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What did I know about Wales? Unpronounceable place names (it took me several days to learn how to pronounce Llandudno without choking on my own alveoli)? My dark-eyed London friends with names like Davies and Morgan? Welsh rarebit? The Prince of Wales (both the man and the local pub)? My favourite travel writer Jan Morris, who describes herself as a Welsh European (or a European Welsh)? Nasty Welsh jokes, like the one recited to me by a neighbour:

"Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,
Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef.
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy wasn't at home,
Taffy came to my house and stole a mutton bone."?

I could also recall how, in the early nineties, I lived in a Highgate house with a red dragon on the roof, although I didn't know then that it (the dragon) had anything to do with Welshness. It was only much later that I saw the Welsh flag which featured a red dragon against green and white, but none of my Davies-or-Morgan friends could explain why this unappealing mythical creature had been selected as a Welsh national symbol. So, in the end, it was my innate inquisitiveness that triggered my brisk pre-Christmas foray into Wales. That and a somewhat childish (and hence forgivable during the so-called festive season) desire to spot the Red Dragon and, maybe, even grab it by its wriggling scaly tale.

I spent three days driving along precariously winding Welsh roads, through rain and thick mist. At times, it felt as if I was moving inside a huge chilled wineglass. I soon got used to Welsh road signs ("allan" is "exit"), and even started coming to grips with some names on the map by simplifying them to recognisable English words. Thus, the town of Betws-y-coed, which, for some reason, seemed to be on my way wherever I went, became Co-ed Betsy, Porthmadog - Port Mad Dog, and Criccieth - Cricket.

The only place name I could not cope with was Llafairpwllgwyngllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, allegedly the world's longest. It would probably have taken a medium-sized English novel to substitute it for.

Some of the locals, however, seemed to have little problem with their own melodious Celtic language. In the village of Bala, where I stopped for a coffee, everyone spoke Welsh (apart from me that is). To my unpracticed ear, most of the words they were saying sounded like "anti-freeze." They spoke English, too, although a waitress in a local coffee shop did not know what "espresso" meant, and I ended up with a cup of a watery Welsh wish-wash. Perhaps I should have asked for a cup of "anti-freeze" instead.

Despite some obvious misnomers, it was nice to see (or rather to hear) that the Welsh language was still alive and well after centuries of subjugation. In this respect, Welsh was luckier than its sister-tongue, Manx, which had been almost completely eradicated by the beginning of the 20th century. And although the last individuals who spoke nothing but Welsh (three sisters in the Caernarfon peninsula) died before 1950, the increasing number of Welsh people, many of whom have become bilingual, now happily name Welsh as their first language and English - as second. Several casual interlocutors of mine proudly informed me (in English) that they wanted their children to be educated in Welsh. Sadly, none of them knew anything about either the whereabouts or the exact meaning of the elusive Red Dragon.

"Alistair Sawday's Special Places to Stay in Britain" was my most trusted travelling companion. It was from this compact volume that I chose two very "special places" to stay overnight. The first one was the Tower - the only remaining fortified house on the Welsh/English border. Its first mention in history was in 1465, when the then Mayor of Chester, Robert Byrn, was hanged in its main dining hall by Rheinallt ap Griffith, a forebear of the present-day owner. According to a local legend, the Mayor was thus punished for standing in the way of a marriage between a Chester lad and a Welsh woman but - more plausibly - it was just a revenge for his levying too high taxes on his Welsh dominions.

Charles and Wendy Wynne-Eyton, the Tower's hospitable owners and the runners of one of Britain's quirkiest B&Bs, proudly showed me a big hook in the ceiling of the main dining hall, although Charles later explained that the hook was but a "modern hoax". There was the chill of a freshly-dug grave in the unheated hall, with its squeaky floorboards, dusty furniture and faded portraits of some po-faced, as if frozen to death, distant ancestors of Charles and Wendy.

But the rest of the house was warm and cheerful. With Charles, Wendy and their daughter Joe, a student from Manchester, we sat near a massive fireplace talking about
Wales and Welshness. The Wynne-Eatons are Welsh by descent, but, like many border people, they only spoke English.

"I studied Welsh at school until I was 11, but now can only read the signs," said Joe. I asked them about distinct Welsh features, if any.

"The Welsh are small, dark and vivacious," said Wendy, herself of a medium height, and added: "I tower in a pub here in Wales, but in a London pub, I am short…"

"The Welsh have their second toes longer than the first," suggested Joe.

And Charles struck a more philosophical note: "Look at this solid old house - it is very eclectic, a mixture of different architectural trends accumulated through centuries. You wouldn't call it stylish, would you? Wales is the same: it is not stylish in architecture and landscape, but it is strong and solid in spirit…"

The ceilings in my bedroom (one of the three guest rooms in this unusual B&B) were so high that one could bungee-jump from them on to the stately bed - so wide and soft that sleeping on it on my own felt like a huge distortion, possibly even a minor offence…

I dreamt of the Red Dragon dangling helplessly from the hook in the chilled dining hall of the Tower.

