Up the valley

Yesterday we decided to drive up the valley and see what "they" were doing to widen the road where the bank was threatening to subside ever sine we've been here. Over the past couple of weeks along our narrow single-track-with-passing-places lanes we have been passing (with difficulty!) lorry after huge lorry loaded with soil and shale from the hillside they have been digging away. Rather than use it, on top of strategically-placed cages of boulders to shore up the weak side of the road, they have been taking it miles and miles away - presumably as landfill . . . but there, Councils always know what they are doing, don't they?


The swell of Dan-y-Banc against the autumn clouds . . .

We parked a few hundred yards short of where the road was completely cut off to traffic - the gigantic digger parked the width of the road gave us a slight hint!



We finally worked out that the new road level would be along by those tree stumps . . . Hope they widen it a bit, or it will be a very interesting drive on a dark night . . . especially if you meet someone coming the other way!

They will have to put in the final piece of trackway up to the gate too, so the local farmer can bring his cattle back and forth from the hill grazing, and as it is also a trackway to the very top of the hill, so walkers can use it again too. I have only walked DOWN from the top of the hill - it is one heck of a climb UP it!

They will apparently be here for about another 14 weeks yet . . . according to a noticed pinned at the roadside.

The steepness of the wooded valley a couple of hundred yards before the photo of the digger shows you that they had their work cut out with the excavations.


I have always loved this hill as its bracken slopes remind me of Dartmoor, and I used to get very "homesick" whenever I drove past it in our first years here.

The sun was sinking in the sky, and gave a wonderful diffused light to the hillside.

An old abandoned barn, its back finally broken by years of weathering, sinking to its knees at the edge of the woodland.

I walked out onto what used to be the "hanging bridge" but is now like a cage across the river. I looked up and downstream, hoping against hope (I had been quiet) that I might see an otter, as they have been seen here, but the river was quiet - not even a Dipper to be seen.

Fungi of a Latin name adorning a rotten log.

Finally, two photos of our Inglenook and Hergom stove, to satisfy MM's curiosity to what the Hergom might look like! All sorts of doo-dahs hung up there - a pair of hames, old wooden spoons, several old horse bits, an old crane from a fireplace like this, and just above it (far right) a little "griddle" which came from an old Essex estuary sailing barge and which was put over the top of the stove for the kettle to sit in. Of course, at one side, my big old cauldron. You always thought I was a witch didn't you?!!!

Sunrise

Didn't that turn out well? Says she modestly!! I just caught sight of the rising sun this morning and ran outside with my camera. I think the black tracery of branches looks magical . . .

Today's car booty

Despite both of us sleeping badly last night, DH and I went off to the car boot sale this morning and got a few bargains. Perhaps if we had followed the daylight and got down there an hour earlier we'd have had more, but hey-ho and all that . . .

Of course, more books found their way into our possession. These three books cost me a total of £1.20. The Frank Muir is a curious coincidence, as one of the answers in yesterday's Telegraph general knowledge crossword was Muir (as in Frank - Q: "Who wrote the What-a-Mess books?") We still have What-a-Mess The Good which was one of the children's favourite (and of their mother!) : )


This book: "Surviving the Iron Age" is based on the Iron Age living experiment at Castell Henllys in Pembrokeshire a few years ago. Several of the participants, it appears, are offspring of the original Iron Age living experiment at Butser Hill in Hampshire, which was filmed back in the 1970s.


No guesses as to which of us bought THIS book, but although it was a little more than we usually pay, it was still good value at £3. We certainly would have had to pay £6 or more from a second hand book shop.



Do you remember that huge glazed crock that we bought back in September at Builth Wells Antiques Fair? Well, DH found - again at car boot sale - 2 old round breadboards for 50p each, and having measured everything up, he screwed them together and I now have a perfectly fitting lid for my flour crock.

Gavin Maxwell

I listen to Radio 4 regularly, especially when I am doing the ironing, which I was this morning. In fact, I prolonged the ironing and even tackled the king size bedding, in order to listen to the 2nd of two programmes about the author Gavin Maxwell, famous for Ring of Bright Water and his love of otters. He sounds to have been a very complex character, someone you rather trod on eggshells around, whose sexuality and personality had been affected by an illness whilst he was at boarding school, and someone who didn't gell well with reality.

This is a beautiful poem written by Katherine Raine, who loved Maxwell, but whose affections were rebuffed. It sounds very much to me like she could see the landscape around Camusfearna (Sandaig House) whilst she wrote it. I have linked to the website I found it on, and apologies if they subsequently discover her works are subject to copyright, as they know not.

