Tag: history and landscape

Learning by immersion

A panoramic view of a tranquil lake surrounded by rolling green hills and scattered trees under a blue sky with fluffy clouds.

Madame and I were sitting in bed today, reading peacefully – she on her tablet and I was immersed in a book by Jan Morris called “The Matter of Wales” the title being a playful use of language in order to indicate the substance, the deep matter of the country. The book was mentioned in Carwyn Graves book “Tir” which I’ve now finished and recommend without reservation as a gentle pushback against some of the more extreme (destructive) advocates of rewilding. For Carwyn Graves the Welsh landscape embodies the history of Wales for better and for worse. History is written in the soil, the rocks and fields; the livestock, the farmers and their lives but especially in their stories and poetry. It’s a beautiful book, and completely by accident I met one of his interviewees in the pub in Bwlch but we only talked about our experiences as writers for the then local Bristol newspapers. As soon as I saw his name in the book I recognised my lost opportunity to talk to an award winning maker of perry – pear cider.

The two books – Graves and Morris take interestingly different approaches to their subject. The landscape for Carwyn Graves is perfused with recollections of the old ways; a form of living history and its lessons for us in the present day. For Jan Morris the landscape is a living being; writhing, roiling, joyful and melancholy by turns. The history here is inscribed in lives lived in the landscape. She’s a magnificent writer on Wales.

So there we were (I mean Madame and me!) in bed reading and we have rules. Silences are only broken by mutual consent – “can I just play this ?….. ” Today she played an old recording of Pentangle – the brilliant Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee with others – and in something of a Damascus moment I realized I’d left out music, and in what Flann O’Brien would have called a “Keats and Chapman” moment (without the terrible pun at the end); the whole landscape opened in front of me as if I were stood on a mountain top seeing the plains below receding in aerial perspective until the faint blue landscape reached the sea. Of course, you idiot! I thought -it’s language, history, literature, poetry, art, religion, drama and music. It’s the art of the kitchen table and the blackened pot suspended by its crân dân (fire crane) over a crackling fire, the blacksmith, the spinner and weaver, the shepherd, the singer and the traditional doctor, the understanding of plants, the wood carver and the brewer. One of the most inspiring paragraphs in Carwyn James ‘ book is his explanation of the way that in Welsh the word for culture isn’t the cocked finger, class ridden culture from across the Severn – but it also embodies all of the undertakings of ordinary people to advance the experience of being human. So emboldened by this thought I made some coffee, went into my room and guided by some odd instinct searched out a small book about Welsh folk medicine. I’ve known about the Physicians of Myddfai for many years in a more or less superficial way but I had no idea where Myddfai actually is. I had a strong idea of what I was intending to write but (as ever) no idea of how it would shape up so (also) as ever I hunted for a suitable photograph and came up with one I took of one of the three reservoirs which accompany the A470 across the Bannau Brycheiniog passing Pen y Fan. We stopped in a layby there for a brew-up and were joined by a couple of bikers from Merthyr Tydfil on their way to a campsite near Brecon. It seemed to me at the time that this was a near perfect view, but as I looked for the village of Myddfai on the OS map today, thinking to include the physicians who came from that area, I realised that the village was no more than a couple of valleys to the west of where I took the photo, and furthermore the foundational story/myth of these physicians involved a meeting between a farmer and a beautiful water goddess near a lake just like the one in the photograph.

My question would be – is it even possible to understand a landscape or a word in isolation from its whole culture. Many years ago we travelled by ferry and bus down to a small hamlet in southern Ireland for a holiday with friends. One of the friends owned a holiday cottage down there and knew some of the local people. One night we were introduced to two brothers who lived alone in a fairly squalid cottage just up the lane. The two brothers shared a bottle of Guinness with us and clearly thought we were pretty wealthy on account of one of us wearing a new pair of Docs. I had taken a small tape recorder with me and they told stories and sang songs to us provided we returned the offer with songs of our own. Our companions suffered a sudden attack of elective mutism and I sang a supporters song from Bristol Rovers which seemed to please them no end. Just to give a flavour of their lives, they told us that they had advertised in the Cork Examiner for a wife that they would share between them. The ad also generously noted that a pre-existing child would not be an obstacle! Anyway, it became very clear that their stories and songs of the Famine, and of the IRA battles of the past – not to mention a disastrous storm from some time in the distant past – all existed in their minds as if in the present. They sang and spoke of them as if they were still actually happening. It was a powerful example of what I’ve been thinking about in relation to Wales.

