The temperature was very low - minus 8 according to one pundit I met in the closed off corrie that is Cwmdare. The sun was shining, low but brightly over the ridge that leads to Maerdy in the Rhondda Fach, and the snow was at its glistening best, hard and crunchy to the foot-fall. So crunchy in fact that everyone who had ventured out commented on it and you could hear people walk at a distance of 100 yards. All right, metres.

The snow, although not deep, has made an impression this past week. On Friday night, on a visit to Tesco to get Dylan's biscuits, it started snowing and the flakes were the biggest I have ever known. They were the size of side plates in a table setting. Quite magnificent, but not good quality, for they were very damp.However, the low temperatures meant they froze quickly on the roads and caused mayhem.

Snow for me, feeds the memory with the ghosts of snow storms past. I'm sure I remember the heavy fall of 1947, when I was only four. I could walk over my Mamgu's garden gate. No bother at all and one night there were strange lights in the sky. The aurora borealis over Brynaman, the Northern Lights dancing over the Derlwyn Arms pub and Danny "Rhiw Ddu"'s farm. No doubt about it, and to see them again remains an ambition of mine. It's a pity really that Joanna Lumley has stolen my thunder, but, no odds, I'll get there one day, be it Norway or Canada.

In 1963 I was in Cardiff Training College. It was a winter so deep and severe that Roath Lake froze for a couple of months. We could walk across it from one campus to another and, on one occasion a short game of rugby was played on it. The lake lay like concrete. I can't recall where the ducks went for solace.

My father clearing our drive in Brynaman, 1963

Up in Cwmdare this week, there was still enough unfrozen water for the Canada geese and other duck varieties to paddle about, leading to one dog walker to comment: "If there is reincarnation I don't want to come back as a duck. Not in weather like this." Mind you, when the Canada geese start their pre-flight squawking and they take off in formation, slowly rising above the lake, what a sight they make. It's beaten only when the squadron comes back in and each duck uses its wings in a full flap brake angle and its legs in cushion landing mode. Even then, not every duck has mastered the art and one or two are all over the place.

Ah, the memory too of gaining Brownie points from my son on a snowy week in 1978. He was only three and was excited by the snow. You couldn't buy plastic sledges then, but I was his hero when I went out to the garage with a chair that was surplus to requirements. I knocked the legs off, screwed some cut planks across the legs for a seat and added thick cord as the uphill towing line. Man oh man, what a cresta run vehicle it proved to be. We had years of snowy service out of it.

Braving the elements on a slope in Landare, Aberdare in the late 1970s

The magic of snow. Apparently, the Inuit have over 40 names for it... or is it more? I'm looking out of the window at it as I write. What a sight it makes. And under this covering our lawn looks just as good as any one else's.

You have to wonder about global warning don't you? At minus 8 in Cwmdare, the only thing hot around here is the argument about global warming.

Roy

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This mountain is not as pretentious as the Black Mountains of Hay on Wye and the Welsh borderlands. Those hills gather together in the plural, but the Black Mountain that stands brooding above Brynaman is content enough to be singular. It is self confident as one.

This area came to mind this week because I'm due to visit Bethlehem to open the village Christmas Fair. This is not Bethlehem, Judea, but Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire, which lies at the foot of the northern slopes of the Black Mountain, just above the magnificent flow of the Towy and its valley, heading downwards to Llandeilo, and upwards to Llandovery.

The mountain has a dominant colour that has a clue in its name, although dark grey would be nearer the mark and, from a distance, that shade is widespread, nature having carried massive boulders and scree on an ancient ice-flow to dump them as soon as Swansea Bay was in view on the far horizon.

This land is border country of another kind, marking the impressive ridge of carboniferous limestone that separates the coal measures of old industrial south Wales from the northern Old Red Sandstone that stretches under the agrarian quilt of fields that towards mid Wales.

It's a funny thing, but fate has always decreed that I be drawn to limestone. I was born on the slopes of the Black Mountain, I had two teaching headships in Pontneddfechan and Llangattock, and I now live to the north of Aberdare, near the quarries of Penderyn and Cefn Coed. They are all on the band of limestone that circles the south Wales coalfield.

The Black Mountain is wild, an open moorland where no trees grow, and when you walk there it exudes a clearly discernable feeling of being at one with the ancients. To the west are three cairns viewing the valley of the Cennen and the dramatic limestone ridge that firmly holds the famed castle. Carreg Cennen is a good name, a strong name.

