Running for the Hills
Growing Up on My Mother's Sheep Farm in Wales
Prologue
Clouds bowled along the skyline, a procession of billowing white shapes, like the sails of yachts I could not quite see. Not far beyond my window the mountain rose, rearing like a vast wave, hundreds of feet above the house. From my bed I gazed up its great green wall of new bracken, which flexed and rippled as the wind brushed it, at the knotty thorn trees that clung on here and there, and I watched the beetling white bands of the mountain ewes, and the blown black sparks that were ravens playing in the winds along the ridge. In the middle of the towering horizon, which darkened where it adjoined the sky, was a single still shape, like a man standing, looking over us. I had once asked my father, when he came to see us, what it was.
"It's a cairn," he said.
"What's a cairn?"
"It's a pile of stones, put there by walkers."
"Why do they do that?"
"Partly for fun, and partly to say the ... read full excerpt from: Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother's Sheep Farm in Wales ebook