The photograph at the top was taken the day after my retirement ten years ago. I remember the journey because our youngest phoned just after the photo was taken with some kind of crisis and we had to abandon our plans and drive back to Bristol where we were still living. The photo and the memory belong together and can’t be separated.

So here I am ten years on, firmly resolved finally to speak and read Welsh. But the conglomeration of these thoughts has led me to the inevitable conclusion that this project goes much further than learning a bit of grammar and some words. The project is a kind of total immersion into the language; the broad culture, history and all the rest, in order that – finally again – I can see the Welsh plants in their broadest meanings, and I can see Welsh food and poetry, history and song as the Hegarty brothers saw their corner of southern Ireland – as essential to their humanity – daft and cruel as that might have seemed at the time. This is what I mean by using the phrase “learning by immersion” because it’s the absolute prerequisite for deep connection with any place in the world.

I’ve done a bit with the words already and I’m pleased to be able to write and say “good morning dragon” in Welsh, although I doubt if there will be any opportunities to use it, and so I’ve switched over to a different but well-connected course which is filling me equally with terror and hope. I can already say most of “I would like to learn to speak Welsh” without having to take a lie down in the middle. Madame has banned me from doing any practice in her presence. Oh and I’ve bought some – well quite a lot of – books. Learning by immersion, you see.

An open grassy field with a row of trees, possibly apple trees, under a cloudy sky, surrounded by rolling hills in the background.
One of the Marcher Network orchards near Cwmdu

Will the real Cornwall please stand up!

Lizard Point

I was just adding up and I’m pretty sure our first visit to the Lizard would have been in 1969 while we were at Falmouth Art School. It must have made an impression because when we moved to Bath Academy of Art in Corsham we went back for three weeks, camping in a heavy cotton tent on a farm for 50p a night with access to an outdoor toilet and a cold tap in the corner of the farm garden for washing. The farmer was an amazingly good looking young man with blond curls who was experimenting with milking three times a day. We quickly got through the small amount of money I’d earned as a temporary groundsman and I had to phone my sister for some additional funds. The journey down began with a car drive to Penryn with a friend who was visiting her brother and then after an overnight stay we caught a series of buses beginning outside the Methodist Chapel where they were singing in tongues so loudly you could hear it through the three foot granite walls. We finally arrived in Lizard hours later, just in time for a snack in the Regent Cafe on the green (still there). For some reason I’d brought my little portable Remington and a coffee percolator (I didn’t type a word the whole time we were there!), and everything we needed was packed into two rucksacks; mine was so tall I could barely lean to one side without toppling.

I was determined to walk across to Kynance Cove to camp, but I was equally determined to navigate across the most direct route rather than follow the coast path. On sober reflection and more than fifty years later I understand that every mark on an OS map has a meaning. Not least the little wavy blue lines that signify some very rough and waterlogged ground. I had no idea then what botanical treasures we were stumbling across. We finally made it across Lizard Down in the dark having scrambled down and up the precipitous sides of a valley quite unnecessarily and erected the little yellow tent on the first bit of flattish and dryish ground we could find. In the morning Madame went for a wee behind a rock, having barely slept a wink for fear of being inundated by the sea which – although it was noisy, was 100 feet below us – only to be approached by a phalanx of bemused walkers. We’d pitched the tent in the middle of the coast path. Words were spoken and we packed up and walked the coast path back to Lizard.

The three weeks were blissfully hot and we walked and sunbathed all day, discovering the small villages, eating at the cafe when we got back from our explorations and drinking at the pub in the evening. On one occasion I tried to drink every whisky on the bar while Madame had her first taste of brandy and Babycham. It didn’t end well and I banged my head on a farm shed lintel so hard that I saw stars. On other evenings we really did see stars; millions of them.

