Christopher Brasher, 25 years ago, was a young apprentice - one of 2,000 apprentices working in a huge engineering works in Manchester. During the week he was a teaboy, a greaseboy, and a dreamer - dreaming of the mountains to which he escaped at the weekend.
The mountains were those of North Wales - of which Hilaire Belloc once wrote: 'There is no corner of Europe that I know which so moves me with the awe and majesty of great things.'
For that young apprentice those mountains were like a lung, allowing him to escape the suffocation of a giant factory. They were the hills in which he found his freedom.
Now those mountains are under attack: there are plans to flood some of the valleys; dam the high cwms; extract the minerals from the land. Who are the enemies - the nationalised industries and international companies who are making those plans, or we, the people who want more material wealth? And what do the people who live in those mountains think of these plans?
Christopher Brasher has gone back to the mountains of his youth to find out.

(BBC2 People: page 4)
(Colour)