Episode 1 Welsh Heartland: The Llŷn Peninsula

Jutting majestically into the Irish Sea,

on the tip of the north-west Wales coast, Pen Llyn, the Llyn Peninsula.

Attracting thousands of visitors every year, families have

been coming for generations to enjoy its unspoilt landscape.

-How long do you think we've been coming here now?

-40 years?

40 years, something like that, yeah.

But there's also another Llyn not all the visitors get to know.

A stronghold of Welsh culture and language...

They ask you, "Do you speak it every day?" and I think,

"This is our language, this is what we speak.

"This is who we are," you know.

..where old traditions are still part of life.

Welsh is the Welsh bit of Wales there ever has been.

In this series,

we follow the lives of the people who call Pen Llyn home

and reveal what it means to try

and guard the Welsh way of life through the changing seasons.

Can they try and make a living

AND safeguard the culture in one of Wales' truly Welsh heartlands?

It's spring on Llyn.

The first trickle of tourists are already here to

enjoy its stunning scenery.

You've got the mountains, the sea, the countryside.

With the sun rising in the east and then it comes down in the west,

it's just sunny all the time.

But for some of the locals it's not all about the view.

It's time to start rolling their sleeves up.

For many on Llyn,

spring is a sure sign that tourist season is about to begin.

And on Nefyn Beach on Llyn's north coast,

the pre-season prep is just getting started.

Every year,

Chris Dobson gets the Nefyn beach huts ready for the summer,

but this year, his son, Tom, is lending a hand.

I am the boss. I tell him what to do.

He's useless sometimes.

He forgets tools at home.

Screwdriver.

I lost my Phillips screwdriver.

They've got 42 beach huts to put up before the beginning of May.

You've got, like, blocks underneath them for Easter.

Then some want them for the first bank holiday in May.

Then you've got another block who want them

for the second bank holiday at the end of May.

Then everybody needs some for the last week in July

and the first two weeks in August.

That's it, then.

They all disappear end of September and I start taking them down...

..and store them again till next year.

Yeah?

HE LAUGHS

And it's the magic of Llyn's scenery that draws people here

time after time..

'Look around you. Look where we are today.'

Nice, sunny weather on the beach. Fantastic.

Lovely views.

That's that one done for another five months.

Three down, only 39 to go.

I think it would be really useful to have one of those beach huts.

What do you reckon your choice of colour would be? Go on...

-Oh, I'd have to... The blue one.

-..to be by the seaside.

-Coastal blue.

-Yeah. Pastel blue and white, defo.

Opening its doors for the tourist season,

in the little harbour of Porthdinllaen two miles up the coast

is the Ty Coch pub,

recently voted by its visitors the third best beach bar in the world.

You heading down now, then?

Landlord Stuart Webley is getting to grips with

one of the toughest challenges of the job.

HE LAUGHS

Oh, dear.

We get a fair bit of sand in here.

It's probably one of the most used tools of the trade

to be honest with you..

Right, here we go.

One of the best views in the world bar none.

Nothing compares to this in the slightest.

Home is where the heart is, right?

Stuart arrived in Llyn from Gloucestershire

as a six-week-old baby and has lived in Ty Coch ever since.

I am from Pen Llyn through and through,

without a shadow of a doubt and it is different to being Welsh.

It's the last corner of Wales, isn't it, really? The last bastion.

-Morning.

-Morning. How you doing?

-Very well. You all right, guys?

-Lovely day.

-Beautiful.

Living and working at Ty Coch, Stuart has got to know Llyn

all year round and so the importance of the tourist trade.

There's definitely two sides to the coin.

Half the year there's no-one here and it is quiet, it is wet

and it is windy.

The other half of the year everybody's here and there's...

It is a balance but it's a strange balance. It's feast and then famine.

All it takes is a couple of wet summers

and it could all be a different story, you know.

You have to start cutting your staff back and that,

and that's the biggest harm to the place, I think, not letting

the kids work just because you haven't got the work for them.

So...

Peninsula changes with a bad summer.

It doesn't take much to get everyone down.

It takes a lot to get everyone back up and happy again, so...yeah.

It gets me by.

Keeps me...

Depends how much I've had to drink usually(!)

And it's not the best Welsh in the world.

I find it hard speaking Welsh to people who speak really good Welsh

cos they just look at me like I've fallen off a spaceship or something.