This was the holiday we discovered Cadgwith. We stopped off in Ruan Minor and found a little pop up cafe doing cream teas in the garden, and then we walked on down to the Cove and – although I couldn’t swear to it – I think we probably bought fresh crab. Cornwall had been a revelation to us; both of us born and brought up in Bristol and, for the first time, seeing Dracaenas, (which were Palm Trees as far as we were concerned), growing everywhere. The sea there, after the familiar mud soaked grey brown of the Bristol Channel, was a miraculous blue. It was there I discovered the name of the exotic looking clifftop weed called Kaffir Fig. It was there too that we saw the last few Choughs eking out a living before becoming extinct for several decades. Intensive farming and chemical cattle drenches finally did for them and almost did for the Ravens too. It was there that two intertwining threads were born in us; a passion for natural history and a passion for this extraordinary part of Cornwall.

When we go back anywhere along that coast, the first thing I do is take in a great draught of the air; of the sea, the grass, the cowpats in the fields – not the ammoniac stench of huge silos but crusting there on the grass for flies to lay eggs which hatch into maggots which in turn feed the Choughs. The second thing I do is to pause and listen to the sea, the wind and then the birds. Jackdaws, Choughs, Rooks, Crows, Magpies and even Ravens if you’re lucky – they’re all such voluble chatterboxes. The Lizard is known as a botanical hotspot which, translated, means there are so many plants I don’t recognize and can’t name, that I exist with a permanently cricked neck and spend the evenings poring over books and photos. I’m a slow learner.

Then for some reason we stopped going there. It felt overrun with tourists not like us, and the ambivalence of the Cornish towards us was occasionally hard to bear. Too many Tarquins and Cressidas; too many labradors; too many wannabe sailors and posh wetsuits; too much Guinea Fowl and too many places we could no longer afford to eat; too many times being ignored in the bar whilst the barking classes sharp elbowed their way to the front.

We eventually had three boys and for most of the time life was a struggle but we found a wonderful and cheap campsite in the extreme west of Wales with amazing beaches that you could only access on foot after a long walk; and where we could go skinny dipping if we felt like it and build driftwood bonfires on the sand. The boys were happy there and soon found friends among the AT (alternative type) campers. It was like Totnes by the sea. On one occasion one of the other parents asked us if it was really true that we cleaned our teeth with twigs – the boys had rather exaggerated our commitment to low impact living.

I was learning plants more quickly by this time – making long lists of them as we walked down the lanes, whilst barely keeping my head above water at work. There were several occasions when I drove back home – a 300 mile round trip – to take a funeral in the middle of a holiday. I always felt responsible, but we survived the worst that a few of the church congregation felt entitled to throw at us and gradually they left to attend other churches where the vicar was more malleable and would do as they were told. Pastoral care for us was a joke, because the bishops felt threatened by therapeutic groups that might reveal abuse and bullying in the Church of England.

One lovely summer we took three weeks off and went camping in West Wales and by the end I felt like a wildly excited dog, charging around the field. I think that was when I realized that some jobs will crush the life out of you if you let them. There was me preaching about life in all its fullness and slowly fading away myself. That summer I let my beard grow and when we got back one of the congregation told me I looked frightening. I felt that was a good start.

But what about Cornwall? One summer after the boys had left home and we were both working full time we’d arranged and paid for a holiday in the South of France and needed to hire a car which you can’t do without a credit card. That’s so the hire company can remove hundreds of pounds from your account without asking you, on the spurious grounds that you didn’t refill the tank until the fuel ran over your shoes. Anyway, the credit card never arrived, the holiday and our money were lost and three weeks later the bank rang to say that they’d found the card in a drawer in the office. No word of apology or any offer of compensation. Madame was devastated and I felt responsible but she immediately started searching for a new holiday. Needless to say looking for a campsite in August is tricky but she stumbled on a long established campsite in Cornwall that had just changed hands, which had led to a bit of a boycott by the longstanding patrons. So we were in, and found our Cornish heaven again. We’d had a couple of damp squibs in the intervening years. One cottage near St Ives, owned by another vicar, turned out to have walls running with damp and squatting in a sea of mud. The tenants on the farm looked terrifyingly inbred and we drove straight home again before the banjos and shotguns came out.

