The following was our comment on a story on the To Hatch a Crow site:

“It is all very well for Jim Perrin to lead a protest against wind turbines on his ‘native’ Welsh hills’ thus augmenting his ‘image’ and showing his passionate attachment to Wales — the ‘countryside of his forbears’.”

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Sir Andrew Motion wrote in his review of West in The Guardian, 24/07/2010, ‘of his [Jim Perrin’s] native Wales’,  and Stephen Knight wrote in the T.L.S. 14/01/2011:  ‘the return to his Welsh roots in North Wales’. ‘Scotinparis’ wrote on the ensuing Guardian review thread, 24/07/2010:  ‘Fairly sure Jim Perrin comes from Manchester so it’s not his “native Wales” ‘, and ‘Walterluke’ wrote in answer on the same thread — ‘however, he is a Welsh speaker [?] and of Welsh birth ’.  WE believe that ‘Walterluke’ is one of the aliases which Jim Perrin used in the course of this dialogue to plant misinformation and to ‘puff’ his book West…

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However, he is NOT Welsh by heritage as he continually asserts — amazing what information may be found on the internet, and we intend to show his genealogy chart shortly…

Here is a brief summary of his lineage:

His father was, as he says, born in Manchester, although NOT of Welsh stock as he claims in his books. articles and interviews, but of a Manchester couple. The PATERNAL antecedents whom Jim Perrin describes as Welsh were in fact all English. There was a Welsh maternal great-grandmother who married an Englishman and who later settled in England. As she died in 1909 he could not have known her.

But Jim Perrin’s PATERNAL grandparents, his great-grandparents, his great-great-grandparents and his great-great-great-grandparents were all, indisputably, ENGLISH.

Jac’s sisters.

PS. Jim Perrin, we have on very good authority, is NOT dying of ‘terminal lung cancer’— does not have cancer at all. He admitted this to a reporter who went out to Ariège to discuss his ‘illness’.