Hill Farm Story

The title of Ruth Janette Ruck’s first book Place of Stones is a translation of Carneddi, the name of the author’s eighty-three acre farm in the wild mountains of Snowdonia. She told us how, on leaving school in an English city at the end of the Second World War, with virtually no capital except the advice of good neighbours, she succeeded in developing a neglected tangle of bracken and rock-strewn pastures into what is one of the most go-ahead as well as one of the most beautiful stock farms in the Welsh highlands. As a book no less than as a farm, Place of Stones brought praise, not only from readers and visitors but, what is far more to the point, from those veteran farming friends and neighbours to who she gratefully dedicated her writing.

Hill Farm Story is the sequel and contains the reply to the two most frequent questions she has been asked. ‘However do you find time for writing?’ and ‘What happened next?’ She tells us of the happiness of her marriage to Paul; of the rewards of authorship; of new friends and old; of further mountain land made good and its local lore. She tells also how she and her husband have, in the face of formidable national competition, already begun to make their mark as breeders of the most famous and beautifuul of all animals native to the Principality- the Welsh Mountain Pony.