A proud Welshman, Ioan’s roots were in the “mild grey well-built labyrinth of warm-hearted Dolgellau” - the little town under the shadow of Cader Idris where his father taught English at the King’s School. Ioan's mother had been one of the earliest students at the new university college, built from North Wales quarrymen’s subscriptions, in Bangor. The influence of his parents on Ioan was profound - not just culturally, but also in his recreational activities: “I remember the first time the hills became a pleasure for me was on the Bwlchy Rhiwgyr above Bontddu. As we arrived on top, my father began to recite Keats’s sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer, and there in front of us was that skyline of the Lleyn Peninsula over the water, stretching down to Ynys Enlli. There came a magic that day which the Welsh hills have never lost for me.”
By a neat reversal those selfsame hills came under his professional protection through working for many years as county secretary then chief executive of Gwynedd county council. In that post he exercised a wise awareness of how the conflicting demands of visitors and local inhabitants might be reconciled, rather than having the interests of either group asserted to the detriment of the other. His natural inclination was to view people as indissociable from place, and to insist on the centrality of their voice in determining policies that might affect it. In this crucial understanding he rose majestically above the general level of environmental debate in Wales, conducted for the most part by English-retired-bourgeois-dominated voluntary sector conservation agencies.
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