LAND OF MY FATHER: JASPER REES ON WALES

Jasper Rees is an Englishman with Welsh roots. After neglecting them for years, he decided it was time to explore them. So he drove right around Wales ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

You have to pay to get in. The cost, if you’re in a car, is £5.40 ($10). Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker. “Diolch.” Thank you. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers. There’s not initially much difference from the foreign field back at the other end of the Severn bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. An unremarkable town or two. Grey clouds flattening the light. Croeso i Gymru, said the sign.

Am I really welcome to Wales? I’ve been coming here since before I can remember, the ancestral call dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. We ploughed over the old bridge—which back then was new—westward-bound along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to get from the toll gate to my grandparents 90 miles away in not much more than an hour. South Wales was reduced to a race against time, a chain of conurbations whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. This was my father’s twice-yearly speed-trip back to his Welsh childhood. Quite early on in mine, the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services: gwasanaethau. Parking: parcio. How we laughed at that one—the foreign language indebted to the master. All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin. Merlin’s Castle.

I make a left turn. An empty road delivers up pretty villages with English names: Summerleaze, Redwick, Goldcliff. I’ve always sailed past this pocket of Wales. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh, in fact, but Dutch. I follow a track down until a forbidding sea wall blocks the view. Setting foot on Welsh soil, I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water. It’s hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. It’s hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. I’ve wanted to know this for ever. Which is why I am here.

My father was of that generation that was sent to school in England and never really came back. Wales was educated out of him. His emotional detachment from the scenes of his youth manifested itself in a ritual we performed every time we turned for home in a series of monstrous Range Rovers. As we crossed the bridge back into England, he made us all cheer. I could never quite work out what Wales had done wrong, but I swallowed the story that England was where it was at. Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales it would be under my own steam. An awareness soon budded as I visited my grandmother—my grandfather having died when I was 20—that we had been hoodwinked. But hold on, I remember being shocked to realise one evening as loafy hills bronzed in the slanting sunlight, Carmarthenshire’s gorgeous.

That yearning to belong has had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. I’ve never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love it. It’s like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen. There seems to be just the one way round this state of ignorance, and that way is round Wales. This is what I’m proposing to do. Go all the way round, sticking—because there must be rules—to the road closest to the sea. I see it as an obsessive-compulsive search for my inner Welshman. I’m attracted by the project of putting a girdle around a whole country. Besides, I bet it’s not been done much. If at all.

With that, I clamber down from the sea wall, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map, put the milometer back to zero, and turn the ignition.

What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although they have a more resonant word for it: Cymreictod. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts.

Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble into the sea. Along the edge of Offa’s Dyke, delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds that howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.

There’s a ton of driving to do—it’s nearly 800 miles of narrow lanes and fast lanes around the Welsh rim—but at strategic points I get out of the car and walk. And walk. Strategic because, weather permitting, in each place it’s usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. From the Rhossili cliffs on the Gower to the lighthouse on Caldey Island; from St Anne’s Head at the mouth of the vast natural harbour of Milford Haven, to the headlands of St David’s; from the tiny fishing village of Llangrannog up to the river-mouth towns of Aberaeron and Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi; from the miles of beach at Harlech to the multitude of beaches on the Llyn peninsula. Up on Edward I’s turrets at Caernarfon I can look along the north coast towards the Great Orme, the hulk of rock above Llandudno. And then down the hundred-mile chain of uplands which guard the border all the way back to the Severn.

And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they say in Welsh, and I can’t see beyond the fence. Mostly, though, clouds choose not to muster, there are no avalanches of fog cascading from the hills, but that’s because the weather is much better on the coasts than reputed. The sun is free to pick out vibrant blues and greens, seas and meadows partitioned by tongues of white sand and seams of black rock.

The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. On the one hand I can see for miles. One miraculous dusk I sit on a dry-stone wall and take in the entire 60-mile semi-circular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bristle beyond the shore. I’ve only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, and beyond it the whole grand commotion of North Wales erupting. In short, Wales doesn’t go far.

