I am glad that it was Wales and not Ireland. We never went to Ireland, except once when I was an infant in arms. We had no Welsh blood in us and did not like the Harlech villagers much. We had no temptation to learn Welsh or to pretend ourselves Welsh. We knew that country as a quite ungeographical region; any stray sheep-farmers that we met who belonged to the place we resented somehow as intruders on our privacy. Clarissa, Rosaleen and I were once out on the remotest hills and had not seen a soul all day. At last we came to a waterfall and two trout lying on the bank beside it; ten yards away was the fisherman. He was disentangling his line from a thorn-bush and had not seen us. So we crept up quietly to the fish and put a sprig of white bell-heather (which we had found that afternoon) in the mouth of each. We hurried back to cover, and I said: ‘Shall we watch?’ but Clarissa said: ‘No, don’t spoil it.’ So we came home and never spoke of it again even to each other: and never knew the sequel.... If it had been Ireland we would have self-consciously learned Irish and the local legends. Instead we came to know the country more purely, as a place whose history was too old for local legends; when we were up walking there we made our own. We decided who was buried under the Standing Stone and who had lived in the ruined round-hut encampment and in the caves of the valley where the big rowans were. On our visits to Germany I had felt a sense of home in my blood in a natural human way, but on the hills behind Harlech I found a personal harmony independent of history or geography. The first poem I wrote as myself concerned that hill-country. (The first poem I wrote as a Graves was a free translation of a satire by Catullus).