House in the hills!

Dan-Dan

ognum wrote: »

Interesting, sometimes there is beauty in distant (very distant) industrial buildings !

I think i just posted it as a subliminal yearning for our holidays! when we get to port talbot the kids start getting excited!

AdrianC

ManuelG wrote: »

Have to say as well, if I intended to live in rural Wales permanently, I'd be tempted to learn Welsh regardless.

Even in an area where no - or very little - Welsh is spoken?

Across all of Wales, 82% said in the 2011 census that they could not speak Welsh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_areas_by_percentage_of_Welsh-speakers

Davesnave

ManuelG wrote: »

Do you avoid the view (and smell!) of the steelworks?!?

Edit - no you don't. Google Street view takes you right to the scenic view https://goo.gl/maps/fDHJHfLPUEk

Very pretty at night, and just down the road is Kenfig Nature Reserve and beach, which is sandy and largely empty, so no scary parking charges. Plenty of sailboarding in the bay. Fantastic old oak woodlands and other great places to walk just on the doorstep too.

I've never noticed a smell; certainly nothing to rival the pong around Bridgwater, for example.

I'm not saying I'd live there, but there's plenty worse places.

Dan-Dan

Davesnave wrote: »

Very pretty at night, and just down the road is Kenfig Nature Reserve and beach, which is sandy and largely empty, so no scary parking charges. Plenty of sailboarding in the bay. Fantastic old oak woodlands and other great places to walk just on the doorstep too.

I've never noticed a smell; certainly nothing to rival the pong around Bridgwater, for example.

I'm not saying I'd live there, but there's plenty worse places.

Used to live in highbridge , wouldnt go back

moneyistooshorttomention

ognum wrote: »

A bit of work means, happy to decorate, new floorings, new kitchen, bathroom and maybe knock a wall down here or there.

Does not mean take an old crumbling stone barn and completely rebuild!

Okays - that's established one definition of "bit of work" - but we do need to know what one OP's friend has.

It's an equivalent situation to the way lots of people describe food as "healthy" that isn't at all. My litmus test for whether a cookbook that is describing itself as "healthy" really is is to head straight for recipes for puddings and cakes to see if they have sugar in for instance. If they do - that book goes straight back on the shelves and I keep looking for one that really IS healthy.

Davesnave

AdrianC wrote: »

Even in an area where no - or very little - Welsh is spoken?

Across all of Wales, 82% said in the 2011 census that they could not speak Welsh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_areas_by_percentage_of_Welsh-speakers

That's a broad view. When you live in a village, it matters what language the locals speak, not what they do in the next village or town 10 miles down the road, hence my earlier suggestion.

Remember, the bulk of the population, even in Wales, is urban/semi-urban.

AdrianC

Davesnave wrote: »

That's a broad view.

Yes, it's by county.

When you live in a village, it matters what language the locals speak, not what they do in the next village or town 10 miles down the road, hence my earlier suggestion.

Remember, the bulk of the population, even in Wales, is urban/semi-urban.

Oh, sure. And the bulk of the taffyphone areas are very, very rural. As are the bulk of, well, everywhere in Wales except the south coast and the valleys coming up from there.

My point is that speaking Welsh is going to be of use in a VERY small subset of Wales - and that subset will not be within a country mile of the OP's friend's "three hours from London". Here on the English side of the border, we're not really within that. And we're at LEAST an hour and a bit from the nearest place you'll hear Welsh in normal life.

moneyistooshorttomention

Davesnave wrote: »

To be fair, I didn't say it was.

However, when you move out of the urban areas into the remoter regions, there are places where it is still the language of choice. It's something to be aware of, that's all.

If unsure, I'd recommend parking up outside a local school at kickout time to see what the locals are using. From experience, you might hear nothing but English, Welsh and English, or just Welsh.

Nowadays, everyone in Wales speaks English fluently, so it's whether they can be bothered to act inclusively which matters in Welsh speaking areas.

But then, how someone fares as a resident in the countryside, regardless of location, depends largely on what they're like, not what language they speak.

Not quite sure I'd agree with that.

99.9% of people in Wales speak English fluently - but I understand there are a (very few) people that don't. One youngish man told me recently, for instance, that when he was a teenager he had a friend that hadn't learnt to speak English at all until then (as he had been brought up by grandparents who refused to speak English to him and been at a Welsh school and the friend had had to learn English before they could communicate enough to become friends with each other). But it IS only a very tiny proportion who don't and its safe to work on the basis that everyone understands it I feel.

I don't know about the School Test actually. I regularly walk past a Welsh school in this very "welsh" area and every single one of the children coming out are speaking to each other in English and that's the only language you will ever hear them speaking when there are hordes of them sitting on a bus I'm travelling back home on.

I think a better test is probably to get a local newspaper. That being they have mini-columns from different towns/villages in the vicinity giving details of social events that have happened/will happen. For some places - all the groups have submitted the mini-articles in English. In others - its a mixture. In others (ie very small places) I can see that several groups have submitted details and every single one of them is in Welsh (which I use as bit of a litmus test for "couldn't live there then - as non-Welsh speakers are obviously not wanted at these events".)

Another test is to check how many people do or don't have non-Welsh speaking friends (be those friends English or Welsh) and I feel one way to check that is to count the number of announcements of births/marriages/death/etc in the local paper and see how many are Welsh only. From which - I've come to the conclusion a lot of "locals" here don't have any non-Welsh speaking friends (as they wouldn't be able to understand the announcements).

moneyistooshorttomention

AdrianC wrote: »

Yes, it's by county.


Oh, sure. And the bulk of the taffyphone areas are very, very rural. As are the bulk of, well, everywhere in Wales except the south coast and the valleys coming up from there.

My point is that speaking Welsh is going to be of use in a VERY small subset of Wales - and that subset will not be within a country mile of the OP's friend's "three hours from London". Here on the English side of the border, we're not really within that. And we're at LEAST an hour and a bit from the nearest place you'll hear Welsh in normal life.

Being over in an area of that "VERY small subset" I started learning Welsh originally - but the second reason I gave up learning it was just how many variants of it there are. One of my friends that is still learning it said they had a "local" in for conversation from a place very close at hand and she couldn't understand a word he said - as he was speaking the particular variant of it spoken in his particular village. I think it was 17 variants of it that I found when I counted it out one time...

Hence English is the universally understood language even for Welsh speakers.

ognum

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Okays - that's established one definition of "bit of work" - but we do need to know what one OP's friend has

Hmm money despite your analogy to healthy food I don't understand!