Welsh rain… It descends with the enthusiasm of some one breaking bad news. It comes down in a constant cataract. It blots out sea, sky and mountain. Vast shapes from the beginning of the world that tower to the clouds are as if they had never been. The rain is like a separate element. A man can lose himself in it as if lost in fog. It flies, abetted by its companion the wind, to the left and to the right. It even blows upward over the edge of high places. It runs around corners with the wind. It finds its way up your sleeves and down your neck. It sings a song on the roads as it runs, a miniature stream, to join other rivulets until it forms a little mountain torrent. In the hills it comes rushing through the heather-stems to fall in hundreds of tiny waterfalls – hundreds of Lilliputian Bettws-y-Coeds – over stone walls upon the mountain passes. And a man looks at it in amazement and thinks that Owen Glendower must have been at his tricks again. In such wind and rain was the tent of Henry IV blown down when the English armies were seeking the Welshman. And no wonder the whisper went round that he could control the elements; for rain in Wales can seem directed by some malignant producer, some one bent on drowning the earth and wiping from the mind of man all memory of dry places.
From H. V. Morton, In Search of Wales (1932).
Martin Johnes 