Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  The toll is collected “on the English side,” as the old complaint has it. It’s free to get out of Wales. You pay to go in. (Quite right too, because from the very outset Wales offers up her beauties. We should pay. I mean you should pay.)

  Paul and I took a lift up, through the box structure, to the top of the tower, to get a look into the Welsh heartland from a superlative viewing platform. The prospect defined Wales, because even from a height of 445 feet my view ahead was already blocked by rising hills. The Land of my Fathers becomes the Hillside that keeps a Welcome and the Valley that is unquestionably Green almost immediately.

  My eyes, however, were hardly fixed on the distant horizon; they kept being drawn back to what lies beneath. The car deck had shrunk to become a sliver of road, traversed by models. Below that, a swathe of dirty water spread in the feathered patterns of great tidal movements. We felt high: too high not to automatically reach for a handrail for security.

  “This first bridge was the more expensive bridge,” Paul was explaining as he leaned down and started to tackle me up. “It was aerodynamically designed and no expense was spared.” He was reaching around under my arms and attaching a colossal safety belt. “But the other one was safer. Eleven men died building this thing. One fell off into the concrete mixer and they never got him out, so now we take safety very seriously indeed.”

  Soon there were four supports dangling from my harness. Two were long, two short and all of them ended in a big clip shackle. The thing felt as cumbersome as a suit of armour.

  “Of course, the oldest crossing is the tunnel. That runs out there.” He pointed to the water by the other bridge as he took me by the arm. “That was Brunel’s great achievement. It remains in use but it still floods. They hit a spring and they had to pump out the water. They still do. It’s used to make beer.”

  We were now standing by the northern cable. The bridge is literally suspended. The main cables are each made up of 8,322 individual 5mm wires. It needs constant monitoring by a team of experts who simply walk out onto it to make their inspections.

  “It’s steepest up here and gets flatter as you go along. You might basically continue your walk right the way down it and into Wales,” Paul laughed. “Except you wouldn’t be in Wales at all. Despite having crossed the Severn Bridge, you are still in England.” He pointed to another smaller suspension bridge that finished the crossing. “That’s the Wye Bridge,” he explained.

  And for the first time, despite having travelled both the Wye and the Severn, I realised that the bridge actually crossed both rivers just before they join together. Ironically, these rivers begin life within a hundred yards of each other up in the Plynlimon Mountains behind Aberystwyth. They take widely separate trajectories to meet again in tidal waters.

  Paul was joking about the walk down, but he was not joking about a stroll on the cable. My task now was to saunter out and follow some of the engineers on an inspection.

  I have no particular fear of heights. I have abseiled off skyscrapers, my dears. Only three times in my life have I ever been overcome by vertigo. The first time was when I was hauled up a ship’s mast. The second time was on a snow-covered ridge on Suilven, in the far north of Scotland. This was the third.

  My guide went ahead and I was invited to follow. There were two hand rails. My shackles and supporting lines were attached to rails on both sides. But the cable, on which I tentatively put my foot, was spherical, encased as it was in a metal protective sheath. I immediately felt that I might slip off it. But I couldn’t slip. I mustn’t slip.

  This sheathing seemed insecure as a footfall. There was no reason for that insecurity. It was a big, fat, round thing, about three foot across I reckoned. But that made it worse. And it sloped down. That made it untenable.

  I was wearing my new walking boots, still flecked with estuary mud. They seemed clod-hopping and clumsy. My feet now shrank inside them to become amoeba feet. They felt unable to connect with any surface. I stared at them, willing them to move on, but the problem was clear. Beyond my feet I was looking directly downwards onto the miniature deck, hundreds of feet below, swarming with hurrying, tiny cars, and below that, to compound the sense of height, the tide itself, swirling and gyrating.

  Oh God. I was far less at risk than if I had stood on a coffee table. If I slipped, the support belts would certainly hold me, but I could not seem to convince my brain, my subconscious or my mortal self of that fact.

  The idea was that I would help carry out an inspection by squatting down and unscrewing a plate. Now I was talking slowly and they could all hear the hollow cadence in my voice.

