Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  I sensed that Geoff was a proud showman of the old school. He had been in the events business for thirty years and owned his own company for twenty. The same spirit that said “of course we can have a festival for twenty thousand people in these fields” had started to add little extras to Aberdyfi life.

  He told me that he had thought about the cinema for a whole weekend. Viewed it on the Friday and bought it on the Tuesday. He had also been influential in the rented tree house holiday villas I had just left.

  “Absurdly fantastic things,” I ventured.

  “All the better for that.” Geoff extolled the virtue of enterprise out here in the sticks. People worked harder for less money. They were prepared to try out new ideas. There was little competition.

  Geoff had also bought a disused boat yard. “It wasn’t expensive,” he told me. He had built a clubhouse on his boatyard site by dragging an old fishing boat up on the hard and cutting a door in it. He was currently heavily involved in the attempt to hold onto the Shed of the Year award. He won in 2012 by erecting a shed on a floating pontoon and mooring it just offshore.

  That shed had now gone up a nearby mountain to be a “summit shed”. The pontoon was put to another use. Geoff took me to his blue BMW sports car. His excited black Labrador climbed on to the back shelf and slid around somewhere between my ears and the plastic rear window (heavily repaired with yellow duct tape) while we swung out, drove through Aberdyfi and followed the shoreline of the estuary alongside the branch railway, towards his base up the estuary.

  As we arrived at his slightly overgrown lot, a banana-shaped, 20-foot high grey tower in the parking bay started to whistle and dribble. “We built it to take around festivals.” Geoff explained. “It’s steamdriven.” It hit the hour. The upper portion telescoped upwards, to reveal a carousel of wooden fish that gyrated around in a cloud of steam. It was a clock.

  “The main reason I have settled here,” Geoff explained as we walked towards the water under a railway line tunnel, “is because I don’t think there is a more beautiful place to be in the world. If I was going to be anywhere and I could be anywhere this was going to be it by choice.”

  He stopped before the pebbles got slippery, at the tide’s edge, adjusted his broad-brimmed fedora, and pointed ahead. “There you are.” About 50 yards off the shore a children’s trampoline, very like the one at home in the garden for the kids, was leaning slightly askew on top of a floating box.

  “Is it safe?”

  “I have no idea. It floats. It looks secure. Are you?”

  Mark, one of Geoff’s helpers, rowed me out. It was indeed secure. The trampoline was firmly anchored to its pontoon. The green padded protection had come unstuck and was flopping about uselessly in a slight chop. But the water around looked cold and unsympathetic. Had the sun been out or had I been an energetic teenager with balls, then the temptation to boing upwards and outwards and attempt a full forward spring-assisted somersault into the Dyfi estuary might have been overwhelming.

  I knew that Tudor and Chris were sitting watching carefully and recording every moment. I knew they were hoping that when I bounced the thing would rock and I would lurch forwards fully clothed into the sea for a YouTube classic. But you know… It was nearly lunchtime. I was some way beyond faking incompetence for telly, and the unpadded edges of the trampoline looked sharp and painful. I went up and down. I reached an impressive height. But the contraption was stable enough. I was perfectly in control. That was it. So they all buggered off and marooned me there instead.

  – THE BELLS, THE BELLS –

  No doubt Geoff would have been happy to hold an Arthurian hot air balloon tournament in the Tarren Hills, but he knew nothing about the Holy Grail and mid Wales. He admitted, however, that this was a region where people talked about 500 years ago as if it was only yesterday. Almost any strangely shaped rock was likely to accrue a story. There was, for example, a “Bearded Lake” above the town, where King Arthur battled a monster called Afangc, and a rock there was supposed to have a print of his horse’s hoof embedded in it. But I needed to get south. I vaguely remembered a story about a big house near Aberystwyth. The details were misty. But it involved lost treasure and holy rituals.

