“Beyond Llanrhian the road plunges down to the sea-shore, where a ruined mill still lingers on. In its heyday this mill on the rocks, washed by high tides and drenched by spray in storms, was made famous throughout the Welshspeaking world by the poem Melin Trefin, by Crwys, past archdruid of the Gorsett of Bards.

Twisting away from the narrow, cliff-bound bay, the road climbs up again to the village of Trefin. The sturdy, stone-built, whitewashed houses of the village are grouped round a great square with a natural outcrop of rock.

Trefin is typical of the villages on the south-west coast of Wales – seeming so remote from civilisation, yet keenly alive, and more in touch with the far places of the earth than many an inland town, and with its roots buried in a distant, but not unimportant past. In the days before motors it was so far from the railway that London might have been another planet, yet the villagers were so familiar with distant lands through its sea-going men-folk that the very street names of Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai were as familiar as those of their own village, and many a house could boast fine embroidered silks of far Cathay, or curios from Argentina.”