Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  There was nothing “welcoming” about this coast. The incoming tide promised to cover this corrugated shelf of doom with a few feet of raging water, but I would not have liked to pilot a boat in here, which is what made the legends and stories surrounding the cove so unlikely.

  Andrew took me over the edge of a jagged escarpment to peer into a cut in the rock. A sliver of sand and a slew of white, worn stone on the floor, now that the tide was out, revealed that the cove was no more than 20 feet wide and wholly exposed to the sea.

  “The story is that there was a pirate family working out of this place,” Andrew told me. “There is supposed to be a secret tunnel linking their house to that thing.” He pointed ahead.

  The end of the cove was sealed by a four-storey-high stone wall with tiny windows: like a 60-foot tall fortified house built into the cliff face.

  “My own guess is that smugglers might have landed booty in the bay around the corner and brought it round here,” he went on. But anyway the original purpose of the building was much more peculiar and interesting.

  By now Tudor and the others had arrived, lugging the kit, so we restaged our approach to the place and finally stood looking at a tiny hole at ground level.

  “Let’s go in, then,” Andrew said.

  It wasn’t immediately obvious how we did that.

  He pointed to the dark hole at the bottom of the stone wall.

  “We climb under there,” he said. “There used to be a rope approach down the cliff, but, with the tide out, this is the easiest way,” and he lay down on the pebbles and the stinking seaweed and crawled through on his belly.

  I followed, heaving myself in through a gap about a foot high, and slithering upwards in the dark. “Am I now crawling over a nest of man-eating crabs?” I asked.

  “No. But if I press the rock here, the cave at the back opens and a secret tunnel emerges.”

  There were shafts of light breaking through, somewhere high above us. The stink was bad, but it was an organic sea-stink. Beneath my feet the floor was slithery, with bladderwrack of some kind, and above our head something flapped around a bit. But there were no Indiana Jones surprises. My eyes gradually took in the back of the cave and the man-made chimney stretching above.

  “It was originally built as a dovecote, sometime in the Middle Ages,” Andrew said. We arched our necks and, by the dim light from the “windows”, saw nest hollows high up in the structure. There were also the remains of stone stair treads on some of the outer walls.

  “They came down here and took eggs and presumably pigeons,” Andrew murmured.

  Pigeons are rock-dwelling birds. They emigrated to cities because they found a ready source of throwaway provender and nesting holes in drainpipes and culverts that were warmer than their rocks. This strange building was somewhere at the cusp of their social evolution into the Mary Poppins nuisances that they are today. Was it quicker to use the cliff face to build this secretive bird redoubt? I suppose so. The stone was to hand and half the wall was already there. Even now, a few birds flapped in and out in the gloom high above our heads. This was a unique dovecote, but it was not going to provide me with any food for my rugby hero. I got down on my hands and knees to slither out and paused, up to my wrists in the damp black tendrils.

  “What about this seaweed? Can you eat it?”

  “Not that stuff,” said Andrew. “There is other edible seaweed along this coast. Some of it even gets exported to Japan. But that is bladderwrack.”

  I could see what he meant. The stuff in my hands, amongst the jumping sand fleas, looked a little too chewy for my purposes.

  – COCKLES OF MY HEART –

  Gower was full of surprises. In the north-east corner, out on the border with Llanelli, the cosy villages, hugging the lanes, gave way to a rougher cast of accommodation. The houses got greyer and more utilitarian, the streets meaner. The region became flat. This was Penclawdd, one of the largest villages on the Gower. A high sea wall ran along the road. Beyond that were the sort of saltings and swatchways I associate with Essex and a featureless English east coast shore. Gower’s reassuring hills were still there, behind my back, but, ahead, a shallow strand stretched away.

  We turned off the road and drove towards a big factory shed. Glyn was waiting for us with a wheezy laugh. He led me through his kingdom, into his offices to meet a welter of people, popping out of doors and shaking my hand, while he thrust a tin into the other. “This is what happens to our cockles,” he said.

