Tag: inner landscapes

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

Taking a flail mower to the inner landscape.

Winter scene – taken just outside Priddy today

There’s a long walk around the village of Capel y Ffin in the Black Mountains that takes you up Hatterall Hill at just over 530 metres above sea level and joins the Offa’s Dyke path. Walking west along the ridge you come to a track that’s a lot easier to find with GPS, down past Vision farm. You drop steeply down into the valley, cross the Honddu river by a bridge and then climb up the other side through Capel, passing the ruins of the monastery there, and uphill until you reach a second ridge that offers the most spectacularly airy views of Hay Bluff and across into Wales. Turning left you follow the ridge, keeping an eye open for a single wind blasted thorn, several miles further on and which is the only clue to the whereabouts of a path leading back down the valley to Llanthony Abbey and the starting point. It’s about ten, maybe twelve miles, I suppose – a fine walk in any weather although there’s no shelter from sun, wind or rain and it can get a bit gloopy in winter. That thorn tree is an essential part of the navigation. If you miss it you let yourself in for a long and difficult thrash.

The image came to mind today as I was struggling to make sense of the confusion I am feeling at the prospect of yet more restrictions and growing numbers of deaths from the Omicron Covid variant. Hefting – to use the phrase that describes that way sheep “belong” to particular parts of their fells is a powerful description of an attachment that goes far beyond owning an internal sheepy satnav. Hefting includes within its meanings the knowledge of particular plants for food; of water; of shelter from storms; of tracks of use only to sheep who have different purposes than careless walkers. Hefting embeds ancient inherited knowledge within a whole landscape – an almost sacramental image combining outward form with inner grace; shared – and here’s the point – between sheep and shepherds. I remember once talking with a farmworker in his seventies who could point out, and actually name a field on an east-facing slope of the Forest of Dean, a mile away across the River Severn.

It’s an important clue to the way it feels to be human, here in this place and at this moment in time. Covid, brexit, the collapse of social care, appalling and uncaring politics and the impossibility even of seeing a doctor when their answering machine says – “If it’s an emergency dial 999 and if it’s not – talk to your pharmacist”; all add up to the feeling of walking on a rainy and windblown ridge and discovering that every single waypoint has been taken down. The thorn bush that’s always been there as a pointer to the way home, is gone. You feel lost.

And so, today – much to Madame’s bewildered amusement – I just had to drive up to High Mendip to make sure it was still there, even if it was too wet to get out of the car and too misty to see beyond a hundred yards. “God it’s bleak up here”, she said, and I thought to myself that its bleakness may have been its saviour.

When someone’s taken a flail mower to your inner landscape you have this primal urge to find a place that you know, and that – in some strange way – knows you. I’ve explored Priddy’s underground streamways and passages with more moments of sheer terror than bliss; seen the power of the water reshape an entire cave system in a single night, and then retraced my steps sixty years later walking the map above ground. It’s a three dimensional landscape for me ….. or could it be four? My son gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book – a collection of essays – for my birthday this weekend. Here’s something truly significant that she writes towards the end of the preface:

In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, spirit. The scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind. In order to tell the mosses’ story I need both approaches, objective and subjective.

“Gathering Moss” – Robin Wall Kimmerer – published 2021 in the UK by Penguin Books.

You need to know that Kimmerer is both a scientist, professor of environmental biology and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. But you don’t have to be a First Nation American to embrace the earth in its totality. There was never a more important moment in human history to turn away from the narrow vision of the reductionist arrow slit to embrace the intensity and difficulty of the whole. For me, the emotional and spiritual connection to landscape -and not just wild places and countryside, but the towns and cities in which we are also hefted – these connections are being tested like never before. We are being shriven by the weather of events, huddling beneath the walls, waiting for a spring that’s failed us now, for two years, and fearing that there is no shepherd to lead us down to food and shelter.

For each of us the equivalent of my blasted thorn will be different. The signs that guide us to safety are rarely the ones erected at great public expense – like the statue of Edward Colston, in Bristol – in order to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. The Post Office and corner shop, the local pub, the tatty GP surgery, the school where the teachers remember your name thirty years later, the alleyways and steps, the bus stop that’s always hosted the number four bus, the sweet shop of your childhood that suddenly and overnight turned into a bookies on the day you finally understood why your grandfather would send you up to give a note to the shopkeeper and occasionally bring an envelope back – evidently not a rebate on sweets. When the flail mower visits your own blasted thorn you feel lost and sad; and if there’s a calculus for feeling lost then I have lots of data.