The new campsite on the Roseland Peninsula was everything we needed and had its own microclimate with its own flora. But working eighty hours a week precludes any serious botanising apart from a few short holidays and so we had to wait until we both retired and moved to Bath before we could settle to some serious plant hunting. Nowadays we alternate between the Lizard, Portscatho and the Llyn peninsula for longer breaks and do local field trips with the Bath Nats where there are abundantly qualified members to help us identify plants and fungi, even insects sometimes.

Cornwall is a difficult place to get your head around. I’ve often written about my attraction to post-industrial landscapes, which the county offers in abundance. There’s barely a square mile that hasn’t been dug up, turned over and mined. A century later it all looks like a film set; ferns growing tastefully from the crumbling pitheads against the pyramid backdrop of china clay spoil heaps; footpaths glistening with mica flakes; cliffs stained blue and green with copper and arsenic leaking from flooded mine adits.

And then there are the fishing villages. Hardly anyone outside the big ports like Newlyn and Penzance goes fishing any more, apart from a few small day boats after mackerel, crab and lobster to sell through the back door – but the fishing myth persists in a miasma of half remembered better days. It’s kept alive because we all need it to be kept alive. What cottage or pub connects better with the imaginary past than the one with a few coloured glass floats and a brass barometer on the wall? In the winter the pretty villages empty out and go dark. Village schools, churches and shops close every year as the locals move to damp and poorly maintained rentals inland.

But we go back like lemmings to the edge of the sea every summer because we need to feed some remote part of the soul that can’t be fed anywhere else. We take our own soul food; a few folk songs, remembered paintings, some Leach pottery maybe – because the essence of twenty first century life; the high wall that keep us chained to neoliberal stupidity is the constant erosion of historical memory. Memories of the real past, like languages don’t just wither away, they’re deliberately suppressed and the resulting holes are filled with the polystyrene foam of costume drama on TV. Cornwall is Poldark; Poldark is Cornwall. Believe what you like! Truth is so last year! A bit of wrecking or piracy or smuggling is OK, after all it’s only a film!

I suppose for a botanist, even a very amateur one like me, it would be simpler to ignore all that stuff and just enjoy the plant life. But there is a live interface between, for instance, unemployment and a dirty industry like lithium mining. Polluted land might provide a niche interest for people like me, but it’s polluted all the same. In West Penwith there’s a battle raging between Natural England and some of the local farmers. There are about 3000 hectares of moor and downland that constitute one of the largest semi natural sites in the country. We’ve walked the footpaths there for years. But nutrient enrichment and changed land use towards intensive farming is slowly destroying the habitat. There’s more heat than light in the debate because the farmers will be compensated for any effect on their income, but there’s no doubt that the way of life they’ve become accustomed to for – say – fifty years, will have to change. That’s a toughie because a fifth generation farmer didn’t sign up to become a nature warden and very properly wants a bit more flesh on the bones of how it’s all going to work. The problem is, organic change is very slow and incremental but the environmental crisis is more akin to a tsunami. There’s no time for a generational change and some farmers there find it threatening and oppressive to be told their traditional way of life is less important than a tiny plant or a spider.

The Cornish, like most threatened communities, have become defensive and suspicious of the government. The fishing industry has been hammered by brexit whilst simultaneously overfishing because you have to make hay while the sun’s shining. Lack of housing is a huge source of anger – it goes on. Tourism is a constant irritant; there are too many buy to lets and airBnb’s and, just as with the tin mining, much of the money is exported to the wealthier parts of the UK.

And yet ……. and yet, when the beach side building that houses fishing gear in Cadgwith came onto the market, threatening the livelihood of the last few fishing boats, the local community launched an appeal which was supported by people all over the country and the building was saved.

