"My last two visits to Bettws in 1954 and 1981 were fleeting, a few hours each. My return in June this year was not as long as I should have liked but in three days I saw much more, met some lovely people and left with treasured memories and a mystery to be solved.

The main reason for my trip was to attend the Gregynog Music Festival and in particular a concert which would feature the music of my father's dance band The Venetians which existed from 1928 - 1936. After the concert had been first announced I managed to trace many descendants/relatives of the Venetians and with their help I wrote a book of the history of the band. Alas the concert was cancelled (through no fault of the Festival organisers) but a Friday afternoon reminiscence session proved a great success.

It was chaired by Dr Rhian Davies, Artistic Director of the Festival, and attended by many of those same descendants/relatives including two ladies in their nineties, Mrs Alma Kelly and Mrs Doris Tanner. Doris actually played in the band on piano from 1933 - 1936 and is the mother of Gaynor Sadler the renowned musician and composer who brought her to the event.

My youngest brother Ivor (who was born in Bettws) was also present in addition to our nephew Clive Price. Clive, grandson of Herbert Hodgson, entertained the audience by singing and playing one of Herbert's banjos which he played in the band all those years ago.

On Saturday morning David Vickers the Controller of the Greynog Press gave an illuminating address on its history and said things about my father's printing skills which brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes. Afterwards we handled some of the books which my Dad printed and walked around the printing shop where he produced them.

It was my first visit to Gregynog and I and my brother Ivor will never forget it. I was accompanied by my three daughters and their husbands and Ivor by his wife Kathy who were all equally enthralled by the magnificence of the place and the story of the Press.

We stayed at Bettws Hall where I could feel the spirits of the Jones family who farmed it in my young days. The house is much the same and the depression where the duck pond lay can still be seen but the pig pens, the hay loft, the cow shed and the horse stable are gone as is the farmyard stench which pervaded the whole place. Comfortable shooting lodges now stand where barns, stables, lofts and pens stood in crooked testimony to the farmer's labour.

I walked my daughters around the village, through the churchyard, looked at the gravestones, why, there's Dai Jones's grave, see it says The Smithy, stood outside the building which had been the village school until 1897 when the new one was built and which was used as a Sunday school when I was there, that was where Brian Williams swung a scythe round and the point dug into my foreleg, walked down through the gate by the Church Cottage where Mrs Powell the school headmistress lived, down the steps, saw a man and his wife, he said his name was Steve and if we wanted to go in the church he had the key but we didn't have the time, I said that the path down to the village street used to be called The Shut and he laughingly told me it was still called that, my daughters wanted to know why it was called The Shut, Steve didn't know and neither did I, short for 'short cut perhaps'.

> I ventured, up the village street to the Top Shop only it isn't a shop anymore, showed them where a bungalow now stands on what used to be the Mill Pond, tried to describe how the water from the Mill Pond motivated the giant millwheel which stood alongside the mill but gave up on my explanation, how can anyone envisage what is in my memory when all they can see is a modern house where the mill stood and a pretty garden where the mill wheel whooshed, creaked and cranked.

The chapel impressed them and I told them of my mother's decision in our early days in Bettws to go to both Church and Chapel so that she wouldn't offend anyone, pointed out the Chapel House at the rear where the Bowens lived (their daughter Florrie was a teacher at the school), then next down the road, a nice bungalow which stands where stood the house in which my friend Vernon Richards was brought up right opposite the end of Mill Street (which is now closed off) and opposite the concrete bin next to the Mill wheel which contained cow and pig manure (!), showed them the house which was the Andrew's shop and post office, and where Arthur Hind's cobbler's shop beyond it and the shed which housed the Andrew's Ford 8 car both stood.

The Village Green (they scoffed!) which was never a Green even in my day, took them across the footbridge at the back of the Green which I'd never seen before and tried to explain to them the tree trunk laid across the Bechan Brook at that point with palings hanging down under it to prevent cattle and sheep wandering down the brook and which we used to play on (actually I think it was a weir but I cannot be certain of its purpose) and the view up the Brook hidden, overhung with branches and full up with leaves, stood gazing at the rear of the school with a lump in my throat and vague pictures in my mind of a small infants classroom and Dolly Andrews, and a large classroom where the rest of the kids were taught, split up into three or two (?) classes side by side>

Suddenly I realised there was something missing, the old earth closets are gone, look to the right I said this field is where we had our sports days only the Bechan Brook was clear as crystal and stretched to the horizon, didn't I once see otters in it?

