Remembering Moel Famau

I so looked forward to the moment my pink and purple welly boots reached the top of the hill. This was back when the top of my head reached the top of my Nanna’s tiny Welsh slate fireplace. It was the only place in the whole world where we; my brother and I, were allowed to swear. We didn’t just curse though, with grinning faces, we screamed until our throats were sore from vibration. Our big profanities, sourced from tiny lungs seemed to ricochet off the valleys around us. It felt like the sheep in the dry-stone walled fields around the path disapproved, judging my father for his bad parenting choice. The lambs wobbling around the ewes would certainly never be allowed to do the same.

We climbed Moel Famau in all four seasons, every time we visited our Dad in North Wales. Spring was special though. The pine forests on the bottom of the path gave us our first experiences of that wild garlic smell resonant with any forest walk at that time of year. It also taught us about Blue Bell blankets on the forest floor and spotting birds of prey as we climbed. Dad did his best to name them as we demanded it of him, but later told us that these were usually badly guessed improvisations.

At the top of Moel Famau is Jubilee Tower. According to the information plaque that we read loudly and slowly, with a finger pointed carefully at each word, the obelisk was built in the 1800s for ‘King George III’ or ‘Mad King George’ as Dad told us. It looked like a fortress to us, sometimes it looked like an alien spacecraft and once it was a pirate ship. Either way, once we had reached the top of the trail and we had finished our swearing ritual, we gulped mouthfuls of cold water from tin flasks as we planned our adventures. We sat on the walls while Dad pointed out where Snowdonia was. On a clear day, you could see it, but it was rare and sometimes we didn’t understand where Dad was pointing. We were more excited to see where our grandmother’s house was.

When we were older we carried on the tradition of visiting the mound. As those forbidden words became less clandestine when they ashamedly entered our vocabulary, we replaced the tradition with bilberry picking in late summer, tobogganing in the winter and solace seeking in adulthood. We had moved from Wales to Cornwall and then to Ireland, so didn’t necessarily have a childhood home. What we did have was the heather, the snowdrops, the bracken and the gorse.

Image by @J_Percie