Curiously enough
He was mowing hay on his Fergie Bach, where the crop was as thin as the hair on his noble dome. An unusually tall and heavy man of the Welsh hills, he pulled up, glad of a chat.
As we sat on the sward, looking south over toasted landscape towards Bannau Sîr Gar and the distant Brecon Beacons, to the whisper below of the little Pysgotwr stream, a high Towy tributary, out came the aluminium stemmed pipe. The air, already fragrant from the mown hay, became scented with custardy tobacco smoke.
"They do tell me, Hughes, that these mountains were once under the sea. What is your opinion?" John's voice was that of a lay-preacher. His was a natural intellect.
I do not recall my reply, but when, hours later, dew began to form, we had certainly visited ancient Egypt, Hansard, Deuteronomy, Twickenham, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Oliver Kite's fly-patterns and much more from the store of curiosity this scholar-shepherd evidently pondered.
The ceremony of pouch and matches punctuated each theory and inquiry of our talk. Someone had once said of him, and kindly, that John sang "like a harmonium" as he spoke. Lovely, South Cardiganshire Welsh.
Mostly I remember his tales of boyhood on the farm while listening to his Calvinist father debating the Creation with "the professors". These were men who over several summers "hammered rocks and took levels" in this, their study area.
They included the eminent Welsh geologists O T Jones and T Neville George, of Aberystwyth and Swansea universities. John had overheard how the relentless movement of the Earth's crust had pushed sea beds thousands of feet into the sky, how there had also been another, different type of uplift of the land surrounding us.
When ice thawed after the great glacial periods, relieved of the weight, the ground up-lifted. Evidence, perhaps, of these stages is among what they found in the rocky beds of rivers in Mid Wales: the nearby Towy, Camddwr and Doethïe. John's father, Dafydd Williams, the deacon, refused to believe a word of it.
After that debate with John, I was set to thinking, and then reading. I became fascinated by theories that the Towy once ran east from Llandovery to join the Usk at Sennybridge, that a Cothi may have flowed north into the Teifi or south through Talley, and at another time, run with a Towy through "the Middleton Hall wind- gap" to join the Gwendraeth; and that a man with a JCB could, in a day, re-divert the Cennen into the Amman/ Loughor basin, given the opportunity — and a jail sentence!
It is intriguing that the Towy has only one major tributary that flows north — the Sawdde. It is obvious, too, when you think about it, that there are "misfit valleys", those where a little brook flows through a valley wide enough for a Towy, or even a Thames.
The work of glaciers in times out of mind is one provable agent gouging these bigger basins, but sometimes they suggest at some stage occupation by a bigger river. The Brân valley from the Sugarloaf down through Cynhordy is such a one.
That occasion was the last time I had the privilege of his company. Not long after arriving home from the pub to his farm late at night, he was murdered by an intruder. Every year, when I can, I walk the Pysgotwr to Bryn Ambor, and fondly remember that summer afternoon on the new-mown hay. Often, I fancy, a whiff of custard in the air.
Lynn Hughes is an author, broadcaster and local historian. He is the volunteer archivist to the Museum of Speed, in Pendine.
First Published in THE Carmarthen Journal 11th May 2010