I ended last week’s piece on the purchase by Tir Natur of land in the Elenydd, the beautiful ‘wilderness’ between Lampeter and Llanwrtyd, by saying that I was waiting for further information on what was planned to have been the second part of that offering.
Well, I’ve since had a response from the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’, but it’s not entirely satisfactory. More on that in part two. But first . . .
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TIR NATUR AND ‘CELTIC RAINFORESTS’
I pointed out last week that the land bought by Tir Natur, is in the Cwm Doethïe-Mynydd Mallaen Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Which means it is already protected, and in the care of Natural Resources Wales (NRW).
That being so, why does it need ‘rewilding’? Well, I have since learnt that this SSSI is one of four sites in Wales already appearing on the Celtic Rainforests (Wales) website. (Maybe someone should tell them that ‘Snowdonia’ is now Eryri.)
So why isn’t the rainforest aspect mentioned on the Tir Natur website?
Of the others, Eryri is of course a National Park; Elan Valley is owned or managed by Dŵr Cymru; and Cwm Einion (aka ‘Artists Valley’) is another SSSI that runs up behind Ffwrnais in north Ceredigion.
Which means that all four sites so far chosen for restoration to their imagined pristine state of ‘Celtic Rainforest’ are under some form of public agency control. So why can’t the bodies involved do the work themselves?
Perhaps I’ve given the game away in the title to this week’s piece. The Celtic Rainforest baloney is just another way for ‘environmentalists’ to grab land, and for big business to make money.
Checking the background of Celtic Rainforests I ran across this advertisement put up by Wildlife Trusts Wales (WTW). This is the name of a body that abolished itself on 31 March 2021. So it has no official registered or regulated standing
Before that date the individual Welsh Trusts had been represented by WTW in dealings with the Englandandwales Wildlife Trusts (WT). Now they belong directly to WT, just like English county Trusts.
Attributable to the almost complete absence of Welsh involvement in ‘Welsh’ wildlife trusts.
Getting back to the Celtic Rainforests, The manager vacancy was filled by Gethin Davies, who also works for Parc Eryri. Which, if nothing else, explains why the project is based at the Park’s HQ in Penrhyndeudraeth.
Anyway, seeing as this land bought by Tir Natur is already a SSSI, and is to be planted with native trees, how much rewilding will actually happen? Or does planting trees count as rewilding?
To finish this section let me introduce one of Celtic Rainforests volunteers, who believes, ” . . . systemic racism is built into the way we view and use land; how it’s parcelled up and managed.”
For someone I can confidently locate on the political left she’s strangely blind to the class dimension to land ownership. Instead, she prefers a more simplistic, black and white interpretation. Literally! White people bad, everybody else good.
This Rainforests volunteer condemns colonialism but seems blind to a ruling group’s middle class, aligned with corporate capital and serving Globalist aims, working against an indigenous ethno-cultural minority.
Are there any depths of idiocy this anti-white bullshit can’t plumb? Perhaps not; for to believe a US academic this week, drinking cows milk makes you a Nazi.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at NYU, criticized The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on January 14. In a blog post, Caplan claimed that whole milk has been used as a symbol by white supremacists.
As you can guess, I’ve had a gutsful of this nonsense. Despite being difficult to take it seriously at times it’s still racism. It must be called out and defeated.
But of course, in this context, it’s another weapon in the anti-farming arsenal.
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RHOS-FARCH, PENNAL
If the name sounds familiar it’s because I wrote about this farm in July last year, in the piece, ‘Farming’ – The Globalist Way!’. So this is by way of an update.
Last July I told you it was suspected that Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust had bought Rhos-farch, a farm of 625 acres overlooking the historic village of Pennal. Here’s how Savills describes the holding.
And here’s a map to help you further. Rhos-farch is coloured in pink.
I can now confirm that Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust (MWT) received £3,000,000 to buy Rhos-farch. Certainly, that’s what’s suggested in the accounts. The clip below says the money came from Aviva via the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts.
Note “restore it to Celtic Rainforest“. This is the reason for the funding.
But that clip above also says that Rhos-farch will be “open to visitors as a MWT nature reserve“. We can almost guarantee that some visitors will get lost, or think the nature reserve extends over neighbouring farms.
Seeing as Savills had priced the property at £3,500,000 I wondered if MWT had received money from anywhere else. So I wrote to the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’, asking if any money had come from that quarter.
The answer was no. But I was sent copies of email correspondence, from last summer, between interested parties. Despite redactions we can assume the ‘Welsh Government’ was a participant, if only because it was holding the copies.