On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology. The trip started and ended at sea level, but the nerd in me would be keen to know the metres climbed and plummeted. I can turn a corner and find just about anything sheltering there. The narrow opening to a splendid estuary, its meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train. An elegant county town hibernating in the fold of a hill. An aqueduct riding supremely overhead. A crumbling abbey long abandoned by Cistercians.

I stop at an abbey for a night. My uncle is a monk on Caldey, the little island across the water from Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The White Monks have been here since 1929, although there is proof of rather more ancient worship in the sixth-century Ogham script carved into the Caldey Stone in St Illtyd’s church. My uncle lived most of his life in England. After his mother—my grandmother—finally died at 96, he answered a summons. Unlike his younger brother—my father—he never felt the tug of elsewhere as strongly as the magnetic pull of home. The Welsh word for it is hiraeth, for which the pallid English equivalent is “longing”.

To the outsider—in this case me—it seems a hard life. In winter they wear a lot of layers under their robes. However cold it is, the brothers join prayer at 3.15 in the morning. One of my uncle’s duties is to sound the reveille, so he gets up at 2.45 and fortifies himself with a mug of tea. Other tasks include being an archivist, measuring rainfall for the Met Office and packing shortbread. But his time is mostly devoted to devotion. The monks measure out their days in Latin appointments: Terce, Sext, None (pronounced with a long o). Whenever I visit him my uncle is like the White Rabbit, always looking at his watch.

The simple life extends to the kitchen—the abbey is no place for carnivores. The evening I eat supper in the refectory is an exception—it’s a feast day and a nice paella is left over from lunch. “Absolutely no talking in here,” he tells me sternly as we go in. A silent order strikes me as an odd choice for a man of many words— he’s very Welsh in that sense—and in the kitchen afterwards the brothers are all yakking their heads off. The next morning my uncle walks me to the boat. I’m the only passenger going back to the mainland as day-trippers from Tenby step off onto the quay. He stands among them in his robes, white hair cropped above bony shoulders, and it occurs to me that my Cistercian uncle is a good advert for repatriation. Wales has rejuvenated him. With perhaps a bit of help from above.

I return to the road, where the binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society’s rearguard action that this is the only country I know where I can be driving to two places at once: one with an English name, the other with the name it was created to replace. To the uninitiated, Welsh words can look like anagrams of themselves. I try to exhume a grandson’s sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych y Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and Gwyr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I’m sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Cyrillic. It’s as if they’re encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Other words are pure poetry. Why on earth say Cardiganshire when there’s Ceredigion?

And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent in the south-west swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd to the north, delicate wispy vowels flutter upwards as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while farther south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier with England.

And yet the stony imprint of past incursions is inescapable all around the Welsh perimeter. The Romans left their DNA not only in buildings but in the names for them: ponts and porths and cestyll (the plural of castell). One day I wander through Valle Crucis, perhaps the most beautiful of the abbeys erected by the Cistercians who, until the Hundred Years War, answered to the mother abbey in France. My favourite castle planted by the French-speaking Plantagenets is at Harlech. One day I walk for miles along the lengthy shore it guards, and have no company but sea birds.

Wales is a broth, thousands of years in the brewing. So perhaps there is no point in trying to pin down the moment when I felt most at home. It could have been the places I associate with my grandmother—rather more than my grandfather, who was a remote and taciturn figure. I used to be slightly afraid of him in his plus-fours as he poured throat-rasping ginger beers. My grandmother dispensed scones, cuddles and complex jumpers she would spend the year knitting. “Bach” she used to call us—little one—for years the only Welsh word I knew. They married in 1927. She was one of two children, he one of nine children, and they all married. My grandparents were, so far as I know, the only ones to stay in Wales, and she was the last of the 20 to die. I think of her in Llansteffan, where a broken-toothed old castle still proudly commands the heights above the Tywi estuary. From the many times she brought us here I retain a strong memory of old women and sticks, and the train sweetly chugging along the other shore. And then I think of her again when I get to Porthmadog, the pretty port where the slate fetches up after the scenic train ride down from Blaenau Ffestiniog. It’s the first time I’ve been to the place where she grew up. I never realised that every day she could feast her eyes on one of the most beautiful views in Britain, across wide marshy pastures towards Snowdonia. The sight is so beautiful, it comes as a fresh shock to me that by the time I knew her, North Wales was a memory to my grandmother.