It's integral to the place.

It wouldn't be the Llyn Peninsula without the language.

Llyn is still a Welsh language heartland...

-So did you ever learn any Welsh at all?

-Yes.

-Oh, you did?

Go on, say something for me.

-Um, bore da.

-Oh, really?

I don't know what it means. I hope it's nothing rude.

It could be a Welsh swear word.

..and many of its visitors come here to find that corner of Welsh Wales.

With 72% of the population speaking the language, Welsh still

manages to be the language of the home for most of its locals.

It amazes me that people who come here on their holidays,

you know, they ask you, "Do you speak it every day?"

and I think, "This is our language.

"This is what we speak. This is who we are, you know."

So, I don't know,

there must be something lacking in the education they get.

I think they're not being taught about Britain, are they?

But it's not tourism that brings in the income for Margiad Williams.

She, her husband, Robert, and their sons, Tomos and Dafydd,

run Berthyr Farm in Llangwnadl,

a small hamlet only a mile from the sea on the north coast of Llyn.

Both sons wanted to carry on the family trade, but with only

one farm, the challenge is how to expand for the future.

Trouble is, when you've got two lads that want to farm,

you've got to find some land for them to farm, really.

That's quite a bit expensive in this part of the world.

In Llyn now, it's £10,000 an acre, I think.

Without land, you can't farm so we bought some farmland recently.

We're still paying for that anyway. You know, it's quite an item, yes.

Oh, yes, that seems to be doing OK.

Soon the summer visitors will arrive

and for Margiad it brings its own dilemma.

I'm a bit hesitant because I know really in my heart that the

more visitors come here, the more people like it

and then they stay, they buy houses and then our children then

don't have a chance to buy a house at all because they get too expensive.

So I'd prefer to see other kind of work here really.

Real work instead of just seasonal work.

I'm sure there's a better answer really, long-term, than just turning

the whole of the Llyn Peninsula into a playing ground for visitors.

There are only two roads into Llyn.

The north road hugs the rugged cliffs.

Inland, across eight miles of rolling countryside,

the only other gateway to the Peninsula follows the long

sandy beaches and calm seas of the south coast.

This is the Welsh Riviera.

In a few weeks' time, Llyn will welcome its summer visitors.

And yet, what was crazy was the price of that caravan,

-the holiday home.

-Yeah.

How can people afford to live here?

-It's getting like the Lake District, isn't it?

-Yeah, it's crazy.

And among its visitors are some who can afford to buy their own

slice of summer.

Llyn has recently seen its highest house sale ever at £3 million.

Visitors in many guises have long been coming here.

Thousands of pilgrims across the ages have flocked to this

remote corner of Wales to make what was often a treacherous

crossing to the holy island of Bardsey.

And where there were once pilgrims, there's now tourists

and money to be made.

The gatekeeper to the mystical island in these parts

is Colin Evans.

Colin ferries day-trippers

and holiday-makers for most of the spring and summer

from the little harbour of Porth Meudwy on Llyn's south-westerly tip.

But today he's got a problem.

Doesn't work.

One of Colin's two brand-new engines seems to have blown a fuse.

He designed and built the boat himself

so he's confident he can fix it...

-..but not right now.

-All aboard!

Well, we'll go on one engine. We've got plenty of back up.

We'll go on one engine for this trip and we'll see

if we can fix it over on the island.

Never before, especially with engines with only 50 hours on them.

Ah, well, there we go.

It's a nice day. We'll carry on.

Eh? No, you can't pray. There's no praying involved in engineering.

Colin tries to run as many trips as possible,

at least three a day, with passengers paying £30 a head.

Tourists may have replaced the pilgrims of old,

but it's not necessarily a lucrative job.

It doesn't pay well because...

People think it does, but, of course, anybody can come on a boat

and do the sum and work out how many people are on the boat

and how much each of them are paying.

But nobody can do the sum, except me, how much all this equipment

costs to maintain and run and buy to start with, the finance.

So if your viewers think I'm making money they're wrong, I'm afraid.

Hope so. Usually can.

I'll be disappointed if I can't, let me tell you.

We do have to try and fix everything ourselves.

That's the thing about islands.

If you live on an island, you've got to be a mechanic as well

as a farmer and a fisherman and everything else you've got to be.

And a builder and a vet.

And a doctor.

There's not many people made like that any more.