  The water in front of Geoff’s boatyard runs into a wide, sandy silted-up gulf called the Dyfi Estuary, once used as a location for the 1976 Led Zeppelin film, The Song Remains The Same. It was ten miles back to the bridge near Machynlleth. I was looking for a way across. Historically, it was unlikely that I was the first person to face this dilemma. The weekly town market in Machynlleth dates back to 1291, when people from all around the area would have trekked across the estuary to get into town.

  Not far from Aberdyfi in Tywyn you’ll find Cadfan’s stone, which is said by some to be the oldest known written Welsh in existence. Some academics argue that it’s the most important object in Welsh history. It’s somewhat surprising, then, to find that Tywyn is a very anglicised place, with just over half of its population being born in England. The town has an extremely mixed identity. The Welsh dialect used in this area has its own distinctive features, so much so that one Victorian observer said that there were three languages spoken in the town: English, Welsh and “Tywynaeg”.

  Aberdyfi (or the Mouth of the Dovey) itself lies on a byway. In World War Two it was home to a secret commando unit of troops from Austria and Germany, trained for espionage missions against the Nazis. These troops became valuable members of the community, with several of them marrying local girls. Now a few seaside cafés were scattered along a quiet front. Buckets and spades, gummy sandals and postcards in wire racks sat like forlorn reminders of simple holidays. It was quiet. There was no sign of any of this legendary activity. I ordered a half a pint of espresso and wandered out to the shore.

  I had been promised a lift in a motorised rib. It was going to pick me up on the long spit of sand that ran out to the west beyond the sailing club. But for a while I lingered on the quay, built by the Aberdyfi and Waterford Steam Company in 1887 to import livestock from Ireland.

  The sun was low and bright. There were kids jumping into the water (the same freezing water I had so scrupulously avoided earlier), and just beyond them was a hole in the top of the jetty. It commemorated another legend.

  I was on the borders of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a Welsh Atlantis that once reputedly stretched 20 miles out into Cardigan Bay. One acre of that rich, fertile, low-lying mythical land was said to be worth four of ordinary grazing. It was drained by a gate in a dyke and protected by shutting the gate to prevent the sea coming back in. But, around AD 600 (and I like the niceness of the date: it brings the myth closer to recorded history) the gatekeeper Seithennin went to a party near Aberystwyth. He got drunk and he forgot his duties. A big storm and a spring tide came blustering in and 16 villages were swamped. And, as with most drowned land legends, on a stormy night they say that the bells can still be heard, swinging in the submerged steeples.

  They can certainly be heard today, because the hole in the jetty contains a sea-bell, hanging just beneath the quay, with a clapper attached to a vane that dangles in the water. It keeps the legend alive. As the tide comes in and the wind gets up, so the waves knock against the flat metal flap and a dolorous sound echoes through the village. I listened and I waited. It was high tide, but the sea was calm and the sky was blue. Shrieking children were jumping in the water. The bell stayed obstinately lifeless.

  We persuaded one of the boys, however, to swim around and rattle our clapper. He did so and our television viewers enjoyed both a lovely evening half-light and the legendary storm bell donging its clapper. Is that cheating? Probably. So go on, expose us to the papers. We don’t care.

  – PETRIFIED FOREST, BRAVE PRESENTER –

  Leaving the estuary and striking south, Cardigan Bay became a long ellipse of washed sand in front of an unexpectedly flat plain.

  Near Borth, a sea wall prevents breakers overwhe
lming a straggle of grey houses and bleak shop fronts. They are currently spending 12 million repairing these sea defences. It seemed rather empty, although in 2011 Borth was named one of the top 20 best places for families to live in England and Wales; it was the only one in Wales to make the list. Perhaps they like it empty.

