Run for the hills...

Yes, I always run for the hills and I know what hills to run to.

Coming up to the Llyn I glance to my right, Yr Eifl (a mountain, but so much more) towers in front of me, grey and scarred, seeming to reach to the very top of the sky, the sea sparking at its foot; dwarfing the jetty and the smudge that is the village of Trevor.

Trevor is a strange place, a quarrying community once. Dark granite gouged from the mountainside. Hard, tough, granite to be shipped to Liverpool and Manchester to build the buildings of those faraway cities. 

Opened in 1850, closed in 1960, they still sometimes quarry the finest of granites to make curling stones. Polished chunks of the mountain sliding over the Olympic ice of Japan and Italy and Canada – London too.

It’s a Victorian place, a once-working place, a Welsh place. Chapels dotted amidst the grey of terraced cottage on terraced cottage, men speaking in Welsh who never not meet your eye. A place cut off from the rest of the world by the mountain, the sea, and time – and reached by a road that could easily be blocked, just one way in and one way out. An easy place for the booby-trapping of buildings.

If ever the end comes - a man-made plague to turn men into zombies, a virulent virus; killing us all with a slow drowning in our own rotting fluids - then it is here that I might run.

High on the hill stands a fort. Just look at it; a structure from 'Alien'? A Tibetan monastery of a building, a Saracen Castle, a place where Knights Templar might practice their magic in peace, a sanctuary - a refuge for men to run for in times of trouble. A derelict quarry building, built in 1923, the main loading point for the stone that passed on the narrow gauge railway that ran down to the pier and then on out to the sea in the sailing ships.

Vast and impenetrable it stands, a home fit for the giant that sleeps in the mountain, a strong place to hide in times of trouble. With some work and repair you could hole-up here for years; far away from the cannibalism of the cities and the warring tribes of the countryside.

So, when it comes, whatever they are, you know where to make for when the aliens land... but for now I mainly pass it by. Those men - the ones that never not meet your eye - well, just who (or what) could they be?