? When the Afon Las hydro was being put in, they didn’t think about what would happen if it rained. But of course, it did! And the river washed all the soil they’d piled up into the lake - killing the fish in the river and in the lake. I could have told them it was going to happen, but they didn’t ask. We have to get better at working with the water.
I can’t believe how much that stoney bank has grown on the river [Afon Peris in Gwastadnant]. Is that because the water is coming down in bigger gushes now? Or is it because there is no protection on the river bank - the trees are almost gone?
Yeah, we have names for lots of the weather in Nant: we call the waterfall in Cwm Glas Bach that goes upwards Shimne Sion, and the wind that comes off Llyn Padarn ‘Half Lake Wind’, when you see it, you know you have to run home because the storm is coming!
There’s lots of things – we had our water supply changed which really pissed me off. It doesn’t taste the same now. It was really amazing, but thanks to the youth hostel who polluted the water supply – I heard it was them – apparently why, but its hearsay. It pissed me off because we were getting fresh mountain water before. Now it comes from Waunfawr, all treated.
It’s all about water. Think from there… start on one of the thick misty wintery days, where water exists in all her forms, a continuum, sky to bedrock.
Our grass area here – I thought of it as a lawn in those days – even thought of playing some kind of cricket on it. But if you kick a football on it, it lands there and just plops and stays there. the water table underneath it is so high. That’s always been the case.
Oh yes, there’s definitely more water coming down. I sometimes get the old stream opening up through the sitting room [Nant Peris]. Its a constant struggle to keep water out - its coming down the chimney, through the back wall. I’ve had loads of work done but it doesn’t work 100%. It never used to be like this.
I’m conscious of more problems with water rushing down from up there – outside the stream rather than the stream itself, which gets higher and higher. But I think we’ve had more problems recently of water coming down our path rather than staying outside the wall. There’s more and more rain. We need to clear out our streams more I think.
Its not rocket science, to do with flood alleviation, people recognize this, even governments recognize this, that it makes perfect sense to reforest as much as possible. Especially as agriculture as compared to 50 years ago is dying a death. Maybe you have to think differently about agriculture. Farmers are struggling – god knows what’s ahead of us, but that’s another matter.
It feels like there’s been all these hydros put up in the mountains. And no-one asks us. It’s just people who own the land saying yeah go ahead and they get loads of money. I presume that’s how it happens. I’m just not sure about that.
I always thought it would be good to get hydro schemes here that were community owned. It makes no sense to have all this water, and the community not to benefit. I mentioned it years ago, before any of these schemes were developed. But we couldn’t find anyone interested. Now it’s all gone to private developers and I guess the farmers have got something out of it too. But mostly the money is going out of the valley isn’t it? Dyffryn Ogwen are doing it differently - lots of interesting things being set up by Partneriaeth Ogwen. Well, Llanberis there’s a community owned one isn’t there?
Hydro electric stations. The little ones that suddenly appeared a few years ago. Suddenly people were digging up the hillsides and getting pipes and things up. Yeah that was a bit – people were saying it a very good thing to do, and they would make money from it – but somehow it passed us by in the sense that everyone as saying you’ve got a slope there aren’t you going to do one? Obviously it was a big moment for people to invest, but it seems to have settled. At the time it seemed very disruptive. I can see obviously the purpose of it, and it’s a good purpose.
The upland farmers have often been asked to drain their lands, using ditches. Same with forestry, after the first World War there was lots of ditch digging to drain the soil enough to be able to grow trees. I had a friend who was a forestry manager, who said that most of their concerns when putting in infrastructure for forestry is about water. Its about reversing the strategy of draining, and more now about holding back the water, letting it stay in the land. One of the permaculture tricks is to use swales, just digging a channel in line with the contour so you don’t see the water off, but slow it down, send it over to a holding area - a pond or a spongey area.
The summer before last the well dried up for the first time. Not for long, it soon filled up again. No matter how much water there is around it never floods. It never freezes! You can see why it had magic connotations. It’s a spring coming up.
A single mature oak tree can give you and I enough oxygen to live on for one year. I was gobsmacked with that. It also absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide and 5200 litres of water a day. So if you have a whole copse or section of forest there somewhere in the valley, then it drinks millions of gallons of water a day. All that water it doesn’t get down into the watercourses and into the river, down the valley. It slows the movement and keeps the quality of the soil too. A lot of the problem with rivers overflowing is that they are silting up because there is nothing up stream to stop the rain washing the soil away and into the rivers.
In Deiniolen someone did an experiment, putting poles in a straight line on the slope there and left it for 20 years to see if it was still in a straight line. It was all crooked, where the soil creep was going down hill and that all ends up in the water course and the river.