THE IMPORTANCE of BEING WELSH

Outside, a cold Welsh night. Inside, a small room atop a narrow, creaking staircase that seems to have been designed for hobbits, not people. My wife and I lie still, eavesdropping through 16th century floorboards.

“Schwmae!” says a voice.

“Nowaith dda,” says another.

“Sut yw ti?” says yet another. Then there’s laughter and a thump that must be a beer mug landing on a bar counter--a sound that merges with thousands of other large and small sounds, together delivering the effect that my wife and I are not alone in a tiny upstairs room at all, but on our backs in the middle of the pub below, surrounded by vigorously conversational townsfolk.

“Hello. Good evening. How are you?” they are saying, or at least that’s my best guess, consulting a glossary of common Welsh phrases. No doubt some of them are also asking for pints of Brain’s, the leading Welsh beer. Any moment, I half expect a barman to hand a bucket of Welsh beer nuts across my sheets to a peckish drinker.

We are overnight guests of the White Horse Inn, the lone pub in Capel Garmon. The inn is atmosphere-rich, sound-proofing-poor and the only place for a stranger to sleep on this particular hilltop village in northern Wales. The language of the drinkers below is Welsh, the confounding, consonant-heavy tongue that British authorities here spent generations trying to replace with English.

Today was a day of strolls through the panoramic cemetery of Capel Garmon, a train ride through the forests of Snowdonia National Park, a promenade along a Victorian resort beach at Llandudno--a full day. As soon as the publican downstairs declares last call and the voices begin to thin, we will sleep deeply. But until then, we can only let the consonants wash over us.

The sound of the Welsh language should be encouragement for anyone who roots for underdogs. Before Asia, before Africa, before America, the English crossed a few hills and colonized Wales. By the 16th century, English monarchs had settled into the habit of designating first-born sons as Princes of Wales. (Politically, Wales is classified as a principality of the United Kingdom, which also controls England, Northern Ireland and Scotland.) Yet despite the global empire headquartered next door--or perhaps because of it--the Welsh have vigorously guarded their identity and their language, which is more alive in these green valleys now than it has been in decades.

Welsh, which has Celtic roots, is now taught in public schools and celebrated in song, poetry and other arts by a closely followed annual festival, the National Eisteddfod, which yearly alternates locations between north and south Wales. Against long odds, the Welsh identity endures as a strange marvel of defiance and renewal. It can be a wonderful thing for an outsider to behold, even if it does occasionally keep you up at night.

We begin in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, arriving by train at the end of a blustery August day. It’s a short taxi ride from the train station to our modest hotel on Cathedral Road, where Beagle, our aged, frail innkeeper, welcomes us into a pair of converted Victorian homes near the green expanses of Bute Park.

We lug our own bags up the stairs--our host looks brittle enough to break if he tries it--and pass the evening on The Hayes, a pedestrian zone of restaurants, pubs and, on this night, an outdoor concert by an electrified Celtic folk band.

Here is our first clue to the new life of old Celtic ways in Wales: While the drums throb and a long-haired singer belts out a tune (in Gaelic or Welsh, not English), the bedraggled youth of Cardiff dance and thrash merrily at the lip of the stage, a mosh pit governed by flute and fiddle.

In the 1991 census, about 500,000 people--just under 20% of Wales’ population--claimed knowledge of Welsh. This marked an increase over 1981, the first rise in the proportion of Welsh speakers in this century. The language is strongest in the north and west, where farming and fishing predominate, but even in anglicized industrial areas to the south, its use is spreading.

As recently as the 1940s, public schoolteachers were under instructions to punish children for uttering Welsh words in class. Since the 1960s, laws have moved toward promotion of bilingualism. When authorities in London made noises in 1981 about blocking previously pledged Welsh telecasts, Gwynfor Evans, a member of the British Parliament from the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, threatened a hunger strike, and succeeded in a task rarely accomplished: He out-blustered then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. To hear Welsh in Wales, tune to Channel 4.

