"'Access is Difficult but Views are Panoramic,' proclaimed the brochure, and so it was. Living in God's Pocket was the Welsh expression for Hafod's idyllic seclusion halfway up a Denbighshire mountainside. It was here amid fields with ancient names like 'Place of the She-Bear' or 'Graves of the Warriors' and near the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey and the castle of Dinas Bran, that June Knox-Mawer set about replanting her roots." "While facing unexpected hazards - a ram in the well, a swarm of bees in the bedroom chimney, an owl delivered by the postman - she knew friendships were to become the key. There was Will who braved the snow at Christmas to carry a freshly plucked turkey up to Hafod on his pitchfork; Megan, an avid collector of local lore, who knew the way to remote haunted barns and long-lost witches' cottatges; her 90-year-old mother, matriarch of the valley, confiding her gossip of chapel scandals and courtship rituals; and the impassioned Dr. Ivor declaiming George Borrow's Wild Wales. And some days there might be a summons from gloriously eccentric Philip Yorke, the last squire of Erddigg, to share a Chinese take-away in the ramshackle servants' hall." "Helpers appeared from nowhere - most notably Idwal of the Red Beard who built 69 steps up the mountainside single-handed, Huw Half-a-Day, and the burly Griff-the-Boots who could fell a tree with the same zest he had for throwing a quarrelsome Englishman into the river."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved