Artist
The iconic Welsh countryside, so well known and deeply loved, has been shaped over centuries by generation after generation of small family farms, each eking out a living from a challenging yet beautiful landscape. These farms produced more than food; they sustained rural communities, traditions, and a way of life rooted in knowledge passed down through families.
Today, however, those family farms are disappearing at an alarming rate. Land is increasingly being amalgamated into larger holdings, run by fewer and fewer people, while rural economies are hollowed-out and the countryside steadily depopulated.
The farm depicted in this painting lies adjacent to Cardigan Island Farm Park, where the family now makes more income from farming the public than from cows and sheep. Yet this farm could stand for any one of the thousands that have vanished across Wales. Its story mirrors that of our own family farm, where my parents raised my two brothers and me.
Our cows and sheep were sold, the barns converted into desirable houses, and our fields absorbed by a neighbouring farm.
What remains is a landscape that appears unchanged, but beneath the surface a vital part of Welsh heritage is slipping away. The tradition of small family farming, once the backbone of rural Wales, is vanishing.
Was that an echo of our cattle,
Ruminating in the stalls?
Their warm, sweet breath
Wetting the cold, stone walls.
Was that a glimmer of the lamplight
That softly lit the lambing shed?
Touching the fleece of the straining ewe
As I felt in her for feet and head.
Was that a whisper of the tractor
Upon which I learnt to drive?
The one that took us all to start it
But that we loved as if alive.
Was that a presence of my mother
As she came in from milking time?
To get us all dressed and off to school
So that we might not follow her line.
Was that a shadow of us children
Playing amongst the bales?
The last crumbled vertebrae
In the backbone of rural Wales.
And was that the silence of my father
As the auctioneer arrived?
To sell our cows and sheep and home
Another farm not survived.