We’re here in Wales again; this time we’re 1000 feet up a hill and just on the edge of the treeline. We’re here because the builders have moved into our flat, finally to install some humidistat extractor fans and get the black mould permanently off the walls. It’s been a ten year battle with the landlords and we’re so relieved they’ve finally listened to us.
This time we’re above the small town of Talgarth beneath Waun Fach and very close to the Cambrian Way walk. It’s cold; extremely windy and we may even get some snow up here later on. There’s a small stream running very close which becomes larger as it tumbles down the hill and finally when it reaches the town, feeds a working water mill as the River Ennig. Its route takes it down a steep sided cwm where there is a partially open nature reserve called Pwll-y-wrach “witches pool” which – legend has it – was used for ducking suspected witches in a heads I win, tails you lose form of rough justice.
Rough justice is a bit of a theme for this corner of God’s own country. We arrived too early to check in so we parked up and visited the nature reserve of the same name which is partly closed to visitors due to the epidemic of Ash dieback. The combination of emergency felling and wind damage give the valley a strangely gloomy air notwithstanding the emerging spring wildflowers which seem not to mind. There were even a couple of species of Bumble Bee mooching about to provide a soundtrack. The wildlife managers of the site have taken a decision not to remove all the ash trees, but just the dangerous ones and to leave a good deal of the brash in situ for the woodland residents.
I’ll come back to the more cheerful spring flowers, but when we first booked here and got the address “Hospital Road” I guessed instantly that we would be near the old Talgarth asylum which has fallen into dereliction and now is locked away from visitors apart from urban explorers who are prepared to take the (considerable) risks. We were walking down the road back to the car when we spotted it through the hedge below us and it truly is a melancholic ruin. I once worked as an art therapist in a similar hospital in Bristol which has now closed and is largely demolished. It was a dark place of historic injustice and suffering in spite of its origins as a safe and productive, self-sufficient colony. Overcrowding, underfunding and sheer lack of vision condemned thousands of guiltless men and women; many of the men shell-shocked after the cruelties of war and the women labelled as moral defectives because they had become pregnant. All crowded together with other violent and sometimes psychotic residents and nurses who acted more like prison warders, and who would punish those who got out of line with injections of paraldehyde which was so noxious it had to be administered with a steel and glass syringe because it ate through plastic as it ate through the skin of the unfortunates who called it “pollyeye”. Something went terribly wrong with the vision and a miasma of suffering still hangs over the buildings in which it was administered. Thank goodness those days are largely gone. A classic example (think of the present government) of what happens when policies fail but no-one has any inclination or clue how to mend the damage.
Anyway – enough – I wanted to write about spring as she’s manifesting herself here up in the hills where it’s colder and later. We only had a short walk, but we spotted primroses, common dog-violets and early dog-violets, lords and ladies, dandelions, wood anemones, barren strawberries, lesser celandines and soft shield ferns. The woodland floor had the early leaves of herb robert and wild garlic and there were large numbers of acorns on the ground in the process of germinating and opening their seed leaves like scarlet cloak – very pretty. I didn’t have time to make a detailed list, but there are some photos below.