  I looked at a flat sardine shape covered in Spanish. “We bring them ashore here, Griff, and we wash them down and then they get sent to Boston in Lincolnshire.”

  I was intrigued.

  “It’s the main distribution and cleaning centre for the UK and most of the cockles that we collect get sent to Spain. Thirty million of these cans are exported every year.” Glyn had been down to Spain many times. “We can sit there in a restaurant the entire afternoon and the food and wine keep coming. But that’s what the Spanish like, you see. You know tapas. Well they love cockles as tapas. They have them on the bar, like we might have crisps.”

  We got into his Land Rover and drove back towards the village, turning left along a rough damp road.

  “You’ve come at the right time, because the tide is out.”

  His team worked a piecework rate, way out on the sands. There was little to see as we drove out there. During World War Two several gun batteries were established to both the east and west of Penclawdd. Gun-barrels were calibrated and shells were fired across the salt marsh; it was that empty. We negotiated the gullies that ran across the bay, carrying Welsh rain out to the sea, digging deep, muddy culverts in the landscape. Suddenly we were rolling and yawing down a steep incline and into thick mud, changing gears and spraying and slipping sideways though black and grey gloop.

  “This used to be the old road for donkey carts, you see,” Glyn went on. “My family have been digging cockles for centuries. A lot of it was done by the women in the old days.” The practice of cockle picking is very much the same as it was in the past, expect now the donkeys have been replaced by all-terrain vehicles.

  We were out of the mud and on to a relatively hard sand-mix, still pressing on, as if crossing a wet desert landscape and following barely discernible tracks left by other vehicles towards a few misty dots on the horizon. Cockle picking in Penclawdd dates back to Roman times.

  “We take on different areas. There are places that we know.” He gave a wheezy cackle. “But we mark out areas and then we move on as we exhaust them.”

  It was a continual rotation process. The diggers got about six hours’ hard digging in before the tide came racing up the bay faster than a man could run, and now we could see them, a caravan encampment of pick-up trucks with bent figures, shovelling and scratching at the ground. There were men and women, wearing solid gumboots, well wrapped against the damp weather, and seemingly casually scattered over an acre or so.

  Tommy swung himself upwards from his bent position and greeted me. I was going to have a go. So he fixed me up with gloves and handed me my equipment: a sieve and a pronged hand rake, like a bent trident on a short handle. Glyn ushered me over to a patch of mud a few yards on. He leaned down to show me. “See there, that squirting, that’s them.” The water lay in shallow puddles and there were tiny jets shooting up from the surface. “They are only just below the top, so they can feed, so you don’t want to go too deep.”

  It was simple enough. I was aided by a tiny pump that worked from a car battery. It fed a hose leading from one of the deeper puddles. Water was used to keep the surface tractable. Each of the prongs on the scratching rake had a wide flat arrowhead. Glyn bent himself down from his considerable height and raked steadily and furiously, scooping great wodges of what seemed like a mix of mud and stones into his sieve. He applied the end of his hose to wash off the sediment and reveal the cockles.

 
“These are small ones,” he said, handing me the sieve and rake. “Try over there.”

  I bent down. I raked and gathered. I scooped handfuls of lumpy mud soup into my sieve and raked more. I filled it until I could barely lift it. My back was protesting. After a few minutes I had to ease the pain and creaked upwards, reaching for the hose. I doused the mud, which ran away through the wide mesh of the sieve, but as it did so, so did the cockles. Most of them dropped through.

  “Shake them out,” said Glyn. So I shook the sieve and hosed in some more water.

  The rest of the cockles fell away. I shook hard and washed some more and finally ended up with exactly nine small round shellfish. I didn’t want to rattle the sieve again in case they found a way through my mesh.

  Glyn peered at my tiny haul. “That’s great. Of course, a few years ago we wouldn’t have kept tiny ones like that, but we are allowed to now that stocks are good and we can use them.”

  “Do you eat them yourself?” I asked him as we bounced through the gullies on the way back.