  We passed the corpse of a porpoise. It must have washed up on the beach and been put on the new wall to be disposed of. A grey inner tube, slightly swollen, with its eyes pecked out by gulls, it had wholly disappeared by the time we came back, though nobody else seemed to be about on this windy afternoon. Pity. The Ynyslas sand dunes nearby are a popular tourist attraction, particularly amongst kitesurfers. The dunes attract around 250,000 people each year. It was a fine day to be out on such a wide, uncompromising beach. But it was deserted.

  As I strolled along, I saw what I assumed were the remains of a wreck up ahead. And getting closer I could see the worn ends of wooden posts, smoothed by the sand. But these were not old boat frames, because these protrusions had roots.

  I crouched down. The stumps of trees were joined to the sand by a complex and interwoven network, scrambling over and through each itself. Close to, I could see that the tide had worked like a sander, scouring and smoothing the wood, and revealing the grain of the original tree. The sand at the roots gave way to a black, sticky mud-like substance. This was peat. It was this organic residue that had preserved them. It had an acidic effect that protected the trees from the natural processes of rot.

  I was looking at the remains of trees that grew here some 1,500 years ago. Further to the north, radio carbon dating has identified a submerged forest that was 2,000 years older still.

  It is known that human beings walked amongst these trees, because perfectly preserved footprints have been found in the peat further to the north. But it was interesting that the age of this forest near Borth corresponded to the supposed date of the inundation of Cantre’r Gwaelod, the Welsh Atlantis. Over the last 2000 years the sea level has varied considerably. It is generally supposed to have been higher in the Roman Era. But here was straightforward evidence of a whole forest overwhelmed by climate change; and without the help of global warming.

  These inundations were all happening around the same time that a supposedly factual Arthur was ruling over Britain. Legend and history were closing on each other.

  – ABERYSTWYTH –

  I am always happy to linger in the “Biarritz of Wales”. Aberystwyth is uncompromisingly “seaside”. A granite promenade runs in a magnificent curve along the front and stands as a bulwark against the Irish Sea. Behind it, as if staring down the sun, is a terrace of hotels and bed and breakfasts.

  It also has a link to the Holy Grail, albeit a rather tenuous one. Former Aberystwyth mayor Sue Jones-Davies played Judith Iscariot in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When it was first released, however, it was banned in the town (the film was banned in a number of places). When Sue Jones-Davies became mayor she sought to rectify this and did so, successfully. Confusingly, it has also since been proven that the ban itself was an urban myth. It didn’t happen. Hm. So she overturned something that had not taken place. “Pythonesque!” (as we used to exclaim about anything baffling).

  If you leave the front and sneak up any of the backstreets, past the occasional startlingly coloured house, you find yourself in a kindly amalgam of cafés, bike and bookshops. This is a university town. And it has been since 1872. The population varies seasonally, with the coming and going of around 8000 full-time students. It is a remote town too. The nearest big cities are an hour and forty minutes drive away. The railway reached here in 1869. It was late coming, but remains the best way to arrive.

  Some say that this isolation is the reason why you can find almost anything in Aberystwyth if you look. It has to be self-sufficient. Anything? Did that include the Holy Grail, I wondered?

  But here were seaside and academia combined: two of my favourite recondite things. Aberystwyth is like Brighton, but neater, smaller and quieter. At one end is the castle, which started falling into ruin in the fourteenth century. At the other is the funicular on Constitution Hill. And you must not miss that. It shows no signs of slowing down. Though if it did, it would stop completely. It creeps up a 50 percent gradient at a mountain goat pace, to an invigorating view down the coast towards Pembrokeshire.

  Directly behind the town is another hill, and halfway up that is another reason for visiting Aberystwyth: the National Library of Wales. There are treasures enough in the Library itself, which houses over 6,000,000 books, including a manuscript edition of Chaucer, which I had held in my own trembling hands on a previous visit. There are 118 miles of shelving – enough shelving to get you nearly as far as Birmingham by car. The stock of the library grows by around 80,000 each year because of copyright law, which entitles the library to receive a copy of every new book published in the UK. But as the Second World War approached, the institution became even richer when some of the greatest collections in Britain began to send their own treasures to Wales for safety.

