Retrospective: the past is a foreign country

It was late October and I had begun a journey which would take me away from my home in France for five months. I would travel over 30,000 miles from France to the U.K. and on to S.E.Asia and finally to Andalucia in S.Spain. My new existence was about to begin. Living out of a suitcase, long car journeys and long flights were to become the norm,very different from my life over the past few years in this sleepy little village in 'la France profonde'. It's been a trip that took me to faraway exotic places and back to a past which now seems several lifetimes away.
 In a surprisingly mild late autumn I found myself back in Wales which I left forever at the age of 19 to go off to college.It was there that I first met Jeff who shared all those experiences of the late 1960's with me but who, unlike me, returned to Wales and has lived there ever since.
 Over the intervening years we have stayed in close touch and so it was natural I suppose that I spent the first days of my new existence back in Wales. It gave me the opportunity to revisit 'the land of my fathers' parts of which I had not seen since my childhood and adolescence. Although I have been back to Wales many time since,my experience of it has been limited because of personal obligations.This trip,because I am now free to go where I want, allowed me the chance to return to places I have not seen since my youth.
  Jeff lives in the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan and so we began with a visit to Porthcawl, a small seaside town on the coast of the Bristol Channel with wonderful views across the sea to Somerset and North Devon.I hadn't been to Porthcawl for nearly fifty years. In the 60's Porthcawl and Tenby were the places to spend Bank Holidays for kids exiled to the far west and anxious to experience what our luckier (or so we thought at the time) contemporaries seemed to be enjoying in the more 'happening' resorts of southern England.This was of course, the era of 'the mods and rockers'. I don't think Porthcawl experienced the same kind of thing that occurred in Margate or Brighton. I do remember one holiday weekend however when I was tossed over a hedge into someone's garden by a group of 'valley boy rockers' who were obviously not impressed by the way my friends and I were dressed!
  Jeff drove me to Rest Bay, the site of the Treco Bay caravan park which was once the biggest of its kind in Europe and where I spent a week in August 1965.Seeing it again all these years later,I was struck by how little it has really changed in the intervening years. It looks neater now,the serried rows of dowdy caravans have gone and have been replaced by neat mobile homes each with its own little picket fence around it but it is essentially the same, mass holiday accommodation for the masses.The fifties and sixties were an era when a caravan holiday in Porthcawl marked the highlight of the year for many miners' families from the Rhondda and the other South Wales mining valleys.They were hard, resiliant people used to the toil,danger and sheer drudgery of life in the small mining communities which existed then. A week or two in Porthcawl, at the seaside, must have seemed like heaven to them.
  Standing at the point overlooking the stony beach and the stormy channel,I was instantly transported back to the week I spent there with my parents. As a sixteen year old, I tried to spend as little time as possible with them and hung out instead with a group of boys and girls who were obviously experiencing the same kind of teenage existential angst as I was.
  It's funny how, when viewed across the expanse of time, the past seems a curious place, strangely,yearningly familiar,yet at the same time has few real points of contact with your current existence or your existence over the years since, although you feel yourself to be essentially still that same person. L.P Hartley in his novel 'the Go Between' sums this up most succinctly in the opening line, ' The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.'
  Our next stop took us deeper into the Vale and inn a past even more remote than the 1960s; to Ewenny and Ogmore.

  The Vale is beautiful and has always been highly desirable to invaders.It forms a fertile narrow coastal corridor between the border of Wales and England at the Severn estuary and Camarthenshire and Pembrokeshire further to the west. Behind the Vale, the hills begin and rise towards the more barren mountainous interior ' the desert of Wales'. In the times of the Romans and later, the Normans, the invaders chose to occupy and fortify the lowlands and confine the rebellious Celtic Welsh ( the Cymry,'or band of brothers' as they referred to themselves) to the north in the inaccessible hills and mountains. Forts, castles and roads were built throughout the lowland areas along the coastal strip to secure them and allow ease of access for supplies and men to the more remote military outposts. Ogmore castle built by the Normans to protect an important river ford is a classic example.It straddles the Ogmore river on the vital east-west route from the border and Cardiff to the castles at Swansea and Pembroke. It is remains ruined but imposing and slightly  menacing late on a chilly afternoon in early November.

  On the way back from the castle we stopped at the Dipping Bridge at Merthyr Mawr.The bridge was built in the 15th century and is still in good condition.The holes in the parapets were once used by the local farmers to push their sheep into the river for their annual dip. Apparently, at one end there once stood an inn whose landlord was infamous for robbing and murdering pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St.David in Pembrokeshire.
The day ended with a welcome pint of real ale at the 15th century Prince of Wales Inn at Kenfig. Once the town hall, the inn is quirky and ancient, the sole remaining building of the medieval town of Kenfig which disappeared beneath the sand dunes which form the foreshore west of Porthcawl : but that's another story for another day.