Welsh defiance turns up in all sorts of other ways, too: Every day’s outgoing Royal Mail includes its share of letters bearing stamps with the Queen’s face deliberately pasted on upside-down. And when Charles was invested as Prince of Wales in the late 1960s, thousands of young Welsh arranged to be in Ireland or somewhere else off Welsh soil that day, their small way of saying that he might be a prince, but he was not their prince.

By noon the next day we’ve given downtown Cardiff a quick look, picked up our rental car and set a northerly course through Brecon Beacons National Park. This apparently happens to Cardiff fairly often. Though it can boast about Cardiff Castle, its covered market, the collections of the National Museum of Wales and the outdoor Museum of Welsh Life nearby, Cardiff is a fairly young and unprepossessing town. It has fewer than 300,000 residents, only became the Welsh capital in 1955 (until then, there was none) and often suffers the complaint that it’s neither very Welsh nor very interesting.

The Brecon Beacons, on the other hand, mark for us the beginning of Wales’ great, green open spaces. We pull off highway A470 by an old red phone booth and go tramping down a dirt road, its border marked by a traditional fence of stacked slate slabs, the neighboring meadows dotted with munching sheep. The sun, never reliable here, favors us with an appearance. Hiking and driving along those narrow winding roads, we see green and more green--it’s something like traveling along the seam of a great, green tennis ball.

When the greenery does yield, it’s for towns of narrow streets, stone walls, old-fashioned storefronts and street signs that defy pronunciation. We stop for a lunch in Llanidloes, for a dinner in Dolgellau.

We count ourselves too clever to be taken in by Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlllantysiliogogogoch, a tiny and otherwise unremarkable town in northwest Wales that tourists visit just so that they can be photographed standing by its sign. (The name, expanded from five syllables in a 19th century gimmick to promote tourism, means “St. Mary’s Church in the Hollow of White Hazel Near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio Near the Red Cave.”)

Then, at a nightmarish old mining town called Blaenau Ffestiniog, the greenery is swallowed by a universe of black and gray. Beneath heavy, clouded skies rise mountains of castoff slate shards. In their shadows, a warren of dismal streets is lined with slate-built homes, offices and windows bearing signs that read “AR WERTH” (“for sale” in Welsh). Yet in the middle of all this stands a gaggle of exhilarated tourists in brightly colored parkas. They’re about to take the old narrow-gauge steam railroad down to the coast at Porthmadog, the same 13-mile trip made by countless tons of export-bound Welsh slate from the 1830s to the 1940s.

The days of large-scale Welsh slate, coal and iron production have passed, ending a horrific era of exploitation and shortened workers’ lives. But now many old extraction sites and rail routes have taken on afterlives that no coal baron could have forecast: They are tourist destinations.

Aside from the railway, two mines near Blaenau Ffestiniog--Llechwedd Slate Caverns and Gloddfa Ganol Slate Mine--offer underground tours. One of the leading attractions in south Wales is the Big Pit in Blaenafon, a coal-extraction operation that ran from 1880-1980, then reopened as a museum just three years later.

One of the many things I still don’t understand about Wales is how it can seem so vast and be so small. The entire principality, roughly 50 miles wide and 136 miles deep, is just twice the size of Los Angeles County. Fewer than 3 million people live here, compared to the 50 million next door in England. The highest mountain is less than 4,000 feet above sea level. Yet at just about every turn along the road and rail lines, the landscape evolves into an entirely new character, or widens into infinities of stone and mountain and sea.

Less than 10 miles from the black desperation of Blaenau Ffestiniog, there’s Betws-y-Coed, gateway to Snowdonia National Park and magnet for hikers, climbers, backpackers and bicyclists. Its main street chockablock with hotels and restaurants hewn from local stone, Betws-y-Coed crouches amid thick foliage, a tiny town featuring every convenience. Then you roll out of town, take a one-lane road up the overgrown hill, and again, within less than 10 miles, you’re in a new world, this time the hilltop hamlet of Capel Garmon.