THE WILDERNESS by Kathleen Raine

I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare
Winters before I was born of song and story,
Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation,
The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away.
A child I ran in the wind on a withered moor
Crying out after those great presences who were not there,
Long lost in the forgetfulness of the forgotten.
Only the archaic forms themselves could tell!
In sacred speech of hoodie on gray stone, or hawk in air,
Of Eden where the lonely rowan bends over the dark pool.
Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain,
Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red,
Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain.


HERE is a link to a beautiful website about Maxwell, his life, his Scotland, and his final home on Eilean Ban. Whoever had the bright idea to build a gigantic causeway of a bridge right across the island had no soul whatsoever . . .

More of Kathleen Raine's poetry can be read HERE.



Many thanks to Shandchem on Creative Commons Search for the photograph of Tongue Bay, Sutherland.

Walk in Dinefwr Castle Woods

We had to drive to Llandeilo today as our son had to call at his old school, so we decided we would have a stroll through Dinefwr Castle Woods whilst we were waiting for him. The sun had come out and although rain-clouds were threatening in the distance they were far enough away not to worry us.


We parked beside the River Towy and walked up the leaf-strewn trackway at the edge of Dinefwr Castle Woods. There were sheep on the water meadows and two dogs looked out of the window of a recently-renovated old bungalow: what a lovely view it enjoyed across the river and fields.

Dynefwr Castle is hidden behind the trees on the top of this precipitous hill.


We breasted the slight incline and stood looking down on the mossy roof of Llandyfeisant church, which sits in a little hollow which we feel was once a special place in pagan times too, surrounded by a young yew tree and 4 fully grown, one of them very ancient, and with a spring on one side of it. A sacred grove indeed.



Below, the view from the back of the church looking across fields and the wooded hill where Dinefwr Castle is shrouded by the trees (out of sight on the left).


The church is now being left to nature . . .


In 1875, a coin was found beneath the porch and originally wrongly-identified as Roman, but it was subsequently correctly identified as a silver penny introduced by Edward I in 1279 and likely spanning a period from that date to 1327, when Edward II died, which suggests rebuilding work was carried out in that period.

The church is dedicated to Tyfei, nephew of St Teilo (to whom the main church of Llandeilo and many others in this area is dedicated) and is first mentioned in records in 1291 as 'Landevaysen' as part of the Deanery of Ystrad Twyi and by 1324 had been given to Talley Abbey by Rhys, grandson of Rhys the Great. It once served a medieval village in the grounds of what is now Newton House (there have been recent excavations and my daughter and I are mentioned in despatches - we were over by the Heronry!) but this village was already ruinous when noted at the Dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.

It ended serving the Rice family at Newton House, but is now sadly locked to protect it from damage. The trees have been cut back now, but when my daughters were younger, they found it had quite a scary atmosphere as it was gloomy under the trees.




It has been recorded that digging in the churchyard in the 19th century revealed the stone footings of an earlier building and locals say that a Roman mosaic floor was uncovered when a grave was being dug in the past and indeed, also in the 19th C, an urn full of Roman coins was found 300 yards west of the church.

Below: my husband on the trackway back.

View of Llandeilo from across the water meadows. There was a storm brewing (we have just had the thunderstorm it heralded, 2 hours later.)


The beautiful stream beside my son's school, just inside the boundaries of the Brecon Beacons National Park.

Family history woes

Can you hear my screams of despair? If you are a family historian, a word of caution. DO NOT attempt to build your on-line family tree when you have only had abut 3 1/2 hours' sleep, and then brief periods of dozing many hours later. There is nothing worse than staring into the darkness of your bedroom, clock-watching and wishing away the night-time hours. I had also eaten a bad combination of food and still have a sore stomach, nearly 12 hours later. Rashly, I thought I would make the time productive by filling in my family tree. Wrong move, being compounded now when I have just discovered I have the biggest family put in THREE TIMES, and I can't seem to remove them either. I will have to get back to it later when my brain is less frazzled.

Of course, as I am currently in family history mode (something which normally happens about this time of year), I was very tempted by the selection of Family History magazines in town yesterday, but I resisted them all. I even ignored the lure of the Family History mag with the free CD which announced you could "Find out How Your Ag. Lab. ancestors lived". (At £4.99 to purchase it, the temptation was soon well under control!) When I gave it some consideration, however, I concluded that it wouldn't really TELL me anything - just give links to various websites which I could probably find myself anyway, or I could read relevant chapters in my books on Victorian rural social history.

