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Although producing videos on Border Collies began for me in the early 1980s,
my work with the Border Collie breed and with working sheepdogs began more than
a decade before that. In the early 1970s I took a job working on the Black
Mountains in South Wales, sheep country and sheepdog country. Without a good
Border Collie the days would have been long. The wonderful writing of David
Rees have been coloring the pages of the Working Border Collie magazine for
the past few years. David’s country was also the hill country where I learnt
about the wonders of the Border Collie breed.
We’ve landed
After picking up the rental car, exchanging my left side brain for my right
side, so that I could negotiate the British driving habits, then found my way
back to the car rental depot after driving in completely the wrong direction,
and around in circles, for about an hour, I eventually came across the M4 and
my road to Wales and to my first stop in Brecon.
A Detour
Wales is a beautiful country and as I drove down through the hills and
mountains, I wondered how I could ever have left this inspiring landscape
some 29 years earlier. I took a left, off the A40, at Sennybridge and a
drove through the small market village, on through Libanus, and on up onto
the Black Mountains, over looking the Crai Valley and Aberhyddnant, the farm
of my younger days. The road over the mountains to Ystradgynlais was much
busier than when I lived there and the valley itself had changed greatly.
Wealthy, retired English folk had taken over many of the farms, selling their
homes in the Home Counties for great financial gain enabling them to buy a hill
farm in Wales with the proceeds.
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