A lonely post office stands neighbored by a handful of houses, a 19th century church and a churchyard cemetery. Across the street from the church stands the White Horse Inn, scene of our sleepy immersion in the Welsh language.

Altogether, Wales draws about 750,000 visitors yearly from outside the United Kingdom, among them about 160,000 Americans. In the north, the visitors usually aim for the castles of Caernarfon, Harlech and Conwy, and for the odd architecture of Portmeirion. In the south, they gravitate toward Pembrokeshire Coast National Park (especially St. David’s Cathedral, which dates to the 12th century and is often called the finest church in Wales), the further coastal scenery of Glamorgan and the Gower Peninsula, and the town of Laugharne, where Welsh writer Dylan Thomas wrote “Under Milk Wood” (which follows 24 hours in the life of a Welsh waterfront town) shortly before his death in 1953.

Nearer to the border with England, there’s the ruin of Tintern Abbey, made famous by the 18th century Wordsworth poem, and the town of Hay-on-Wye, now dominated by used bookstores and overrun by book-minded tourists.

Determined not to run ourselves ragged, we resign ourselves to missing more of these “must-see” spots than we hit. After our night at the White Horse, we race toward the west coast, skirt the low slopes of Snowdon, a 3,560-foot mountain, pausing only briefly to take in the broad, austere valley view near Capel Curig, and make for Portmeirion.

Portmeirion is the brainchild of a true Welsh eccentric, the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who spent much of the years from 1925 to 1972 building an Italianate retreat by the sea that would “improve on what God provided.” Many know the place for the fancy pottery that bears its name. Others may recognize the odd landscape in an oblique way: Portmeirion was the setting for the Kafkaesque television series “The Prisoner,” starring Patrick McGoohan, which aired on American television in the late ‘60s.

Williams-Ellis died in 1978, but his project lives on as a tourist village, with a high-end hotel and restaurant tucked into the hillside down by the water. The concoction seems at once an artifact of Welsh eccentricity and an island of bright-hued internationalism. In other words, it’s an ideal place to meet the woman who now steps forward to greet us in the lobby.

Jan Morris, author of more than a dozen volumes of history and travel writing, looks and behaves as if she might be your favorite aunt: a tall, white-haired woman, 69 years old, robust, quick with a quip and inclined to tear across the countryside at high speeds in her Honda Prelude.

“I find this landscape unmatchably beautiful,” she says. “The scale of it! And how it changes every half hour. I’m always comparing places to it.”

Morris has written books about Venice, Oxford, Spain, Manhattan, Hong Kong and Sydney, and beginning in the 1970s spent a long spell as travel essayist for Rolling Stone magazine. But she belongs more to Wales than any place. She explains this at lunch, then invites us to tea at her 18th century farmhouse, a few miles up the road.

Morris’ father was Welsh, her mother English; but Morris says she’s always felt more Welsh than English. And when Jan Morris pursues an affinity, she doesn’t kid around. Thirteen years ago, she wrote “The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country,” which is in part a meditation on the country’s landscape, but also a sort of hymn to Owain Glyndwr, the hero who united the long-divided Welsh in the early 15th century.

Many believe Glyndwr came nearer than anyone to achieving Welsh independence, but the English crushed his troops, and by 1416 Glyndwr had gone into hiding. No one’s sure where he’s buried. Writing to please his queen two centuries later, Shakespeare spelled the warrior’s name Owen Glendower, wrote him into Part One of “Henry IV” and made him a pretentious blowhard. Morris calls him “the most compelling of the emblematic heroes of the Welsh Resistance,” and some of the Welsh nationalists accused of burning English vacation cottages in the early 1980s called themselves the Meibion Glyndwr, the Sons of Glyndwr.

Look closely at the shelves of books in Jan Morris’ upstairs library and you notice that the early volumes are attributed to James Morris, a reporter for the Times of London and father of three children. In fact, as a Times reporter, James Morris accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary to about the 20,000-foot mark in his 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest. But in a search for identity, described in Morris’ book “Conundrum,” the writer decided he was a woman misplaced in a man’s body and persuaded doctors to help correct that situation.

