Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Later, however, when I finally got to see a river emerging from the cave, several miles from the factory, I began to understand the science of it all. My guide was Gary, a caving enthusiast. He explained that the southwestern extremities of the Brecon Beacons are “Karst Country”: a geologist’s term for a limestone landscape.

  Limestone is created by the skeletons of sea creatures, deposited on an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years ago. They died so we could cave and sup clean water. The movement of the earth’s crust crushed this stuff into layers of rock. It was laid down in an ocean in the Tropics and made its way to Wales by creaking and juddering across the surface of the planet.

  Limestone is eroded by water but in a gratifyingly slow manner. (Everything in geology takes ages – especially the explanations.) Water and lime together create a light carbonic acid. This eats holes into the solid rock: potholes if they are vertical and caves if they are horizontal. Cavers like Gary thrust themselves bodily through fissures and cracks in the stone in order to explore these holes and discover and enjoy (in their own fashion) many kilometres of passages and voids hung with lengthy icicles of rock (which have also taken an inconceivably long time to form). Water just drips through.

  The Beacons are a caving hotspot. The Dan yr Ogof cave system is said to be the largest in Europe and covers some 11 miles. Many of these caves have yet to be explored. Experts argue there could be as much as a 100 miles of tunnel. Porth yr Ogof cave meanwhile (also in the Beacons) has one of the largest cave entrances in the United Kingdom. It is 20 metres wide and 3 metres high.

  As we stood looking at the stream pouring out of the low cliff, Gary told me that I was right to “avoid surface water”. He confirmed my prejudices. “A lot of unhealthy things can float on the surface of stagnant water,” he explained. He pointed instead to the gushing river below us. “This stuff has been through eight kilometres of cleansing rock. It is perfectly safe to drink.”

  Any water that is not following crevices and emerging in torrents after an 8-kilometre underground journey is steadily seeping downwards through the rock. This is even safer. The limestone acts as an extended natural filter.

  “It takes around fifteen years from the point where it falls on the hillside to the time it enters our wells,” Jeff told me back at the factory. This is the long period of filtration and cleansing. This is when the minerals come. This is why they bottle it.”

  So now we drank the stuff: the mineral water first. I spat and gobbled and swilled, but I felt as if I was cleaning my teeth, so I drank it instead. It tasted entirely neutral. Some mineral waters, especially French ones, are so soapy I avoid them. This was bland. So was the other water, the “spring water”, which was, effectively, as far as I could tell, the same water with a different name. It came from a well, not a spring at all, but the arcane food and drink legislation allowed it to be labelled incorrectly.

  “We have applied for that well to be classified as ‘mineral water’ too,” Jeff told me.

  I wasn’t sure why. To my ears ‘spring’ sounds rather more refreshing than a ‘mineral’. Of course, they knew that already. That’s why they used the word.

  So why bother with the ‘mineral’ designation at all? Are there that many British hypochondriacs sharing a European belief in the liver-cleansing properties of almost undrinkable, carbonic-flavoured waters? I discovered, however, that Brecon Carreg was now owned by Belgians. No doubt these hypochondriac continentals wanted the certification. Perhaps they were unaware that the British increasingly prefer water with added chemical “strawberry” or “lemon” flavour, manufactured in laboratories in the mid-west of America, and with plenty of extra sugar to ensure that the healthy properties of pure water are utterly extinguished.

  Bottled water is ironic in the Beacons, which has 17 reservoirs in its hills. The water that flows through the plumbing is, surely, effectively the same as the bottled product that this Belgian company delivers by road. Tasted much the same to me too. It tasted like water, in fact.

  “Do you have any of that fizzy stuff?” I asked Jeff.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “The machine is off today but we certainly make it,” and he offered me some to try.

  This was much better. Instead of bland, still, tasteless, ordinary water, I had a mouthful of bubbles. Please, don’t morally legislate against my last remaining vice. You have your beer and Coke. I just want to drink carbonised water. The only thing I object to is its name. The description “sparkling water” was made up by a canny marketing executive. Yes, I know – like diamonds glittering in a fairy’s diadem, it “sparkles” and “twinkles”, but it is carbon dioxide pumped in under pressure. “Carbon dioxide water” might not sell. “Fizzy water” sounds juvenile. At least when you get to Belgium they comprehend “with gas”.

