Tag: Welsh history

Red Kite causing a food stink – and look who’s stirring the pot in Wales

Any guesses where this was taken?

I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.

We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.

Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.

The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.

Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.

Is botany nothing more than a science?

The Pilgrim church of St Maelrhys Church, Llanfaelrhys, near Aberdaron, Lleyn.

Buried in this churchyard are Elsi Eldridge, who was the wife of the poet RS Thomas; with their son Gwydion. RS married again after Elsi died and is buried near the door of St John’s Church Porthmadog. Also buried here is the lovely radical priest Jim Cotter who wrote the most wonderful prayers and liturgies. Needless to say the church Authorities had no idea what to do with him but he was an inspiring teacher and marvellous company and the bureaucratic incompetence of the Church of England gave him (and me) space to breathe. And finally the Keating sisters, friends of the Thomas’s, gardeners of their house Plas yn Rhiw – now owned by the National Trust – and scourges of coastal caravan sites are buried here too. All of them were artists. This churchyard is a powerful place for quiet reflection.

Well it’s a pound for the stone and thirty nine pounds for knowing what to do with it!

The quote came from a Gloucestershire stonemason I knew who was once asked how much he charged for a yard of drystone walling. When he gave the price the enquirer reacted with some scorn. “Forty pounds for a load of old stone?” – he replied. “well it’s a pound for the stone and thirty nine pounds for knowing what to do with it!”

Another secondhand book arrived in the post today. It’s called “Welsh Fare” and it was written by the anthropologist and researcher of tradition Welsh life, S. Minwel Tibbott who worked in the Welsh Folk Museum gathering and curating oral traditions. I found it in the bibliography of Carwyn Graves book, “Welsh Food Stories” which I mentioned last week. As soon as I opened the book and started to read through the recipes, the memory of the stonemason’s reply flooded into my mind, and it wasn’t so very long before the image of the churchyard on Lleyn joined him. Why so? well it was because the recipes list the very simplest ingredients without giving the slightest clue what to do with them, and knowing what to do with them has largely disappeared. Here’s a recipe for

Teisen Ddim – buttermilk scones

  • One pound plain flour
  • Quarter pound lard
  • A little salt
  • buttermilk

Rub the lard into the flour, and work in the other dry ingredients. Mix with buttermilk and knead to a soft dough. Roll out on a floured board and cut into small rounds, approximately a quarter of an inch thick. Bake on a moderately hot bakestone spread with butter and serve warm.

Llandeilo’r-fân and Heol Senni, Breconshire.

It’s all perfectly clear – except that unless you keep cows and make butter in the traditional manner by allowing the milk to separate overnight when it begins to ferment naturally, and then churn the butter in the traditional manner to separate butter from buttermilk; and unless you have a traditional bakestone and have learned what “moderately hot” feels like even assuming you have the means of heating it – well you’re not going to be able to bake the buttermilk scone.

Of course you can buy buttermilk from Tesco – except it’s not proper buttermilk but a factory made imitation – and the butter if it’s like the farmstead butter actually produced in old Welsh farmstead dairies, won’t be nearly as salty; like 3.5% salty – keeps better! And as for the lard you’d probably keep a large pot of pork lard which you could add to as you cooked joints from the fattened pig. Coincidentally it was Madame’s birthday yesterday so we had an extended family gathering and I slow cooked a whole shoulder of pork to make pulled pork for the boys and their partners. Even from a free range Gloucester Old Spot pig, shoulder is remarkably cheap and when you cook it very very (12 – 14 hours) slowly overnight it releases a huge amount of fat – dripping – which is ten times as rich and tasty as the bleached and purified block you slip into your shopping basket when you think no-one’s looking on disapprovingly. Finally the locally milled flour would have been rather darker and much more flavoursome than supermarket white. I used to bake with a marvellous 81% extraction white(ish) flour milled by Bacheldre Mill, now sadly no longer made. I hope I’ve made my point here. The simple list of ingredients tells us almost nothing if it’s become detached from its culture; and so – finally – I can leave the churchyard whose occupants once embodied a culture that’s largely disappeared, buried under second homers and Airbnb lets, and switch the topic to the so-called science of botany.

TV programmes on botany are as rare as hens’ teeth these days so we were filled with hope and excitement as we watched the first two episodes. The pleasure didn’t last. The unspoken assumption that ran through it like the writing in a stick of rock was the faintly smug and self congratulatory thought that traditional knowledge of plants was mostly held by deficient traditions which only needed some solid reductive science to reveal the truth. It reminds me of a story told to me about Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi – who according to legend, reproached a tour guide near to the Victoria Falls who had foolishly asserted that the Victoria Falls were discovered by the explorer David Livingstone. ” I think” – he said – “You’ll find that we knew about them long before Livingstone got there!” Bishop Henry visited us once when one of the boys was in peak teenage rebellion, and he so charmed the angry rebel (I just love your green hair) he almost curled up in his lap and purred like a cat.

So the programme rambled on in a more or less predictable way through the history of scientific botany without so much as a mention of traditional herbal medicinal wisdom and without any sense of the vast contribution of the ancients from Dioscorides onwards. The plant kingdom was just treated as another exploitable resource to be catalogued, analysed and turned into a profitable enterprise. No sense of wonder, no mention of the inter-relatedness of all living things, no mention of the profoundly important role of plants in synthesising complex compounds beyond the reach of organic chemistry (which is by far the more interesting thing about photosynthesis and fungal networks). The last programme comes out tonight and I’m dreading the triumphal moment when the presenter announced that we’ve cracked some sort of code – probably gene editing – and finally we can exploit the poor old plants in any way that turns a profit. Wheat berries as big as pineapples or some such nonsense.

It rather reminds me of a line from Peter Shaffer’s play “Equus” – “Without worship you shrink”. To approach nature without humility, armed with scanning electron microscopes and DNA analysis misses a large part of the point. Of course I’m pleased when science discovers a new cure for malaria, or breast cancer or whatever else by understanding plants better. But plants aren’t just there for us to exploit – and misunderstanding that essential point is leading us towards extinction.

*** I just watched the last programme – it exceeded my misgivings so now I’m really scared.