It's a job to get people to come and live on places like this.

No, not all the year round.

In fact, less and less these days.

Too many small children to live there.

I hope one day we can spend a lot more time there.

My parents still spend a lot of the year there.

Colin's ancestors have lived on Bardsey for over 300 years.

This is the only island nature reserve in Wales with

a permanent population.

Up to 14 people live here all year round, sustained by fishing

and farming the land.

Tourism is not just about income for Colin,

but about helping visitors appreciate and understand.

The island here is where I was... sort of my inheritance.

I've sort of got a duty to maintain it. I feel that duty very keenly.

And, by bringing people here myself, at least

I get to introduce them to the island and make them sympathetic towards it.

If somebody brought them here who wasn't sympathetic to the island

and just thought it was a money-making opportunity,

the people we've got on the island might be different

and they might affect the lives of people who live here.

It's not my island, by any means, but I've sort of got this duty to it all

the same, to try and maintain it and to try and make sure that

people don't abandon it or don't mistreat it in any way.

Unfortunately, I carry that burden with me.

I wish I could get rid of it sometimes and go somewhere else.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's something that I can't do.

I'm stuck here, I think.

An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,

Pen Llyn is surrounded by 70 miles of unspoilt coastline.

This attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year,

hoping to find that slice of peace.

You come here, though, and you've got all the worries

of your world on your shoulders and you just step out here...

-You just forget them, don't you, for two weeks?

-Two weeks of just...

-Or a week. I know.

-Better than an antidepressant.

But, while some relax, for the other side of Llyn, daily life goes on.

For Huw Roberts, making a living here means driving

an eight-hour round trip most days of the week.

It's normally about a 12-hour day, shift.

With a full load, four hours up to Preston

and then three-and-three-quarters back, so it's not too bad.

Today he's taking 500 lambs to be slaughtered.

Along with tourism, agriculture is what brings in the money on Llyn.

The peninsula sells most of its spring lambs to one of the big

supermarkets and this trip is one that helps keep the farmers afloat.

You're talking about 500 lambs. £100 each. Well, you're making some.

Between these two lorries here, we've got about near enough to 1,000 lambs

can be fitted in both of them

and that's going five days a week from Sunday to Thursday.

Maybe sometimes on a Friday.

It's a 300-mile round trip to the slaughter house in Preston

and so Huw is keen to get going as soon as possible,

but some of the lambs have other ideas.

Oh, one's escaped from the tail of it.

Both lambs are reluctantly back in the pen.

It's nearly time to hit the road

but there's one more farm to head to on the way.

Bethynau, 303 there.

So...load up and away

fast as you can.

Staying on Llyn is what counts for many of its young generation

but that can be a challenge.

Last year, 15% of 20 to 34-year-olds left Gwynedd,

but lifelong friends Dafydd and Daryl are trying to make it work.

These two pals grew up together on Pen Llyn

and they've started in business together.

Today, in Porthdinllaen, they're hoping to get

a head start on the other more experienced fishing crews.

Early worm that catches the bird.

No, early bird that catches the worm, isn't it?

HE LAUGHS

Right next door, Pete, his son, Stuart,

and their mate, Maldwyn, are also getting ready.

Whelks today...hopefully.

Porthdinllaen has the largest fishing community in Pen Llyn.

Five of the seven crews have been fishing for the last 30 years,

but novice fishermen Dafydd and Daryl are on their first year

in the business.

Five miles out in open sea,

they're trawling for whatever they can catch.

Good catch means a good day. Bad catch means a bad day.

We never know until we're home. Never know.

It was OK yesterday, so hopefully it will be OK today.

Pot luck.

Over on the Melissa, Pete and his crew are potting for whelks

and they too are hauling in their catch.

There's no market for whelks in Wales, but in South Korea

they're considered a delicacy and so will fetch a good price.

Once the whelks are emptied,

it's time to get the bait ready for the next haul.

We need two boxes of dogfish

and about six boxes of spidercrab a day.

We gets this from Dafydd and Daryl, the new trawler, Steel Venture.

But on the Steel Venture, the first haul isn't as promising as it looks.

Most of this will be going back.

It's undersize...

Most will be bait for Pete's boat.

Unlike the whelks, Dafydd's catch isn't going overseas.

To make his money,

he'll need to sell what he can to local restaurants.