  I asked Jeff what distinguished his water. He plunged in. “Refreshing… low on sodium… clean…,” but he was faltering. Then inspiration hit him. “… Welsh!” He said finally with a note of triumph in his voice.

  I drank to that.

  – UP IN THE AIR –

  In Llangernyw I met a chimney sweep and accused him of coming from Liverpool. He looked pained and told me he was sixth generation Colwyn Bay and fully Welsh-speaking. (The coast in the far north has a very distinct accent. There are high “ees” in it.)

  He also explained that down in the Valleys the recognisable Welsh lilt returned. Not recognisable enough for me to identify another woman I met in Pembrokeshire, who had been born in Cardigan, raised in Birmingham and now lived in Haverfordwest. It was better not to try to guess at origins, but Bo was clearly not Welsh.

  “I was born in Sweden,” he explained, “but I lived for a long time in New Zealand. I still live there in the summer.” (I think he might have meant our winter.) But the much travelled Bo, who later explained that he had worked as a seaman for many years in his youth and had used the skills, he’d learned in ice-breaking runs through the Gulf of Finland to open a restaurant near Wellington, had chosen to come to the Beacons.

  I run into these people from time to time. The Finns with a hotel in Fishguard. The girls who ran away from Amsterdam to west Wales. When fervent Welsh apologists get bitter about helicopter shots of their landscape and want informed opinion to concentrate on Welsh achievement (heavy industry and its after-affects mainly) they are missing a point. Wales is incredibly beautiful. Rural Wales was a life-changing revelation for this exile, previously familiar only with Cardiff and Newport.

  Admittedly, I was fortunate. I travelled for six weeks and hit perhaps three days of rain. The day I met Bo was one of the wet days. We stood in the hangar by the Black Mountains Gliding Club airfield, a meadow raised up on the side of a mountain, like a landing strip in the Alps, and gazed at the de-tumescent orange windsock through a light drizzle.

  The gliders lay jumbled around us. Their crucifix forms required a criss-cross parking method. What frail and insubstantial kites they seemed in the frigid top-light of the roof. Single-handed gliders looked little stronger than the dubbing-daubed, tissue paper balsa-wood models I made when I was twelve. Those had required hours of patient work with ball-topped pins and sweet intoxicant glue, and usually crashed and smashed to splinters on their first flight.

  Bo stood by a dual-seater glider. It looked a bit stronger than my kits, but clearly the lack of any means of propulsion permitted a return to utter basics. The hull clasped its two riders in a tight embrace. There was a long wing and bit of tube for a fuselage. But we weren’t going up today.

  “The rain reduces visibility too much,” Bo explained. “And we need thermals, rising air caused by variations in temperature, to get us flying. This is not the weather for that.”

  So we waited. He told me how he worked here as an instructor. Bo had chosen the area because this was the best place to glide in Britain. The average flight times were the longest in the UK. The lie of the land provided rising a
ir and challenging flying, but the landscape was spectacular. He didn’t need my prompting. Bo loved the Beacons. He was daily astonished by the landscape laid out beneath him.

  We left. We couldn’t go that day, though, even in that rain, the hills were garlanded with smoke-like headdresses of mist and the dark clouds softened the greens to a flat, fuzzy brilliance.

  When we came back the following afternoon the sock was full and the sun was shining. I was introduced to the saggy bag of cloth that was my parachute and Bo took me through the drills necessary to get me airborne. “The biggest danger is the idea of hitting another plane,” he said. “Just pull open the hood, unclip your safety belt and jump clear and then reach down and pull this metal ring and the parachute will open.”

  This was five more things than I would be capable of doing if I was hurtling to the ground to my death, but it was notable how focused I was on these instructions, compared with the ones that drone out on EasyJet.

