The ‘Green Desert of Wales’ is an English term first used in the 19th century to describe the area now known as the Cambrian Mountains, that bridges the gap between Snowdonia in the north, and the Brecon Beacons to the south, due to its lack of roads, towns and trees. The area was the subject of a National Park proposal in the 1970s, rejected by a majority of those who lived there at the time - the first in the UK to be declined by local people.
The landscape today is characterised by rolling upland hills, either carpeted with a seemingly endless sea of molinia grass, or deathly silent plantations of non-native conifers. A man made wilderness, prevented from returning to its natural state. Crossed by only three roads over its forty mile length it hosts few visitors, and even fewer residents.
A campaign to protect that landscape has continued since the 1973 National Park rejection, but has as yet failed to achieve any formal recognition. Artificial forestry continues to spread, justified under the guise of carbon offsetting. Wind farms creep over more and more hillltops, while the ways of life that have persisted in the mountains for centuries, gradually give way to ‘the greater good’ as with them, the green desert gradually loses its identity.
"There is absolutely nothing to relieve the monotony of the landscape on this route: no trees to break the skyline, no colourful flowers to carpet the wayside, no birds to charm both ear and eye, just the green and brown of grass and bog."
W.A. Poucher 1962
“Affording us water and trees, and yielding a dim and remote picture, wrapped in purple sunset haze, of some fine country far far down, where a chasm of hills gave egress to the water, it appeared quite an oasis to us travellers of this Desert of Wales.”
Joseph Downes, 1836