Other participants that can be clearly identified from the emails are Wildlife Trusts Wales (conduit for the Aviva money), and the Celtic Rainforest Creation Manager (Wales). Confirming that even though Rhos-farch is not mentioned on the Rainforests website it is obviously lined up.
The wildlife trust’s purchase is not welcomed by locals. Certainly not by local farmers.
One reason for that is the farms in the area, including Rhos-farch, benefit from a local shoot, a useful addition to their income. Of course, Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust will not allow shooting, and this will impact negatively on other farms.
The issue even got an airing in Nation.Cymru last year, which reported retirees and good-lifers trying to impose their views on locals. The giveaway was the paragraph beginning, “I was upset when moving here that there seemed to be an us and them atmosphere in the village.”
(Of course it never occurs to these buggers to ask how this division arose.)
Thankfully, the answer came later in the piece:
I and all my family are Pennal born and bred, and it winds me up terribly that incomers want to change our way of life and also tell us what we can and can’t do. If all the anti shooting brigades in the village don’t like what we do in the countryside, maybe they should move back to where they came from.
I find it interesting that Nation.Cymru should run this article around the same time as the emails I’ve mentioned were being exchanged. And perhaps as the Rhos-farch sale was being finalised. But N.C is extremely well connected in Corruption Bay.
Though seeing as Rhos-farch is not mentioned on the Celtic Rainforests website, how many other farms, other sites, are being lined up?
One final thought. Rhos-farch was never in Montgomeryshire, or Powys. It was in the old county of Merioneth, now in Gwynedd. So why was it bought by the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust?
Is it because the vendors, one of them a senior ‘Welsh Government’ civil servant, live in the old county of Montgomeryshire?
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CONCLUSION
If it was simply about preserving and perhaps enhancing rainforests, then I’d be fine with that. We could ban felling, clear the rhododendrons and other invasive species, plant more trees – and then leave it to Nature.
Given that the rainforests I know locally are typically dark, dank places, steep slopes and narrow valleys, no good land would be lost and no one would be inconvenienced.
And the website agrees with me.
You are never far from the sound of cascading water, and with the huge boulders and ravines galore, these forests are an ideal place for adventures.
“Adventures“?
That description also tells us these sites are unsuitable for the grazing that is constantly advocated! Though bear in mind that what these areas might have known in the past was not the right kind of grazing.
For that’s how it works when ‘environmental’ arguments are used against Welsh farming. It starts with dreaming up ways to make money, grab land – and then comes the excuse.
Step 1: Think of imaginative ways to achieve the objective.
Step 2: Dream up a ‘problem’ to justify what you’ve decided on.
Deception is the essence of the ‘climate crisis’; responsible for Net Zero impoverishing the West through ruinous electricity bills that drive industry away and make life more difficult for ordinary people.
Feeding off this prime lunacy are associated disorders such as the ‘threat’ from CO2! All too predictably, this is one of the justifications used for the Celtic Rainforests scheme.
It should go without saying that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is to the fore in connecting trees with corporate money-making.
Pushing the same message on the UK level is the Climate Change Committee. Here’s an extract from a CCC report on Wales published less than a year ago.
“Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere“! Life on Earth depends on carbon dioxide. Remove it, and everything – including we humans – dies.
Seeing as we’re talking of rainforests it’s worth remembering that this all started decades ago, in attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, and the rainforests of south east Asia. But more recently, someone realised it could be brought nearer home and used in the Globalist-environmentalist war on farming.
And remember! “Just 4.3% of the entire rainforest landscape is ancient woodland“, says the State of Wales Rainforest Report (page 8). So plenty of room to expand. Plenty more farms to buy.
And who’ll decide what must be ‘restored’? A fair question – because most of Wales qualifies as “Rainforest Zone”.
The map comes from an article in Nation.Cymru in October 2022. It seems to be attributed to Guy Shrubsole, whose name crops up a lot in such discussions. The article even names the Elenydd.
Shrubsole is said to have founded Right to Roam, a gang of self-entitled narcissists who feel they have the right to traipse wherever they damn well please. Among their number we find the ‘racist countryside’ woman we encountered earlier.
In conclusion . . . I often watch Neil Oliver’s monologues on YouTube. Neil’s persona non grata with the Beeb for challenging Covid, climate change, and all the other lies. He rambles a bit, and he’s not always right, but he’s a sincere guy.
Anyway, and as Neil Oliver always says: “It’s never about what they say it’s about“.
How true that is. Bear it in mind.
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© Royston Jones 2026