  “Well, let’s put it this way,” he said. “When I was boy if I went to my granny’s on a Sunday and I didn’t eat them, then I starved.”

  There are more than 200 species of cockle (even more if you include fossils) with some bizarre names, including the “dog cockle” and the “blood cockle” found in Malaysia, but I wasn’t a huge fan. Here was a memory of Welsh childhood. My father loved them. If he could eat custard ice cream (no full cream dairy Vermont cow stuff for Elwyn) and a polystyrene cup of whelks or mussels from a seaside stall, he was on holiday. The nursery food at our table was an echo of his own seaside idyll in Llangrannog.

  As a seven year old, I ate anything going too. But the rubbery, grey “little chickens” (as my sister and I called them after the yellow beak-like part of the mollusc) boiled to death and doused in sour vinegar, were like secondhand chewing gum. Perhaps they were better preserved in their tins. According to Glyn, the Spanish now gobbled up ninety percent of the British catch. I decided I would find out if they improved by being cooked in the French fashion with a little wine and onions - “cockles marinière”.

  Before I left Penclawdd we called in at the Roma fish and chip shop. We Welsh, as you may have heard, are “Italians in the rain”. And the Italians are all over Wales, in unexpected places, running chip shops, making ice cream and preparing frothy coffi in countless caffis. Given that several square miles of cockle beds lay stretched out in front of the corner chippy on the other side of the sea wall, I asked if they had any cockles.

  “Of course. We deep fry them in batter, if that’s OK?”

  “Sure.”

  OK? When it came, straight out the fryer, it was cockle popcorn bliss; a tempura heaven. Great batter, sweet cockles, tiny bites. A quid paid for a huge portion.

  In between gazing at the sepia photos on the wall, of big ladies in woolly dresses and head scarves leading donkeys across the marsh, most of whom turned out to be Glyn’s aunties, I wandered round the chip shop offering battered cockles to the customers.

  Most turned away. “Not cockles, no.”

  One went as far as “Eeuurgh”.

  I was disappointed. I thought I had discovered a new craze. It wasn’t catching on.

  We would leave all the rest to the Spanish then except, perhaps, for a very few for my rugby hero.

  – SHEEP MAY SAFELY... –

  Although Weobley Castle is called a “castle”, from a technical point of view it’s a fortified manor house, and one of the best preserved in Wales. The whole place is essentially a medieval “panic room”, thanks to thick fortifying walls, turrets and sturdy gates, but quite a civilised one. “There are galleries, withdrawing rooms and ancient toilets inside,” I was told in advance, and I was looking forward to some respite from the dripping weather, except that, when I got there, I discovered that Weobley is a bit of a ruin that Owain Glyndwˆr knocked about a bit. It was roofless.

  The evening clouds had faded down the grey of the stone. A light drizzle was adding to the gloom. I pulled my coat around my neck and zipped it up tight. I wasn’t there for fancy interiors. My quest was out there – on the impressive salt flats, over which Weobley had such a commanding view and over which it might have fired the odd cannon from time to time. It was dusk and the tide was coming in. It was time for a daily mass migration.

  I was there to help, to safely gather in the sheep, and then maybe to eat one. There is of course a stereotype about Wales and sheep. It has to be admitted that there are three times as many sheep in Wales as people; nine million to three million. A thousand of this woolly majority were out on these flats. Salt marsh is a great inter-tidal resource. Fish breed there and wading birds nest there, but samphire, sorrel, sea lavender and thrift grow there too. Sheep that chomp on these strongly flavoured herbs of the marshes become flavoursome themselves.

  But where were they exactly then in the darkening twilight? I could see nothing.

  “Oh, they’re off out there somewhere,” said Roland and we trudged down a muddy path to the flat lands below. He was pointing ahead to the glistening water. I could make out the odd sheep shape right out in the marshes.

  “Surely it’s a huge job to get them in?”

