There's Lovely

Wales will always feel like home although perhaps it's blasphemy for me, being Saesneg, to say so. Coming back, even to a new part of the country, feels cosy and familiar. I lived in Wales for twelve years and still want to belong to it, if that is at all possible for an Englishman.

The relationship between the English and Welsh is a close one, still sore in places. We've been exploring some of the monuments to our joint history here in North Wales: the castles built by Edward I at the end of the 13th century. This was when Wales was subdued by the powerful English crown. By building massive castles like Harlech and Caernarfon, Edward followed up his military victories with psychologically crippling blows. These fortresses are massive, beautifully designed and brutally imposing. Today, of course, they serve the Welsh, boosting trade and tourism; nobody thinks of them as English castles anymore...

And outside of the towns, the mountains rise up, covered in grass and sheep, mottled and dappled by the shadows of the broken clouds that scud across the sky and obscure the peaks. Up and down the steep-sided valleys run tiny green steam trains on their narrow rails, belching yellow smoke into the clouds, their carriages full of waving passengers. The hills that aren't green are black, piled with broken slate from which burst blooms of purple rhododendron. And through all this twists the road, rising and falling and turning.

There's water everywhere. It rains, of course, but it also bubbles up, trickles down the mountainside and collects into streams that rush and gurgle over edges, bursting down in falls and cataracts. It drips inside the mines, sliding over the smooth rock in the darkness into the black stillness of an underground lake. Meanwhile the sea sparkles in the sunshine, rushing and moving, breaking against the cliffs and the cries of the gulls.

It's magical place; a great big country folded up into a smaller area. And this corner feels concentrated, more intensely Welsh than the rest, almost a caricature.

It's easy to leave, knowing we will always return.