Dewi Sant

March is not a traditional time to celebrate the end of winter but there has been no direct sunlight here for four months and even today's cold sunlight seems warming and to offer the promise of summer. The sun slipped below the hill at the end of October and everybody in the hamlet knows exactly - to the day - when it will reappear on their house.

It may still be very cold in March, but here winter is over because the light has returned. We were promised March 1st and the first creepings appeared a day or so ago, touching the courtyard wall and stretching warily through the garden. We danced in our ability to cast shadows. And with the light has come the birdsong, even on the grey days.

The long darkness is due to the position of the house, tucked into the hillside of a valley which straddles the Welsh border and gives us a border identity that I like; local towns have two names, an English one and a Welsh one, and in Llandrindod Wells our hamlet was written Cwm Mawr, the big valley, and not the English Coombe Moor that the maps have, the moor for Coombe, a settlement further down the valley. But maps older again have the place as Cwm.

This used to be the Welsh kingdom of Powys, and appropriately we have seen wild daffodils flowering alongside the roads for the last couple of weeks, primroses and crocuses, and the last flowering of the snowdrops. Even the roads busy with heavy lorries have small clumps of snowdrops and daffodils. Winter may not be officially over, but Spring has arrived.