  I looked up. My guide had a puzzled frown. It wasn’t lifting the inspection hatch that concerned him. He was wondering what he would do if I froze into a blob of iced panic jelly. So I laughed. A big mistake, because now I sounded positively maniacal too, and I stepped forward. That felt terrible. It got no better. The cable was steady. The wind was light. I was terrified.

  We probably went no further than ten yards down and out, over yawning space. I pretended to be interested in the inspection hatch. Then they turned me around, by releasing each of my retention straps and re-connecting them one by one. I mechanically forced my arm to twist over and grip the other side of the rail before I tiptoed my way back to the platform.

  Having got there and gripped the railing I turned and smiled wanly at the guys who gambolled about on that tube on a daily basis.

  They smiled back.

  – DYKE STUFF –

  The bridges and tunnels are a modern gateway to Wales: a conquest of the muddy sluice of the Severn. A little way up the west bank, however, but still in England, I went in search of older, longer and cruder civil engineering: a monument to something far more mysterious – vanity, power or paranoia: you choose. I was startled to find that we don’t really know what Offa’s Dyke really is.

  For a start it is less a dyke than a rampart.

  Beginning in a little grove of trees, on the top of a cliff, a substantial wall of earth (with a well-trodden path on top of it) snaked away to the north. I have walked in “Boudicca’s encampment” in the middle of Epping Forest. I have stood on the raised humps of many Iron Age forts. Though dating from a similarly foggy period, this was a bigger deal than any of those minor wrinkles in the carpet.

  Jim Saunders, the Offa’s Dyke path officer for nearly 20 years, joined me some ten feet above the surrounding fields. Had we wanted to, we could have followed the rampart for about 150 miles to Prestatyn (or perhaps to the Dee Estuary). There is some dispute as to whether the whole ditch and wall should be attributed to Offa, and archaeologists have argued about which bit of dyke was built when, but it is indisputable that here is the longest ancient monument in Britain and possibly even Europe, and one about which almost nothing can be ascertained.

  Offa, a “vigorous” powerful Christian king, ruled most of southern England between 757 and 796AD. He seems to have subdued East Anglia and sorted out Kent. There are fine coins with his bulbous face on them. George Borrow, in his classic, Wild Wales, noted that at one time “it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it”. These are most likely fictions, but this rampart certainly has its ditch on the Welsh side. It also skirts around the western side of any hills, so it seems that people on the wall were able to look out into Wales… for what purpose? Welsh marauders, invaders or sheep-stealers, one supposes, possibly erroneously.

  Offa certainly fought campaigns against the Welsh in 778, 784 and 796. But revisionist historians have decided that the dyke might be a giant vanity project. “You want to know how big and powerful a king I am, then look on my mighty mud heap and despair.”

  As Jim and I lumbered up hills and down into valleys, watched by curious cows, warbling birds and a camera crew, I could only marvel at this
manmade lump. I know from bitter personal experience that the most expensive hobby in the world is neither horse racing nor yachting but landscaping.

  They planned to build the Severn Bridge just after the war and finally got it done twenty years later. By all accounts, or, let’s be strictly accurate, by one account, given by Asser and written 200 years after the event in his “History of Alfred the Great”, they knocked this wall up in a similar stretch of time, using leather buckets, 1300 years ago.

  Or maybe not. My mind was already more boggled by this ditch than it had been by the view from the top of the bridge. And now I wanted to follow it all the way to Prestatyn, crossing back and forth with it in and out of Wales as we went. But I had to leave. I was supposed to be exploring the Land of My Fathers (and singing it), and I hadn’t even got into the country yet.

  – WELSH CHEPSTOW –

  I took the fine 1816 cast-iron bridge and crossed into Chepstow and thus into Wales, wondering how Welsh this border town really could be. “Welsh enough for the inhabitants to pass the other way to get a drink in England on Sunday nights not so long ago,” I was told by Ivor, whom I met on the waterfront.

