Visit to Bala

Yesterday I went to meet another Country Living blogger. You may remember her blogging as elspeth. She proudly informs me that she did seven blogs and they were sparky and witty and funny as she is.

It was a beautiful drive down along the edge of the Clwydian hills where we live towards Ruthin and then up from Ruthin to Bala, everywhere bursting with green and life. I was carefully following instructions and eventually without getting lost pulled up on a steep hill above Bala lake outside a stone built perhaps Edwardian house, square and strong and impressive.

Katrina was warm and friendly, tall and slim with auburn hair, a firm handshake and a direct gaze. We started talking and didn't stop until I left. Driving away afterwards I wondered at what I had told her: some stuff about the breakdown of my first marriage, some about my illness and recovery. Nothing madly intimate but much much more than I would normally say at first meeting. Someone once told me that I am very easy to get along with but take a long time to get to know and I felt as though we had short circuited about six months. Very strange.

The house is built with its back to the road, saving its gracious front to face out towards the lake. And what a house. Fabulous tiled floors, huge rooms with cornicing and enormous windows, a gentleman's house built to impress and everywhere that extraordinary view, the huge sweep of the lake vividly blue and the mountains rising up behind, piling up and away, misty in the sunlight. The bedrooms are just stunning. I love B and Bs, prefer them to hotels if they are really good, and we have been to all sorts, always using the Alastair Sawday books to find something beautiful and interesting but this was lovelier than any of the marvellous places we have stayed in. The beauty of the inside and the beauty of the outside just made me want to curl up in the window and look and look and never move again.

We had looked at the details for this house on the internet but dismissed Bala as being too far away and the house too big unless you did want to do Bed and Breakfast. That was strange too and the strangest thing of all was the strong sense of what a different answer this was to the question of "What shall we buy in Wales?" Our house is ancient, rural, a Welsh longhouse in origin with its huge slate slabs and oak beams, small, built as protection, tucked into the hillside to withstand the weather and, with its little cluster of barn and bakehouse, pigsties and kitchen garden, offering a little world of its own, self sufficiency when that was the only way to survive. Its view is of the valley it lives in, softer than Bala, again a little world of its own, high and hidden.

Katrina's house is another sort of beautiful altogether, a glorious statement of a house, throwing its arms out wide to its huge and fabulous view, confident and gracious, built with love and pride at a time when to be British was to have won first prize in the lottery of life. It is just stunning, like meeting a very beautiful woman, you just want to keep looking at it. Have a look at it at www.bryniau-golau.fsnet.co.uk but I'm not sure it does it justice. They are updating their website I think.

As I drove away my head was buzzing with connections and coincidences. Now sitting here by the window in the house which is my own answer to the question, looking out across my own valley, I am reassured by the sense that this is where I want to be. But what a fascinating place the world is, what interesting people it has in it and how many beautiful and different ways there are to live.