Oh! What's that? there are houses on the horizon now, back across the Village Green, pointed to the house called The Square with the flood wall in front (or back?) of it (told my girls I've got a photo of me as a baby being held up on top of that wall with my brother Bert and sister Lily sitting astride it) and that was our half which was called Glynawel, then pointed to the building opposite which was a pub, The Talbot, which had a large picture of a hound high on its end wall and a purple-painted corrugated iron screen wall on the roadside on its left hiding the pub urinals, showed them the trickle of water running past the flood wall outside our old house which was directly in line with the Mill Stream and the Mill wheel and it ran past the Talbot and under the urinals (!), pointed up Mill Street to where the Mill had been and said that either side of the Mill and the Wheel there were pens housing cows, pigs and horses and extreme right a garage all owned by the Davies family, then took them past the terraced cottages lining the main street, Mill House (Davies the mill owner, you can still see the remains of a rusted petrol pump in the front garden)).

The Old Post Office (Evans stonemasons) and Griffiths (tailor), then past the entrance to The Shut and a large building housing The Malt House (Ernest Davies the Millers son) Ted Williams' wheelwright's shop and his pub the New Inn next door and Bridge End where the Evans family lived (Mrs Evans used to walk the five miles each way to Newtown to save a few coppers from the prices in Andrew's shop), opposite the New Inn.

I remember there had been a two-storey building belonging to the pub with stabling on the ground floor and a meeting room above and next to it at the foot of the bridge the pub urinals, stood on the bridge and told how we kids would count the number of fish paste jars we could see in the shallow water below and that Hartland Lewis had told me recently that Hywel Jones who ran the motor bike and push bike shop would ride his bike back and forth across the parapet of the bridge (!)

Alas Hywel's little corrugated iron shop is no longer there at the edge of what was the school field but as you cross the bridge you can see modern houses and a community centre which I'm told (and I quite believe) is a great improvement on the cold and drafty old village hall, so back over the bridge, turn right and past the corner where the public grindstone stood and on beyond the old smithy and memories of blacksmith Dai Jones who of course is looking down on the scene from his carefully chosen spot in the churchyard above, now we're back at the lych gate and Bettws Hall and we haven't got time to go up to the Vicarage to see if the monkey puzzle tree and croquet lawn are still there or past the cottage where the Parry's lived to see if the pear tree still stands which my elder brother and his friends 'scrumped' from and when Mrs Parry caught them she said "You can have as many as you like, you only have to ask........" but as my brother used to say "they taste much better when they're scrumped......"

Each evening we ate good pub food in the New Inn and got to know landlord Merv and his wife Alison who, would you believe, hail from Littlehampton just down the road from where I'm writing this. We also met innumerable local people among them Hartland Lewis and his wife Megan and Geoff Davies whose bungalow now sits where the old village hall stood, who extended the hand of friendship and made us feel very welcome. One lady, Morfydd Davies, presented me with a copy of a school photograph from 1933 in which my elder sister, one of my younger brothers and I are shown. My family and I want to go back and I'm sure we will.

Ah yes, the mystery I came back with. I spent an exciting and utterly nostalgic couple of hours with the present owners Tim and Rachel Roberts going all over the building in which my family and the Hind family next door lived. It was of course two houses then but Tim wanted to know exactly where every partition, passage, door and staircase stood.

The house dates from the1640s and was built as a wheelwright's house but why was it called The Square? That is the mystery which they are determined to solve and to which I have pledged my support, albeit at long distance. If anybody reading this has any ideas please get in touch........!

It stands end on to the road, the main village street, but Tim has found evidence of a buttery and larder on the end wall which would have projected into the main street and evidence also of the remains of an old road running past the front of the house which would have been a continuation of Mill Street. At the end of that old road stands a wooden building to one side of and behind the house and overlooking the Bechen Brook.

When he asked me if I remembered what that building had been called when I lived there over seventy years ago instinctively I replied 'The Boathouse' without ever remembering seeing a boat or knowing why I said it. Obviously Bettws owes its geographical position to being a spot where the Bechen Brook could be forded but did it ever have a boat ford? Tim took me into his front garden and showed me a brick building with a pitched roof, windows, a tiled floor, fireplace and a number of large hooks suspended from the ceiling. He asked me if I remembered it and I had to admit that I couldn't but we both thought it was possible evidence of trade or commerce, butchery perhaps of domestic animals and/or game. "

Article written by Bernard Hodgson