  Roland was unworried. It was routine. “No, no,” he said casually. “They’ll come when they see the Land Rover. They want to get to the grass, you understand.” He pointed behind me at the startlingly lurid pasture lying directly under the castle.

  His son, Will, was driving away from us, very slowly out along a causeway. At the absolute extremity of the rough track, he turned his distant vehicle and then came back at a creeping pace.

  The sheep were spread over three hundred acres of damp sludge and tough, juicy herbiage. Now that their secret call had come, they noisily began to clop in towards the central road. They had the distinctly uncertain and nervous manner that sheep maintain whenever they are not actively consuming. With a steady purpose and heads bowed, scattered groups were working their way from distant muddy outposts towards us.

  The dogs were there mainly to hassle the strays. They ran out to the extremities. Even though the Land Rover was still way behind, we could see the outriders of the leading mob of sheep coming clearly into view, making their way down to the single gate that led to their evening safety. Except that, about fifty yards away, they halted.

  “Oh, they’ve seen us,” said Roland. “They won’t want to come through with us standing here.” But he didn’t move. We watched as the sheep became increasingly fretful. His dog made a wide encirclement to encourage them a little, but that just caused some to bolt to the side: scrambling away across the hundreds of acres of salty bog and disappearing into the drizzle again.

  “They don’t like that you see,” Roland pointed at our camera team, “and the camera on legs in particular.”

  I was parading in a bright red jacket too. We were placed discreetly back from the road, or so we thought, but the herd stopped. The swivel eyes swivelled again and more ran off sideways.

  I might have expected Roland to become concerned, but he stood exactly where he was, calmly chatting on about sheep: how the herbs added flavour, how the speed of the tide could be very quick especially on springs, and how the lamb was very popular with French chefs. Meanwhile ever huger numbers of his nervous flock backed up at the bottle neck.

  The camera crew slunk backwards into a muddy gully.

  Then it happened. A couple ran for it. Two more followed but one went back. Another group chanced it. The noise of baaing and ovine groaning grew ever more insistent. The rest of the flock decided that they would risk it. They started to scissor legs and trot and baa even more loudly. A great racket of sheep-like communication went up and, like a bad encore, suddenly they were all heading for the exit.

  “There you are,” said Roland matter of factly. “They will all go now.” And they did. The straggler
s suddenly felt very alone and they ran to catch up. The side-wanderers thought better of their waywardness, the rampant individualists (and sheep are by no means sheep-like) suddenly fancied mass company and they all seemed desperately to need to be in the sloping pasture under the trees.

  We turned to watch them. I marvelled at the huge flock crowding up the hill.

  “Yes indeed,” said Roland, nodding slightly. “I think somebody must have left that lower gate open.” He nodded to himself. ‘They’re not supposed to be there in the grounds of the castle, you see.”

  Typically, Roland didn’t seem unduly alarmed. The sheep, like the tide sluicing up Llanelli bay, came in every day. I guess they had done since long before that ancient castle had been there. They would continue to do so, as long as the taste for this special meat from Gower continued to grow. Roland left the sheep and his son to sort themselves out. He got me a leg of lamb from the freezer. I went on my way.

  – RUGBY BALL –

  And now to the great game. Ah, the crunch of shoulder blades, the scrape of the ear protector against the bare cheek, the warm embrace of Fatso on your left and Jimpson on the right as the scrum plunged together and collapsed on itself for the third time. I haven’t played rugby for 48 years. I haven’t been to a Black Sabbath concert either. Yet the same welling conviction that here was my heartland, my identity, my birthright comes back whenever they are mentioned.

  I was in East House. We were a soccer house. Most of the school soccer first eleven were drawn from our ranks and, during the spring term, when the squared-off goals were lifted out and replaced by the gaunt “H”s of rugby posts, many of the senior boys were carried away to trounce Bancrofts and Merchant Taylors in a continuing interschool soccer league table.

  At that point Mr Cluer would survey the remainder of his flock and nominate fifteen boys to get out there and pretend to be the House First Fifteen.