  What a strange outlook we had too. We sat on a bench on the quayside, gazing across at an English limestone cliff with a Union Jack painted, provocatively, halfway up a stone face, next to a reputed smuggler’s cave. Ivor pointed out that it was now occupied as a vantage point by a pair of breeding ospreys, who sat watching us watching them. The River Wye trickled along somewhere deep below us in a gut, waiting for the tide to rise in a mad bath of muddy water and bring its surface up to where we were sitting.

  Despite the empty channel, Chepstow was the biggest port in Wales in medieval times, renowned for the importation of wine and the exportation of timber and bark from the nearby Wye valley and the Forest of Dean. Clinging to the pinnacle of another cliff to the left was William FitzOsbern’s castle: an English toehold in Wales and often cited as the oldest surviving stone castle in Britain. It is a symbol of the Norman appetite for conquest. This was “Marcher” country. The threat of “border trouble” meant that extra powers were given to families like the Bigods, who then became so mighty that it took centuries to bring them back under control.

  Monmouthshire became a non-partisan land. It was left out of Henry VIII’s reforming laws of Wales so it remained partly attached to England. When they required higher justice, its inhabitants had to appeal to the Old Bailey, not to Carmarthen, and it was only as recently as 1974 that it officially became part of Wales. So one might assume that its population would gravitate towards England. Apparently not. They fall to Wales. In Chepstow people take their Welshness seriously, including the language. Ivor himself was learning Welsh.

  He took me along to his class, meeting in the gatehouse of the town and attended by people of all ages and sexes. Perhaps I would be able to sort out some of my difficulties with the National Anthem.

  – LAND OF MY DIPTHONGS –

  “Chhh!” We began with sounds. My Aunty Megan used to chide me for saying Welsh was difficult. “Bach” with that extra “ccchhh”. Like hawking. My Dad called me “Griffith Bach” when I frustrated him, as I so often did. It has that guttural noise that we Saxon-educated outsiders can’t get used to.

  In fact everybody Welsh seems to chide me for finding it difficult. Tudor, the cameraman, and Brian on sound chided me for finding it difficult. Celyn, the assistant producer, chided me and it was her mother Heulwen doing the teaching now.

  “Stick your tongue up against your teeth and blow through it.”

  “Lllll.”

  “Now you can say Llanelli”.

  And I could. In 1977 the Voyager satellite was sent up to space in search of intelligent life with greetings in 55 different languages, one of which was Welsh.

  Research suggests that there are as many as 750,000 Welsh speakers in the world. I am not even close.

  I once went to Conwy to round up some wild ponies and the farmer greeted me with enthusiasm. “Well, Griffith Rhys” he said, “I’m a Rhys myself. Don’t you just hate it when people pronounce your name wrong.” I nodded vacantly, suddenly conscious that I must have been pronouncing my own name wrong for my entire life.

  There is an “h” in there, you see, and the Welsh hit every part of the true spelling, so that it can be heard. It’s not Rees or Rice, it’s R-hees. I spend hours trying to master the right rolling “arr” followed by the distinct click of the “h” and I never managed it without stumbling over my own teeth.

  But here I am again, willing, but frankly too old to turn on the sixpence in my own gob. “Gwlad…” we sing in the anthem. “In fact we sing it again, to give it extra emphasis. “Gwlad”.

  “And its not a “you” or a “double you”, it’s an “oo”, but hatefully it looks like “glad” so my fuzzy brain still keeps trying to make it sound like that. I have a long way to go. And I feel dismal. At my age, did I have the capacity to learn the language of my fathers? That could be discovered. But did I have the will? That was a more complicated proposition.

  – WITH A PADDLE –

  Canoeing was an easier skill to master, but we had to catch the tide. The brown sludge at the base of the canyon, beneath the flange of mud, below the bank of bilious salt marsh, had started boiling and frothing northwards just after lunch. With almost 50 feet of tidal difference between low and high tide, that flood had once brought old sailing ships shooting up the estuary (and beyond for another five miles) and we needed to catch it.

  I have canoed on the Wye before. (Here we are, going round in circles again.) In the programme “Rivers”, we came south on what was voted the nation’s favorite river in 2010. I learned to kayak and shoot rapids near Ross. Now we formed a posse intent on going the other way.