If anyone at all could shed some light on the mystery of the Red Dragon, it had to be Jan Morris, who knew Wales like the back of her palm. It took me three hours to drive across Snowdonia to Llyn Peninsular, where the acclaimed travel scribe lived in a tiny and wind-swept coastal village of Llanystumdwy. In an almost spy-like fashion, we agreed to meet near a solitary public-phone cabin in the village's only car-park. It was raining, and everything in the village - including the only pub - gave an impression of being permanently shut down.

Jan Morris arrived in a red sports car (the Red Dragon?) with two stickers on the rear: "Cym" for "Cymru" (Wales) and the starry emblem of the European Union.

"They dug trenches in front of my house, so I have to lead you through back lanes," she apologised. She had radiant wide-open blue eyes - the eyes of a romantic and a
lifetime explorer.

When we were approaching the destination, our way was blocked by a tractor stuck in the middle of a bumpy dirt-track. We couldn't bypass it, because of the trenches near
the curb, and had to wait for the soiled mechanical monster to extricate itself from the mud.

"This is the most Welsh scene you can imagine," explained Jan, as we walked through her old ("as old as the United States", as she put it) wooden cottage brimming with
paintings and books - a real writer's abode. "Mud, rain, trenches, tractor blocking the road, and two writers and one poet living in the houses near-by…"

"I have skimmed all over the world, but this is one place where I do feel at home," she said, pouring out coffee. I asked Jan about her idea of Welshness.

"Cymru means comradeship, and this is a point of Welshness. Here I always feel among friends, although there are lots of infights. Class never meant much in Wales, for in modern times all aristocrats were English, although many people now claim that they descend from Welsh princes. Yes, there's always a "but". Welshness is a contradictory concept, for we don't really know who we are. We live in this beautiful
country which for a large part of the year is suicidally awful and lacking in light. In short, Wales is a muddle…"

"How about the Red Dragon?"

"The Red Dragon of Cadwaladr? No one knows exactly where it comes from," said Jan taking a long ponderous sip from her cup. "Some claim that it descended onto the Welsh flag from the purple griffins of Roman imperial banners…"

By the time I backed out of her driveway, the rain stopped, and a fragile mica-like wintry sunset was smouldering above the forest. It was pink, almost red - like the shadow of the elusive Red Dragon of Cadwaladr.

Courtesy of the "Special Places to Stay" guide-book, I spent my second night at Trericket Mill Vegetarian Guesthouse in Powys - a stark contrast to the Tower. It was a former watermill, masterfully converted into a cosy modern Bed-and-Breakfast hotel, with two rooms and a bunkhouse outside. Everything about the place was flexible and democratic: it was non-smoking, but there was a smoking lounge; the food was vegetarian, but delicious and extremely filling (I especially liked Glamorgan sausages made of cheese and leeks); one could enjoy en-suite accommodation inside the house,
or camp outside and pop in for breakfast…

"Welsh Tourist Board objects to such a mixture and says that it has to be either a hotel, or a bunkhouse, but not both at the same time," shrugged Alistair Legge, a Scotsman, who owns the place with his wife Nicky.

I told Alistair that it was perhaps the very mixture of the seemingly unmixable things that made his millhouse so unmistakably Welsh. Jan Morris was right: Wales was a muddle.

To irritate the Board even further (or so I thought), the Legges were thinking of opening a second-hand bookshop on the top floor of the mill. The reason was simple: Hay-on-Wye, the book capital of the world (at least its founder Richard Booth, alias King Richard the Book-Hearted, thought so) was just eight miles away.

"Make Hay while the sun is shining," I hummed as I headed towards Hay-on-Wye, one of my favourite places in the whole world, early next morning.

On 1 April 1977, Richard Booth, a local eccentric, proclaimed Hay-on-Wye an Independent Kingdom with himself as the King. “Home Rule for Hay” was a joke of course, but Booth has achieved his objective. The number of bookshops soon reached 30, and the number of visitors - 500,000 a year! Pubs, hotels and B&Bs were thriving, and the locals, who used to castigate Richard Booth, were singing praises to their glorious “King Richard”.

“I am trying to turn Hay-on-Wye into the book capital of the world,” Richard Booth told me during our first meeting in 1990. At that time, it was easy to dismiss his claims and behaviour as somewhat “haywire” (no pun intended) - not unlike the idea of the devolution and the Welsh Assembly, I presume. Eight years on - there are over twenty towns throughout the world describing themselves as “book towns” or “book villages” (with another twelve in the making) - all modelled on Hay-on-Wye! Likewise, the devolution is in full swing, and the Welsh Assembly will start sitting next year, although the way to complete Welsh sovereignty, favoured by Welsh nationalists, is probably still as long as the one to the "Home Rule for Hay".

And here I was in Hay, where a Welsh-born Croatian Marjana Dworski runs an excellent East European bookshop; where digging through mountains of old books is an occupation similar to digging for a gold bullion in the sand, for you never know what you are about to come across. It is this uncertainty that makes the search so exciting, so similar to a treasure hunt and so distinctively Welsh, for Wales is extremely uncertain in everything - in its identity, in its weather, in its history, in its national symbols. It can be best compared to a Hay-on-Wye bookshop, stuck with a random selection of old and new books in English and in Welsh - a bookshop with no catalogues, but with a red dragon above its entrance. The same Red Dragon that was once sitting on the roof of my old house in Highgate.

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