If there was a moment when I most felt a surge of connection, it was on the last day. I spent the morning in Hay-on-Wye, looking for a paperback about the two Ladies of Llangollen who famously introduced the concept of the beautiful lesbian friendship to Georgian Britain. The day before I’d spent a couple of hours looking round their exquisite nest, Plas Newydd (or New Hall), full of quirky black timbering and doll’s-house detail. I spent as long in Hay hunting the book down, and eventually I found a dog-eared Penguin and returned vindicated to the car. Slowly through hedge-heavy lanes I climbed until several hundred feet higher I was up in another world: the rampart of the Black Mountains (those Mynyddoedd Duon). A thin ribbon of road traversed a bald summit—or penfoel, as they call it. The grass was dotted with dark sheep droppings. A fierce wind dragged the ambient temperature downwards. Gobbets of rain spat from restless clouds overhead. A world away from the trim civility of the little forest of bookshops below, I stood and looked far into England and farther into Wales. Up here, such questions as who comes from where are rushed away on the gale. I belong, I said to myself. I’ve circled this glorious country and I hope I feel I belong.

Fired by the surprise of this new feeling, I drove on, along the curving edge of mountains, back through the tree line and into a densely wooded valley. The lane, narrowed by foliage, plummeted. A stream kept it company. Eventually the road came to somewhere near the bottom. Fields fanned out either side, and agricultural buildings made their presence known. And then, on the left, was another ecclesiastical ruin nestling under a tall slope in the lee of the wind.

Llanthony Abbey is close to perfect. It’s rumoured that St David, the nation’s patron saint, lived here as a hermit. True or not, that was enough to persuade one and then another hermit to follow suit in the early 12th century. An Augustinian monastery was soon endowed, but within three decades the 40 monks had been driven over the border by the weather and the Welsh. In the next century a priory was built. One night in 1327 it housed the dethroned Edward II, shortly to be murdered. After the dissolution of the monasteries the buildings crumbled. Two hundred years ago Walter Savage Landor bought the estate, fired by dreams of picturesque rural seclusion, but he vanished abroad and left his creditors and mother nature to continue the dilapidation. It was in this semi-naked state that Turner captured Llanthony’s lonely ravishing roofless essence. There’s something ineffably Welsh about a place where saints and kings, writers and painters all experienced the hermit’s solitude. And now me too.

That’s another of the great things about Wales. It’s not just that the sheer foreignness of England’s neighbour is overlooked. It’s the emptiness. I say it with a slightly heavy heart, but there doesn’t seem much doubt that more people will eventually choose to cotton on to Wales’s extraordinary beauty, thanks to global warming and the global downturn. And no sea wall will be able to protect Wales’s lonely corners from inundation.

There’s a bit more driving to do, incorporating one minor disaster. As I descend towards Tintern Abbey along the south-meandering Wye, the road randomly jerks left across a bridge into Gloucestershire and proceeds for four agonising miles along the English bank before ducking back into Wales. I have to control an urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint—but there are only so many country lanes that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take. Eventually the valley drags me towards Chepstow.

The Wye, which began its journey on the same distant mountain as the Severn on the other side of Wales, rounds a final Welsh castle and consummates a muddy reunion as one river spills into the other under the old bridge. I cross to leave Wales and return to the other side. I do not cheer.

(Jasper Rees writes arts interviews for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. "I Found My Horn", his book about relearning an old musical instrument, was published in January.)

Picture Credit: geraintwn, papalamour, qbiq, Richard0 (all via Flickr)