When we are there my greatest joy is to stand at the kitchen door of our rented National Trust cottage – in truth an otherwise derelict cattle shed – and absorb the smell and plangent sound of the sea against the rocks below. I don’t need to own it, or control it in any way. The thought of it just being there is a sustaining one when the going gets tough in Bath. A week is all it takes to fill the tank, and we’ll come home with dozens of photographs and maybe identify some never seen before (by us) plants, oh and we’ll eat fresh fish from the fishmonger in Porthleven, drink wine, sleep like innocents and feel the life running through our veins.

If there is a solution to the conundrum to the disconnect between real Cornwall and the competing fantasy versions, it will surely include tourists like us; but let’s make it sustainable tourism, buying locally to support small businesses, parking thoughtfully without blocking the lanes and respecting those who live there the year round. Let’s support any initiatives to bring sustainable non-polluting green jobs to the county and behave like ethical grownups!

Digging down

Priddy Pool

As it happens this post isn’t, strictly speaking, about allotmenteering or gardening, but about interrogating a landscape – to borrow a phrase from Alan Rayner of the Bath Natural History Society – “It’s about walking in nature rather than through nature.”

Dunnock egg

Our favourite way of exploring is to get to know a new landscape by walking all its byways and footpaths really intensively. In this case it’s revisiting a landscape after a gap of many years which has added an extra dimension altogether. I don’t think there’s anything particularly deep or spiritual about this way of walking; it’s just about intense attention to detail. The dunnock egg, for instance, was in the wrong place; many yards from any possible nest. It’s impossible to know why it was there, but probably it had been stolen and then abandoned.

What triggered this line of thought was using the idea of silence in my last posting. Today we were walking a linked series of old droves and as we made our way towards the starting point I realised that I could hear the sound of a dried and dead leaf scuttering across the road in the brisk wind. That’s silence. I could describe it as the matrix that holds all the sounds of a particular place together; an ocean in which sounds are made and scattered. Its a great sadness that such moments are so rare these days.

But there’s more. Coming back to this high country after many years, farming seems to have changed. Walking through the village everything looks much the same – the local authority have done their job in preserving its appearance – but from the inner landscape – the droves and footpaths, another picture appears. Old buildings that were once useful are now abandoned. Behind the unchanged roadside buildings massive new barns have sprung up as farmers have been forced to intensify or go out of business. The rich diversity of wildlife has become increasingly confined to reserves and after three days of walking we’ve yet to see an unimproved meadow. This isn’t an attack on farmers at all. They’ve somewhat heroically tried to do everything they were asked to do – not least to increase production at the expense of the soil and the environment in general. Every cottage that hasn’t been sold to second homers has been pressed into service for holiday lets and – in a situation I know only too well, a local mixed farming culture that developed over centuries has been homogenised and all but destroyed. I was only bleakly amused to meet an electrician installing CCTV cameras on a remote house to deter off-roaders in four wheel drives who, totally illegally, noisily tear the ancient drove road to shreds in rain and snow. The balance of power between locals and incomers has been destroyed and the parish council has, by all accounts, endured hostility as the entrenched pro and anti offroaders battle it out. The local school survives but we looked in vain for a shop. It occurred to me that the silence I was enjoying would have been punctuated by the sounds of dozens, if not hundreds of farm labourers and horses. Some silences are more malign than you might think. An absence of life is not what I was looking for.

And the earth in some places looked exhausted.

The landscape, it seems – and sorry about the long word – to be a palimpsest. The newest message inscribed upon the poorly erased messages of the past. Walking through nature you might never notice the difference, but walking in it forces us to embrace its mystery. The story told by the plants that survive in the most surprising corners where they escaped the predation of plough, fertiliser and pesticide.

And yet our hearts are still lifted by discovering new plants. Tonight – so long as the sky stays clear we might get a glimpse of the lyrid meteor shower – first described over two millennia ago, which adds up to a lot of wonder. God forbid I become just another grumpy old man. When it comes to landscapes I’m more Edward Thomas than RS Thomas.