Valley Time Forgot Emerges from Dark

Mon June 2, 2003 09:47 AM ET

CWM BREFI, Wales (Reuters) - Tucked deep in the Welsh mountains, Cwm Brefi will this week become the last village in Britain to connect to the electricity network.
Until now the 11 households in Cwm Brefi, in a valley dotted with grazing sheep between steep wooded hills, have relied on diesel-powered generators.

"It's always been like this and we had grown to accept it. It will be quite strange," said farmer Eleri Davies, who is looking forward to a mains supply after 18 years in the valley.

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Britain first installed an electricity grid over a century ago.

Cwm Brefi's new power provider, Western Power Distribution, said the village's remoteness and distance from the main network made the cost of installation an obstacle.

Smallholder Julie Hutchings said every resident knew exactly how much power each appliance used.

"You have to get your sums right. We can't have the washing machine and hoover (vacuum cleaner) on at the same time."

The people of Cwm Brefi are now eagerly anticipating using all the forbidden appliances later this week.

Hutchings wants a toaster, her stepfather and mother have bought a breadmaker, and her son Patrick is counting down the days to putting lights on the Christmas tree.

Wow,

What are they going to do with all that quiet?


Bill

...As long as the electricity doesn't cost £1.50 per slice for toast.

Well, I can't even find Cwm Brefi on the map. It's not listed in the index of the standard Ordnance Survey (4 miles per inch) atlas, but then with only 11 houses I guess that's understandable!

P.S. [hushed voice...] Don't give 'em ideas, but they'll be wanting telephones and TV next!


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-06-2003).]

Certainly they wouldn't skimp on anything less than full-blown 230Y/400 for every house! ;-)

Just a small aside, if I may.
How would this place name be pronounced?.
Would the C be spoken as a K or an S?.

A hard 'c' i.e. K.
A 'w' is a hard 'u' as in 'could'.

If you think Cwm Befi is hard to pronounce, you should see some of the other place names in Wales! They're a great source of confusion for English tourists. Here are a few picked out of my UK road atlas:

Cefngorwydd, Pontrhydfendigaid, Gwyddgrug, Llanfair Clydogau, Llanllyfni, Llanynghenedl, Llanymawddwy,
Glyndyfrdwy, Llanssantffraed-Cwmdeuddwr, Betws-y-coed, Ysbyty Ystwyth.

That's enough to make any English spelling checker give up in despair!

The common LLAN- prefix in Welsh is pronounced something like "clan", but you need to make a strong a "huh" sound as you pronounce the hard C.

Makes those Maori names look quite simple, doesn't it?



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-08-2003).]

Paul,
Check this one out,mate!
Longest place name in the world:
(And yes, it is Maori!)



[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 06-14-2003).]

Ah.... I think I've seen a picture of that sign somewhere before.

The longest place name we can manage in Britain is:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch


According to a website on the place it translates as:

Well, they'd have to wouldn't they?
http://www.grossi.co.uk/wales/pnames.htm

Paul,
That Welsh place name must have taken a wee while to type!.
How on earth would you fit that on a map?.
It's a strange language, Welsh, comes from Gaelic, dosen't it?.

Well, actually I cheated by doing a "cut & paste" from the website!

Here's an old railway station sign:


You can see the Gaelic influence in the language, but it's still quite different to Irish or Scotts Gaelic. You can at least see similarities in the latter two, e.g. loch in Scotland vs. lough in Ireland, both meaning lake.

So Paul,
There is Scotts Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, these are quite different strains of Gaelic, or are they just different dialects?

Being the typical English "sassenach" I'm not that knowledgable about Gaelic.

You might like to try here: http://www.ibiblio.org/gaelic/gaelic.html

(Audio files included, so you can hear what it sounds like.)