There would be nothing which could tell me if my 3 x g. grandfather suffered from "the rheumatics" as so many Ag. Labs. did from working outside in all weathers with just an old sack across their shoulders. Nothing to link me to the documents which would give the details of his life when he applied to "go on the parish" because he could no longer work on the farm - well into his 70s. I have to go to Exeter to find those - or pay someone to do the look-ups for me. There would be nothing to say that the little holloway, a short cut between one road and the next, which we passed last time we were in Hennock, was one he was wont to take. The things I really want to know include more about his life as a sailor (when apparently he spent his pay on buying tobacco, dead mens' clothes and paying extra for a bunk instead of a hammock) and the excitement of being at Trafalgar aboard HMS Belleraphon (another ancestor was aboard HMS Victory). Was he on Belleraphon when she took Napoleon to Elba? I hope he was a better sailor than my father, who got seasick the moment his uncle's fishing boat got beyond the harbour wall.

It is the minutiae of family history which fascinates, those intimate details which tell you more about the person so they're not just a name and a date on a family tree. The ancestor with the sweet tooth, the musical one, the little girl who got sent down to the pub for a jug of gin every night (my husband's side, not mine!) I know so very little about them beyond the fact that many of my menfolk worked on the land, quite a few others were good with horses - carters, grooms, ostlers, saddlers, a coachman - no wonder I have a deep love of horses. The women were skilled with a needle and were dressmakers. On my mum's side, I come from generations of lace-makers. One of my grandfather's sisters was a servant for the Carus-Wilson family in London. They were strongly connected with the church and religion, and when I was reading a book about Charlotte Bronte's husband, Arthur Nicholls, it transpires that it was one of the Carus-Wilsons who was involved with the Clergy Daughters' boarding school at Cowan Bridge that figured so largely in Charlotte Bronte's early education, and which she wrote about so vividly in her novel Jane Eyre. Her two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth contracted TB there and died in 1825. One name - and suddenly family history starts to come alive.

The photo at the top was taken about 1920, and shows my dad, Eric Bolt (aged around 4), and his parents central. My gran's sister and her husband on opposite corners and the two opposite corners taken by the Bow parents.

Liminality

Many years ago - probably 14 or so - a neighbour I didn't particularly care for read my Tarot cards. I can remember a surreal feeling as I distanced myself from her, almost in a different time or place as with total accuracy (it transpired), card after card spelt out "Change." And so it came to pass - within weeks I suddenly found myself on an ACCESS course for higher education and within the year, taking a BA in Archaeology. All because I had opened the local "free mag" at the page which held an advert for the University of Wales, Lampeter and the words 'Stones, Bones and Bog-Bodies' leapt off the page at me. To understand the significance of that a look back over my shoulder is necessary, to the three years I spent living in Wiltshire, working with horses, and at some point reading P V Glob's 'The Bog People', which fascinated me and fuelled my burgeoning interest in archaeology. In a way, it prepared me for my future.

I feel in a similar state now. Not quite in the here and now, but as if I am on the top of a hill, looking at myself in a little boat taken randomly by the waves, one moment in a lagoon, and the next whisked around a headland and being dragged out to sea, not knowing quite where I will end up and feeling rather lost.


Things are changing. People I know. People I thought I knew. People who I thought were important in my life quietly moving into the shadows, and others taking their place. I don't know what is going to happen next. I know what I would LIKE to happen, but I cannot be certain of anything. There is no longer a predictable future with my children's school lives. They are making their own way in the world now. We plan to move, to downsize, but the where and the when of that are open-ended. My heart strings are pulled ever more strongly by the West Country, Devon to be precise. I would up-sticks and be off there tomorrow. My husband 'doesn't mind' the West Country, but he wants me to consider Yorkshire, or Northumberland, or - teasingly - Berwick-upon-Tweed!

So, as we gradually prepare for our future, in a new place, a different house, we are having to live each day as it comes, coping with the decisions of what furniture stays, what is sold, what books we can bear to part with, what bits and pieces go in the charity shop box, and doing whatever re-decorating is necessary. The house won't go on the market until spring - and may not sell easily as not everyone is looking for somewhere quite this big - but we still have to do some research on the best area for us, checking out house-prices as some towns are much more desirable than others and thus more expensive or properties are soon snapped up. Our priorities for house-hunting this time are so different to the ones which brought us here, when we wanted a smallholding, somewhere big enough to house both our mothers should they wish to join us (in the event, my husband's mum chose not to), to be near a reasonable school, to be rural but not in the back of beyond.

So, we float rather like lost souls in this liminal time between what was and what will be and think of a future which has blurred edges rather than a sharp focus. Once we know WHERE we are going and WHEN, my excitement will know no bounds. Meanwhile, it is nearly time to think of preparing our evening meal, but perhaps first, just one more tiptoe over the estate agents' thresholds . . .