More than 20 years later, on the spines of later books on Morris’ shelf, the first name Jan replaces James. Elizabeth, mother of the three Morris children, remains Jan’s “partner,” shares the farmhouse, makes tea and flies kites with the occasional visiting grandchild. Elizabeth does not, however, care to see the gravestone that Jan, ever the lover of bold gestures, had chiseled for them, so it remains out of view, beneath the stairs.

But for all the improvisation behind the curtains at the Morris residence, the author of the house is a sort of old-fashioned girl: She clings to the soil, speech and culture of her Welsh ancestors.

Four years ago, in a ceremony rich with flowing robes and Druid overtones, Morris was installed as a Bard of the Gorsedd--the most prominent cultural organization in Wales, and the closest thing Wales has to a parliament. Atop her roof, Morris has placed a custom-made weather vane: Two of its compass points are labeled with characters from the English alphabet, two from the Welsh. And as she leads us along a path beneath oak, ash and sycamore trees, she pauses for dramatic effect.

“Down here,” she announces to us with a wave of her arm, “is my grave. On a small island in the stream.”

Until occupying that grave, however, Morris intends to continue her prolific literary output, and her Welsh advocacy. She hails the resurgence of the language in print and on television and radio, the vitality of Welsh poetry journals and the popularity of rock bands that sing in Welsh. (Morris’ youngest son, Twm--sounds like Tim--is a prominent Welsh poet and musician, performing principally in the old language.)

“All these things are happening,” Morris says. “And all these people who speak only English have no idea they’re happening. Certainly, people miss the intensity of it, and the vivacity of it, especially among the young.”

But even while that cultural upwelling continues, sighs Morris, the influx of English-speakers continues, as does the departure of many young Welsh men and women who leave for jobs elsewhere.

“It’s been desperate, really, to watch the progress of things,” she says. “One by one, the village stores are going, and the English are coming and buying them up.”

“Hallelujah!”

Now we’re in the hills of Llandeilo, South Wales, a day later, and the tents and trappings of the National Eisteddfod are all around us: smiling children, men in costume, crafts for sale. Unfortunately, it’s been raining on and off for days, so mud is also all around us. (In a country that expects 50 inches of rain yearly, this comes with the territory.)

In the main tent, a men’s choir holds forth in blue blazers and carefully creased black trousers. Their voices, sometimes Latin, sometimes Welsh, ring in dense harmonies, and the sound spills over a few thousand of us sitting in folding chairs. The tent is big, but humid and a bit dark and sets me to imagining these voices echoing in a mine shaft, which is where Welsh choral singing evolved into such a strong tradition. (Singing consoled the miners in the damp darkness, and hymnals in nearby chapels were a rich source of material.) Then the conductor spins around in his white jacket and takes a baritone solo.

At a music store display area, children pluck at harps--which play just as large a role in Welsh traditional music as they do in Irish traditional music--and poke their noses between the strings.

Over in the poetry tent, a youngish man, winner of a high prize for a poem about Anne Frank, steps to the microphone and begins a long poem loaded with guttural explosions and trilling Rs, long E’s and short A’s, with frequent resort to Ks, Ds and Ls. In other words: I understand none of it, but it’s a kind of music, too, and most of the men and women around me are rapt.

They’re also a bit surprised to see Mary Frances and me. International tourists generally seek out the International Eisteddfod, which books performers from around the world and is held in Llangollen in early July. (A youth eisteddfod is staged in early June and moves around the country.) But the National Eisteddfod, staged in a new city or town every August to spread the spectacle and revenue around, is a resolutely Welsh affair and a centuries-old exercise--with great community bragging rights at stake in debate, poetry, theater and music competitions, and a Welsh Learners tent to promote the language.

Seeing us (and perhaps hearing our American accents, too), the Welsh festival-goers go out of their way to welcome us, and look out for us. I meet a boy who has just lost a soccer game (“one-nil,” he says with a sour expression) and a man whose daughter was once an exchange student to Kansas.

