Filmmaker planning film about Craig-y-nos

Craig-y-nos Castle, viewed from the lake.

I have just had a long chat with Hungarian filmmaker Tamas Tatai about his project. He is interested in making a film about our book, “The Children of Craig-y-nos”, * based on Craig-y-nos Castle, a children’s sanatorium in mid-Wales, documenting forty years of lost Welsh history. The book is with a screenwriter who is also fascinated by the account of how children were removed from their parents and “imprisoned” in a castle for years on end. It was done on health grounds based on the same principle of treatment for leprosy i.e. remove the infected person from the community and isolate them in remote areas.

I was one of them.

Children have endless capacity for adapting and we did not think it in any way abnormal that we slept outside on open balconies in winter with beds covered in tarpaulin to protect us from rain and snow.

*The Children of Craig-y-nos” by Ann Shaw and Carole Reeves, published by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, price £9.99p. Available from Amazon.