Stories: Morwenna Owen

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Morwenna Owen has lived every day of her 56 years in Newborough and considers herself lucky to have been “born and bred in this lovely community”, noting she spent “most of my childhood on the beach and in the forest”.

As she explains, those were the days before computers, videos games and mobile phones, so children played outside, and had a lot of freedom; in the exceptionally hot summer of 1976, she ‘literally lived on the beach!” On weekends, her father would take the family to the beach in the van: “As soon as we got to the forest edge, there’d be families walking, children in pushchairs and everyone would get picked up. It was a huge community!”

Morwenna’s father was “a bit of a go-getter; everyone knew him”, and he was called Yogi by his fellow foresters – smarter than the average bear. He was encouraged to go to university, but his mother needed the wages for the family: “Even when he was 75 years old, he still talked about that being the saddest day of his life, along with the day he lost his mother.”

However, her father found that working in the forest was a happy time, working with men of all ages. But it was back-breaking work – planting saplings, opening trenches, irrigation ditches, planting the Marram grass, even in the snow. The men used fires in drums to keep warm, but there were no facilities there. The men would congregate in the village and walk together to the forest “it would take a good hour to an hour and half to walk there, in every weather.”

The forest was a big employer: “everyone we knew worked in the forest in some way. All different ages, all different jobs, and it brought money into the village. There were two chippies, two grocers, two butchers, a proper garage with petrol. I would go to Norman’s shop, with a bag in the bottom of the pram, and get loose carrots, loose potatoes, swedes, cheese cut and put in brown paper, ham the same.”

Eventually, in the early 1970s, the forestry work slowed down, and Morwenna’s father moved on to other work. “But he always had an affinity for Llanddwyn, until the day he died.”
Up until the mid-1980’s, Morwenna’s husband also worked in the forest – thinning out the trees: “chopping down the trees my father had planted!”

As Morwenna notes, the beach has changed dramatically in the past few years [early 2000s], noting the erosion of the dunes caused by recent bad storms. “But if you talk to the older generation in the village, they can remember times when sand would be blowing into the house – that’s something I’ve never encountered, and I think it’s down to the trees and the sand dunes and the Marram grass.”

She met some royal visitors in the forest recently who commented that: “It’s the jewel in the crown, we were never happier than when we lived here.” And, as Morwenna says: “It’s our back garden, and I can’t imagine –  looking at the forest now – not seeing a single tree there.”

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