  “Look down at the ring,” Bo continued. “It will give you something to concentrate on and you will get it.” He was talking now as if some mid air collision was a pre-ordained part of our jaunt. “Otherwise you could pull the harness off.” Well, we didn’t want to do that, did we?

  He sat me in the front: great views through a plastic hood. He went through his instrument check-list aloud. Someone tied a rope to a hook below us and the two of us, together in a cabin smaller than the average dodgem car, were attached to a former crop-spraying plane, which whirred and bumped off across the vivid lawn, dragging us behind it.

  “We’re up now,” Bo said, seconds later. The tow-plane wasn’t. For a while we flew at no more than 10 feet off the ground, but, before the hill sloped away to the village below, the plane got up into the air, banked a little and began to climb upwards.

  Our tow seemed further away than I had imagined it would be. Our rope bent a little under its own weight, stretching out to this airborne workhorse, dragging us up. And then further up.

  “I will need you to keep an eye open for other aircraft,” Bo told me. I kept both eyes open. Suddenly, with a slight jerk the rope was gone, and there was a falling feeling in my stomach. We slowed and wallowed slightly as if walking now, without a hand to hold us.

  Now, apart from the rushing air, we were noiselessly suspended like an albatross. We were circling above a valley, picked out in a cold, yellow, slanting September light. There were clouds but they were high. A relief map of the National Park was laid out around us.

  “There’s the Wye Valley,” Bo said indicating the river slipping though trees and fields. “That’s an Iron-Age hill fort there to the left.”

  The sun caught the outlines of the faded earthworks on the grey top of a hill, which like the others, like the Beacons themselves, rose bare and bun-shaped out of richer, greener, valleys.

  The Brecon Beacons cover 500-odd square miles and we could probably see them all. There are 30 standing stones within the boundaries of the National Park and over a thousand separate farms, divided restlessly by hedges into rectangular forms following the contours of the valleys. It was a majestic artwork that had taken thousands of years to create.

  I was entranced by the dead-end valleys: fingers of bottle green that crept up towards the shorn, sage hills and often ended with a high grey stone farmstead crouched down in the crack of the mountain.

  The railway had had the most severely negative impact on the agricultural industry of Brecon. In 1868 there were 11,000 acres used for wheat farming. By 1930 it was down to 595. The Brecon and Merthyr Tydfil Junction Railway also had one of the country’s steepest gradients, which required two to three engines to pull the train. The gradient led to runaway trains with the line being nicknamed ‘Breakneck and Murder’.

  Otherwise, this was a landscape that had evolved within the limits of man’s once-restricted capabilities. We soared over yeoman farms, open fields for stock, and the patterns of the dispersed farm life. There was a settlement of steep-eaved buildings that I guessed was a monastery, but turned out to be a mental asylum.

  Nothing about these few square miles threatened any form of future. In fact the distant future will surely look back on us and thank us for preserving them. We already look back with gratitude on the foresight of the creators of the National Parks. There are ruined, desecrated landscapes enough in Britain. But developers and their Welsh Assembly Government allies don’t want to expend energy trying to remake these bad suburbs and hopelessly designed, alienating places. They want to suck on the indefinable high that we feel in this carefully made landscape, by building more here. They know its marketable value. They want to destroy its very success by offering it to the estate agent. So, away with green belt – let’s colonise more of the beautiful places.

  A few days before Bo and I soared up to look at this impeccable vista, the Planning Minister Nick Boles had been floating a theory that National Parks were “kept in aspic”.

  “We are suffering a slight dip in our relentless material “growth”, called a recession, so now we need to declare an emergency and desecrate more of our country,” I shouted at Bo. “We have no policies to recycle houses like we insist on recycling paper. Our tax system encourages new building. And in the meantime it is conservationists who are accused of selfishness.”

  For ten minutes I disturbed the still air above the Beacons, and probably Bo, by ranting to him about the horrors of politically motivated urban sprawl.

  But we were due back. In this area glides of five hours are common. We had been up for half an hour. After a few minutes more, we bumped and rutted our way onto the ground and landed without splitting into a thousand pieces of balsa.

