The holy goats...

We always look for the wild goats as we drive down the mountain road from Yr Eifl towards Pistyll, the sea suspended between the twins (a pair of hills) in the distance – it’s a breathtaking view. We always look but we’ve never seen any goats, wild, fuming, or furious.

But we always look, hoping - after all they were once seen eating the flowers from the graves in Pistyll churchyard, or so it's claimed.

The wild goats are meant to be descended from a holy herd kept by pilgrims to graze the cliffs back in the time of St. Tudwall. Later the Irish workers who came to work the quarries of Trevor and the lost village of Nant Gwrtheyrn, providing the stone that build Manchester and Liverpool, brought their own black and white stock from Ireland and some escaped and cross-bred. At least that is how the story goes, but we’ve been looking for over ten years without a sign of so much as a single goat hair.

And then on Friday as we turned the final hairpin at the bottom of the mountain and there they were - three long haired, hard horned, Billy Goat Gruffs quietly grazing amidst the bluebells in the setting sun. At last, the fabled wild goats of Yr Eifl!

We weren’t the only ones who stopped to take a picture and soon there were half a dozen cars watching them munching away on the hillside. I asked one of the other goat spotters if she’d ever seen them before and she said that she hadn’t despite living on the Llyn for over forty years! She also told me that spotting the holy goats was guaranteed to bring good luck.

Here's hoping that the holy goats really do bring me some good luck and it's not all Baaaaaa Humbug - I could do with some luck at the moment.