How popular is the Eisteddfod? Booking one month ahead, the nearest lodging we could secure was a room about 35 miles away, at the luxurious, 50-acre estate of the Lake Country House outside Llangammarch Wells. Happily, it was the most pleasant lodging we found in all of Wales, with a grand parlor, a pond in front and a 36-page wine list. For dinner we’re fed apple-and-fennel soup and, for me, a tremendous rack of lamb alongside crab meat. And afterward, we fall in with a pair of Welsh couples and become perhaps a bit too well acquainted with Welsh whiskey.

At the festival, we look at the jewelry and wooden spoons (a standard Welshfolk craft), meander into the tent set aside for local rock bands (lots of saxophones and Welsh hollering) and flop into seats near a grassy field for soccer matches.

We are a couple of days away from leaving Wales and returning to that other country, England, and we have missed the night of Eisteddfod’s greatest pomp, when the bards of the Gorsedd convene in white robes and golden finery, little girls festooned with flowers troop past, and the bards are addressed by their elected archdruid. But we are happy and tired.

I wander over to listen to a folk group and bump into a bus driver whose passengers, a church choir from north Wales, have just taken a second prize.

“We’ll be stopping at every pub on the way home,” he says. He is shaking his head and doing his best to display disapproval, and he is utterly unconvincing.

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GUIDEBOOK: Principles of Wales

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Wales is 44. To call from within the United Kingdom, add a zero before the area code and local number. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 55 pence to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night, including breakfast and Great Britain’s 17.5% VAT tax. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Most travelers to Wales fly to London, then make their way west via train or rental car. American, Delta, United, Air New Zealand, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic airlines offer nonstop service from LAX to London. The best way to see Wales is by car, but remember you’ll be driving on the left side of the road. From Heathrow Airport, take Rail-Link bus service to Reading, England, where you will connect by train to Cardiff. The whole trip takes about two hours. You can rent a car at Hertz at the train station in Cardiff, or you can take the Heart of Wales rail line to northern Wales for links to trains to other parts.

Where to stay: In Cardiff, the Angel Hotel, Castle Street, CF1 2QZ; telephone 1-222-232-633, fax 1-222-396-212. A historic building with 103 rooms on the main drag. Rates: $125 to $175. In the south Wales countryside, Lake Country House Hotel at Llangammarch Wells; tel. 1-591-620-202, fax 1-591-620-457. A 19-room country mansion with top-notch service and an excellent dining room. Rate: $220. On the main strip of Betws-y-Coed in north Wales: the stone-walled, 27-room Royal Oak Hotel. tel. 1-690-710-219, fax 1-690-710-603. Rate: $116-$140. If you don’t mind sleeping above a pub, the seven-room White Horse Inn, tel. and fax 1-690-710-271, outside Betws-y-Coed is full of character and set on a scenic hilltop. Rate: $86.

Where to eat: In Llandewi Skirrid, three miles northeast of Abergavenny in western mid-Wales, the Walnut Tree Inn; tel. 1-873-852-797. The inn, one of Jan Morris’ favorites, emphasizes local ingredients and has won awards for its wine list; about $50.

In Cardiff, the Armless Dragon, 97 Wyeverne Rood Cathays; tel. 1-222-382-357. The restaurant is praised for fresh greens and adventurous treatment of traditional ingredients; $50. Closed Mondays.

About six miles north of Merthyr Tydfil, on the way north from Cardiff into Brecon Beacons National Park, is the Nant Ddu Lodge Hotel; tel. 1-685-379-111. It is a good bistro for lunch at outdoor picnic tables or dinner in the cozy, informal dining room. Local fish and game a specialty; about $45.

For more information: The British Tourist Authority, (800) 462-2748, ext. 4. The 1997 National Eisteddfod, tel. 1-678-521-477, will be held Aug. 2-9 in the northern town of Bala. Cardiff Tourist Board; tel. 1-222-475-202. Information on Portmeirion’s hours, admission fees, restaurants and hotel can be obtained by telephone 1-766-770-228, or by fax, 1-766-771-331.