  – AT SWIM ONE BIRD –

  Llyn Cwm Llwch is a dark puddle of cobalt at the bottom of a carved bowl.

  Up on the rim of the surrounding mountains, where the two flat-iron peaks of Corn Du and Pen y Fan outstare each other, I could make out minute bifurcated dots. They were ramblers walking on the very lip of the ridge, trudging up to the highest peaks in the Beacons. They gave us the scale: immense, going on gigantic. We were lucky to see the tops, apparently. Today they were unshrouded, clear, against the grey blotting-paper sky. Not much marred their flanks. No trees, some smears of shale-fall. From our distant outpost, the hills were smoothed and rounded, polished and raw.

  Far below, on the shores of the lake, down in the valley, were more dots, this time sheep. I realised there were wild horses too. The Welsh mountain pony nearly fell into extinction in the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII ordered the destruction of all stallions under 15 hands. These ones clearly found us mildly disturbing - irritating. It was not fear. Like beach-walkers, they simply did not want to be socially associated with us.

  As we clambered down, so they wandered quietly upwards on the far side of the valley. As we left, I looked back. They had stationed themselves on the far northern pinnacle, waiting for us to leave.

  I was glad to see them, of course, because it gave me a chance to spout my Julius Caesar fact. (He had thought them brave chariot steeds and had taken some back to Rome, though I assume he killed their riders.)

  But I was here to swim. The path down to the lake was a gutter of mud. I had no fear of the tarn. I didn’t think it would freeze my bollocks off. It would be cold. But I have been in the Tay in Perth in November. And just last year, while walking in the Scottish Highlands I plunged about in a mountain stream. I was keen. I just wanted to get on with it. I was oddly glad that I was going to be the only one doing it too. The others would stare at me from within their four layers of clothing, including polypropylene outer shells and waterproof Gore-Tex, like space men watching a poor bare forked animal skipping about.

  Ah, yes, that was a small problem. I didn’t have a swimming costume and I would be naked. What sort of exhibitionist was I, then? I liked the fact that it was raining, because it meant that the air temperature and the water temperatur
e would feel similar, and as soon as I threw off my own fleeces and T-shirts I would be in some sort of pact with the weather and the wet. It would feel much colder to enter this water on a hot day.

  So I faced the camera and remembered how Roger Deakin, the author of Waterlog, the original book on wild swimming, wrote about his dip in a Welsh tarn. It was his induction to the act of swimming his way across Britain.

  I also recalled an evening in Diss last year when his friend Ronald Blythe, in his comfy jersey and woolly shirt, chuckled at the memory of Roger plunging into every available waterhole he passed. Yup, he recognised the determined egotism of the act; the same egotism that I was now enjoying.

  And then there was Alan Clarke, the politician. He wrote about stopping in his Riley or Allard or Supercharged Bentley, or some other out-of-date car, by a Scottish lake and taking a dip, which, he said, felt as invigorating as cocaine. Though why this friend of Mrs Thatcher and one-time cabinet minister should know what cocaine felt like, one can only speculate.

  It was nothing like cocaine. There was the usual slippery entrance stumble, and though the rocks were blessedly flat they were smeared with gooey sediment, the sort of shitty sensation that I might have once recoiled from, but I now recognised as a harmless, freshwater sludge.

  The camera was rolling. Everybody else – researcher, photographer, guide, sound, camera and director – was standing behind it wrapped in protective gear.

  I tried a few tentative steps and met a soft and deep spongy weed. It was possibly full of leeches. Leeches are said to gather in the “llyn”. This might also have been slightly disturbing. In fact it was merely comfortable underfoot.

  All my trepidation was banished by an assumption of rectitude. That was it. I had an aura of Leslie Stephens, that Victorian mountain pioneer, about me now. Only mortal petty-bourgeois fuddy-duddies would stand askance and trembling. This was what real men of the mountain did. It separated the wild horses from the sheep. I even reached down and casually disentangled various bits of my frontal arrangements.