Published: 26 January, 2012

The Brecon Beacons are Wales’s challenge to the might and mystery of the snowcapped Himalayas.

Yes I’ve been there.

To the east are the Malvern Hills, Elgar’s inspiration.

Away to the west are the Black Mountains, an unconquered fortress, brooding unexpected danger and the swirling mists.

The hills unlike those in the Sound of Music may not be aloud with song but they have a compulsive hold over the Welsh.

There is a mightiness as well as a serenity which is a very strong antidote to the ravaged valleys of south Wales.

Nye Bevan the architect of the health service loved walking here.

As a boy he tried to conquer his stammer by going there and shouting out loud.

This is God’s green acre.

This is all that shields old Labour which is now the equivalent of the Tory temple of Tunbridge Wells.

You cock your ear in vain for a dissident voice and in areas where workers once gathered in secret to form unions, Asda is the temple of the present.

The mountains are lofty and aloof and seem to rebuke a nation whose history is still physically visible.

The Romans based at Caerleon built a road which still can be seen across the beacons down to the town of Brecon, a military garrison until the 1970s.

In the 1930s Arthur Eyles, a mountain wrestler and Communist, walked across from Merthyr 30 miles away, marched onto the parade ground and, unperturbed, distributed leaflets inciting the puzzled South Wales Borderers to mutiny and riot.

The sergeant major ejected him three times.

Eventually bored by Arthur’s intensity he hauled him before the police where for the first time in 1,000 years someone was charged with treason.

Later some clerk in the judiciary, alerted to this, reduced the charge to incitement.

A mentally challenged judge at the Swansea Assizes committed him to hard labour, uttering pointless stern warnings to the rest of the Welsh.

This irreverence and rebelliousness came home to me last week when a Welsh archaeologist pointed out a cave deep in the beacons where human bones had been uncovered.

Murder at remote farmhouses over livestock and land were not uncommon and often went undetected.

They hid Salman Rushdie here, although his concealment was common knowledge in the marketplaces of Brecon and Abergavenny.

The discovered bones, meanwhile, were carbon-dated and other evidence seems to offer convincing proof that they were wounded insurgents from the Chartist upheaval in Newport (13 miles to the south) in 1848 and led by the mayor of that town, John Frost, subsequently sentenced to transportation .

Follow the M4 to the junction at Port Talbot and you will find the site where Dic Penderyn who was hanged for treason – the first Welsh working-class hero – is buried.

A little to the left is where Dr Richard Price, an eccentric disciple of the Enlightenment, corresponded with the London corset-maker Thomas Paine and the leaders of the French and American revolutions.

He broke a sound religious taboo by cremating his dead child who he called Jesus Christ.

There was outrage as there always is at innovation.

I collected little evidence of a political renaissance in a place where politics and policy is now prosaic where it once was poetic.

Little disturbs the peace. The streets of my youth no longer vibrate with argument.

There was a time when street theatre was the most popular spectator event.

And I remember one such evening my father’s cousin Mary Ann Jones had lungs like a foundry’s bellows and a voice that would crack church bells, screamed: “The bloody Germans are all over the beacons!”

Her piercing warning was confirmed when five of them got off a green lorry at the end of our terraced street and came into our house.

Mary Ann had long ago been flattered by Jones the Chapel – a man of hidden lusts – when he compared her with Boadicea.

She stormed in with her weapon of choice, a rolling pin, to find that the Huns were in fact local unemployed men recruited to play Croatian Chetniks in a propaganda film being made by the Ministry of Information about Yugoslavian guerillas.

The guerillas, mostly left-wing were equally annoyed when it became known that Mihailovich the Croatian leader was pro-Nazi – the good one was Tito.

Nevertheless, after their adventures in the beacons, the partisans turned Penydarren into the equivalent of Hollywood Boulevard.

When this accurate account reached Mary Ann she blew like the wind around Cape Horn. Rebuking my mother, she said: “I told them not to trust those Nazis.”

These mountains have sheltered the history of the Welsh, turbulent defiant and then unexpectedly hitting the political boundaries.

From here Owen Glendower challenged central rule from London and established 100 years of the Tudors.

The Welsh flourished in the arts, music, dialectics and the law and produced the finest group of religious hypocrites who ever annoyed God.

Brooding in the car I heard about the Howard de Walden estates in central London, owners of Marylebone High Street, and their joyous news of a £20million profit on local land deals.

The last great radical in British politics David Lloyd George advocated the nationalisation of the land.

Nobody seems to worry that in your rent and mortgage, money is flowing out of London from the very places we live on.

After the last of the summer wine from the mountains, I suddenly enjoyed the last of those pleasures which old men relish: I got infuriated at the prices in the service station.

This was the prime example of the free market in action.

Inferior produce at inflated prices.

I came back an angry old man.