By the time you read this I’ll be in the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world: a section of the Wye valley in beautiful mid-Wales, where I’ll spend every day paddling in streams and plunging in mill ponds and playing cockie-ollie in the bracken and wandering across the sunlit uplands, drinking in perhaps the finest view God ever created — the one across the Golden Valley towards the Black Mountains, and beyond that to the Brecon Beacons.
By the time you read this I’ll be in the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world: a section of the Wye valley in beautiful mid-Wales, where I’ll spend every day paddling in streams and plunging in mill ponds and playing cockie-ollie in the bracken and wandering across the sunlit uplands, drinking in perhaps the finest view God ever created — the one across the Golden Valley towards the Black Mountains, and beyond that to the Brecon Beacons.
And each time I do so I wonder sadly whether this will be the last time I get to witness such perfection. No, I’m not dying, I don’t think. But the country I love is. Right now, all over Britain, there are people like me thinking similar thoughts about the special, secret place most dear to their hearts. For some, maybe it’s the Northumberland coast; for others, perhaps it’s Fullabrook Down in north Devon or the Vale of Avon Dassett in Northamptonshire. But the menace they fear is exactly the same.
Let me give you just one example of the kind of mini-tragedy being played out every day across Britain. It involves a man named Wyck who lives with his wife in mid-Wales near Machynlleth, not far from the environmental campaigner George Monbiot.
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