  We manhandled the long canoes over the wall at the edge of the quay, slid them down the grab-rails on top of a bridge to a pontoon and plopped them into the water.

  “Avoid the buoys,” Graham told me. He pointed. The flow was so strong that it dragged these obstacles half-under and rendered them almost invisible. We were four in separate vessels. I knelt forward on my haunches, wedged my bum against the little rattan seat and pushed out into the coffee-coloured stream.

  We were quickly swept away. The tide shot us under the bridge and past the castle and soon we were following what had once been Britain’s first tourist route.

  Excited by the renown of the scenery and the philosophy of “the picturesque”, packages of eighteenth-century aesthetes had followed a trail of wonders identified for them by William Gilpin. Their routes were carefully organised to allow them to see specific sites, sites which, if caught at exactly the right angle, even contained within portable frames, presented the composition and proportions of a proper picture. That was the point. Nature was at its best if organised. We were less fussy. We just paddled and gawped.

  “It’s still a canoeing mecca for enthusiasts from all over Europe”, Graham told me.

  Tourists had been drifting up and down this famous river for centuries and yet, around the bend from Chepstow, we seemed to drop into the Canadian outback. The river was unspoilt. The Welsh side rose up in a sharp cliff, smothered in mature trees, a tapestry of contrasting greens on this sunny July day. On the English side, a few dun cows grazed in a meadow.

  A gentle poke with my paddle kept me on course, past water meadows and overhanging alders. Graham, my guide, had first taken me kayaking ten years before. He had stood high on a bank and watched me paddle into Ross-on-Wye and told my assistant that I was doing it wrong.

  My assistant, with considerable glee, promptly told me, “You’re doing it all wrong, you know.”

  I didn’t. Up to that point I had no idea there was a right way and wrong way to paddle.

  Subsequently I have been instructed and inspected. But I like to paddle on both sides. One paddle on one side: dip and pull. Then across over to
the other side: dip and pull. It always seemed natural to me. Like rowing, you control your pace and direction with opposing strokes. But I shouldn’t do that. A proper canoeist squats down and paddles on one side only, steering the course by feathering the paddle.

  It worries me to be with canoeists who do it correctly because I think they probably think I am a dork, so I remember to do it right for a bit, and then do it wrong for a bit and the pleasure that I once took in canoeing is entirely gone.

  The river was lovely, though.

  – A LOAD OF BELLS –

  We landed back in England, opposite the ruins of Tintern Abbey, slithering up the steep bank between overgrown reeds. I had to cross back by another handsome steel bridge and I was in Wales again.

  I had been singing while tramping, and I set off across a meadow now, bellowing out what I could remember of the national anthem. I had been supplied with a phonetic version.

  My hen oo-lad vurr n’had-die un ann-wil ee mee

  goo-lard bay-rdd a chann-tor-eon

  enn wog eon o vree

  ane goo-rol ruvv-el-weir

  goo-lard gar-weir tra mard

  dross rudd-id cor-llar-sant ay goo-eyed.

  Any use? Well yes, up to a point. It doesn’t really seem to fit the music. It was also more confusing than the written Welsh. And that real, written Welsh kept intervening anyway. My grasp of the actual words and what they stood for was almost non-existent.

  Tudor was all over me. “You’re still putting a double u in “gwlad”.

  I was sure I was. I liked the “enn wog eon o vree” bit, it made some sort of muscular vocal sense. But there never seemed to be enough room for all the tongue and palette manoeuvres that the surprisingly short third sentence required.

  I am sure Welsh is not a challenging language to learn. Nor is Chinese. But Chinese is rendered into the most simple of Latin phonetics. “Dong fang hung, tai yang shen,” goes the Chinese National anthem – especially if sung by Winston Churchill. It’s not very close to the correct Cantonese inflection or pronunciation. Some even consider it slightly racist. But you get by. An entire coach of mainland Chinese once joined with my rendition of “The East is Red” on a motorway running through Hong Kong. Not many Welshmen would have done the same in Tintern as I trudged across that hayfield. I later discovered that my rural idyll had ruined the hay even more than the song.