For me the mountain was a part of life. As a child I played my games there, I swam in Pwll Du Uchaf and Pwll Du Isaf, the Upper and Lower Black Pools.

When the summers were good and reliable they turned up when they were expected, and I hiked to Carreg Lwyd, the grey stone, that formed the peak, carrying my ex-army haversack stuffed with dandelion and burdock pop and condensed milk sandwiches.

In later year I did my courting there and on occasion, when sadness and loss beset the family, I walked the moorland just 'to let it'. Only the mountain saw the weeping and it allowed you your space and time to release that emotion.

Oddly enough, in those days, if a man was seen regularly walking the mountain on his own, it got around the village that he was depressed. I don't know what modern lone day hikers would make of that.

I have also been lost on the mountain. Well, not so much lost, as late, after the annual pilgrimage to Carreg Cennen Castle that was always undertaken by children on Whit Monday. I don't know where the tradition came from, but we all did it, from every village in the Amman Valley. It was our version of going to Mecca.

John Salter, Tecwyn Thomas and I left it late to leave to the castle one year and by the time we got to the ridge of the mountain, the mist and darkness was upon us.

My mother had already reported to the police that we were missing, but the good Lord proved again that he never works a three day week, for he placed a parked car on the Brynaman to Llangadog road, just where the road begins to dip towards the south.

Mind you, it must have been a shock to that courting couple to be quietly sitting there, when suddenly, out of the mist and darkness come three vagabonds desperate for a lift. Just to put the record straight, he did marry her a few months later!

The Black Mountain, my spiritual home and a place of the ancients, stretching down to Gwynfe, Bethlehem and Llyn y Fan Fach, of Lady of the Lake fame. It is a wild, rugged open moorland and the fact that it forms the Carmarthen Vans and the western reaches of the Brecon Beacons is true, but it is a place in its own right: proud, independent and quite unique.

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click Campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.

Dylan does all the things a Collie is supposed to do, he likes us all to be neatly in the same room of an evening,nicely penned in, but he has long legs all right and is pretty fast when he hits the over-drive button. I did think he was a Lurcher, but a knowing doggie person has suggested that he's a throw back to an older Collie breed, so now we boast about that.

Anyway, I don't care if he is a mongrel really. I have a lot of time for mongrels. They're loyal and clean around the house. Actually, most of the south Walians are mongrels when you think about it: they came from all over to the iron and the coal during the Industrial Revolution.

Roy Noble with Dylan

Dylan, to his credit, has changed my personal habits. This dedicated couch potato is taken for walkies every morning now and we are regulars 'up the Cwm'. The Cwm is a a dead end valley, or corrie, crowded and pock-marked by coal mines and diggings in the days of industry. Now it is an attractive Country Park sweeping down from the harsh rocky ridge where the peregrine falcons nest, through woodland and walkways,to the lake that takes you towards the village of Cwmdare.

I am now a doggie groupie. I know all the dogs , and their owners, who lay claim to their patch every morning. We all follow a set pattern - well, until a fortnight ago. Something strange happened.

Dylan, as usual, bounded from the car, heading for his favourite bush to do... well, you know, what dogs do. However, he hesitated, cowered back towards the car and wasn't keen to hit his usual trail. I thought he was just going through a funny phase, until, over a period of days we came across several owners whose dogs had reacted in the same way. This lasted for over a week.

So, what scent had the canines picked up? Was it a wild animal, or was it something else, deeper, older and not discernible to the human instinct? After all, up in the furthest curve of the Cwm there is an ancient grove of alder trees, near the pathway stone that has on it a roughly hewn Celtic drawing.

If you enter the grove of trees, minding the mud as you go, you'll find it serene, quiet and contemplative, even in the gentle breezes that caress the branches. It was there, it is said you see, that the ancient Druids met. Maybe, just maybe, a gust had brought the old days back, fleetingly... and Dylan and the pack had picked the ancient scents. Who knows?

Roy

Roy Noble is bringing his famous storytelling skills to a computer near you as part of the BBC First Click campaign - aimed at encouraging people to take their first steps to getting online. If you know somebody who needs help to get online, call the free BBC First Click advice line on 08000 150950.