We sell them to private people so we get a higher price for them

at the end of the day.

The markets are so far away. There's no markets in Wales any more.

Milford was the last one, but that's miles away,

so we can't be out fishing and transporting the fish every day.

It's not possible.

But the old hands and new kids on the block look out for each other.

They look after me. Everybody looks out for each other.

Help me out.

Tell me, "Don't do this, don't do that, do this, do that," you know?

Back go the nets.

Whatever the haul, for Dafydd, living on Llyn more than makes up.

Wouldn't do anything else. Can't imagine being anywhere else.

I'd hate to be anywhere else right now.

Making a living on Llyn, whatever the odds, carries on.

Huw Roberts is on his last pick up of the day.

At Berthyr Farm, Margiad and Robert Williams have got

over 300 lambs waiting to go to the slaughterhouse in Preston.

We've got 317, but I think he can't take that much so it's 307.

Prices for lambs vary from day to day.

The more they get on the lorry, the better the pay.

And selling the lambs at Berthyr brings in the money,

so there's no time to be sentimental.

I'm a bit soft-hearted myself.

Yes, it does get to you, but I think these lads and their father,

they're hardened.

At the end of the day, we've got bills to pay. That's life.

-What have you got on?

-27.

-27?

-Yeah.

Margiad has always been very hands-on on the farm,

but she's now making way for the next generation.

It's a young industry here in Llyn. Yes, that is true.

Tomos, the eldest, is 26 now, just had his 26th birthday,

and Dafydd is 22,

and they're coming into farming, so, yes, it looks quite good.

We've got another young generation coming along.

I've been doing that as well but they've taken over now

so I'm back of the queue.

I'll be on the lorry next(!)

SHE LAUGHS

For those who live on Llyn,

its way of life is something they hold close...

Oh, goodness, a jar of jam that I've forgotten about.

..and perhaps Llyn's qualities mean more when you're about to leave.

I think anybody who moves house has to face the fact that they've

acquired a lot of stuff they don't really need.

And out it goes.

High above the hills of the village of Sarn Meyllteyrn,

four miles inland, Sister Theresa Margiad is packing.

After 19 years living as a solitary nun on Llyn, Sister Margaret

is leaving to rejoin her convent in Derby.

Along those years,

Llyn's landscape has offered her the perfect location for meditation.

Some of the locals talking to each other, it was reported to me

one said, "What does she do all the time?"

That's by a long stretch, when, in the eyes of other people,

I would look to be doing nothing.

That eccentric nun living at the top of the hill.

SHE LAUGHS

I wanted to be somewhere that was good for what

I was searching for, which is a place where I could centre my attention

on prayer and meditation and also continue my craft which

I was trained in, which is painting.

And which was... had space around it.

To me, the peninsula, it's as if it's an island

and I get a feeling of being very ancient and yet still alive somehow.

It's inhabited by the creatures and by the people that are working.

They're working people and they're continuing life all the time.

It's a very rich place, I think, Llyn.

The peninsula, it's very rooted in its past

and that gives it strength in the present, I think.

I need to find another box.

I hope there will always be a continuity around it.

Even if I'm moving away from here, I'll take quite a bit of it, I think,

with me in my memories, in my heart and they'll be in my prayers too.

This place, not too many younger people will have to leave it in order

to search for a living and a way to live that's helpful to them,

but it's not in their hands too often, is it?

Breakable things go into good, strong containers like this.

On Llyn, another spring day comes to a close.

You don't get much.

Just try and keep going over the summer.

And on Nefyn Beach, before summer visitors arrive,

there's just one more job to get done.

All done. 42 of them.

Till September now, then start taking them all down.

SISTER MARGARET: I hope that it continues to be able to be

a welcoming place, because I can see a lot of the income

that comes into it is from holiday people.

Visitors who value it so much.

Year after year, the same people come and they love it.

Blessings on Llyn.

But, as a new season beckons, there's a challenge for the future.

How do we sustainably manage tourism without spoiling the very

thing that people want to see?

That's some challenge, isn't it?

Next time, the peninsula prepares to be transformed...

..as summer on Llyn starts to pull in the crowds.

Oh, Mags!

For some, it's a new Welsh way of life...

We didn't have anything like this where we used to live before.

..but, for others, that future is balancing on a knife-edge.

You know, there won't be a Welsh heartland in Llyn

if it's going to continue to be like that.