  I had heard of this before. In fact someone once suggested that we make a programme about it. This is how legends start, of course. I had imagined caverns in a salt mine high in the Cambrian Mountains with vast collections of statues protected from Goering, whose fevered brain was already imagining the Parthenon marbles in his bathroom. But the truth was more prosaic. They went in a specially dug hole under the library.

  The miners of south Wales originally organised a subscription of one shilling per man to build the library, inspired by the motto “All knowledge is a privilege”. An aerial photograph shows the building that houses the National Library of Wales, designed in 1909 and finished in 1916, sitting squat, square and massive in a great block to the north of the town.

  The pedestrian, however, approaches by hundreds of steps. There is one staircase that runs up through trees just off a by-road at the back of the town. Lots of library researchers use it. I know this, because I wanted to take a pee behind one of the trees that shade its route, but it proved almost impossible.

  I needed to be comfortable before I entered these extensive, man-made treasure caves. In order to avoid the Blitz, 25 cases were transported from the British Museum alone. The fears were not only genuine but apposite. It is said that the stairs of a Berlin museum ran with melted Trojan gold when the Russians and Allies bombarded. (Another legend. The Schliemann treasures were simply looted.) But drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, the Magna Carta itself, the works of Chaucer and autograph works from Shakespeare joined paintings by Turner, Michelangelo and Rembrandt in the vaults. And it wasn’t just from London: Corpus Christi College was one of the first places to assign stuff. Ten other institutions joined in. I had to hope that my bladder would hold out. Two guys from the library staff wielding electric drills took down the boards that guarded the entrance and I walked in.

  In World War One, a quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog was used to house artwork from the Tate and the National Galleries, including paintings by Van Gogh. It’s even rumoured that the crown jewels were stored there. The tunnel I entered in Aberystwyth was little more than head height. A number of rusty-looking steel doors hung ajar. It was supposed to be sealed, but there was graffiti on the walls. Someone had scrawled “Death” on the civil service issue magnolia paint just inside the entrance.

  I lit a torch and stepped cautiously inside. The corridor curved away. I followed it, my beam illuminating badly-drawn skulls. The space continued to curve, unvaryingly, except for another bulkhead. I walked on, perhaps no more than a further 20 paces and found myself back at the entrance. That was it. The great treasure cave amounted to less than 100 feet of close tunnel.

  It was a little disappointing. I wondered if it had been to the curators and librarians who commissioned it. The absolutely priceless, the really unique and timeless treasures of Great Britain, including letters from Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, could all be stored in a se
mi-circular basement no bigger than a couple of containers.

  The treasures survived and were disbursed again. I have heard that the Luftwaffe had no strategic interest in the area, though I wasn’t aware that the Germans flew such long sorties over west Wales. I have also heard that the RAF used the library as a marker for their own bombers, heading off into the Atlantic, and that had further protected the treasure. This all sounded like embryonic myth-making to me. The embroidery starts. The sheer banality of the cave and its limited dimensions and a few crates and civil service dockets are not enough to satisfy the need for a good myth.

  – NANTEOS –

  I used the bookshops and cafés in Aberystwyth to try to get closer to the Legend of the Grail. My faint recollection was correct. The miraculous cup was, indeed, reputed to have been kept at a house a few miles from Aberystwyth, called Nanteos. I hired a bike and pedalled into the suburbs.

  Nanteos sits in the wooded Paith Valley. It is a big, cuboid, Grade I-listed block of Georgian mansion, built by William Powell between 1738 and 1757, with money obtained from marriage to a former Lord Mayor of London. It was only recently sold by the Powell family after centuries of private occupation and has become a country hotel. It has 69 rooms, including a highly decorated music room on the first floor where plaster musical instruments are entwined with plaster representations of the four seasons in a plaster fantasy that looks good enough to eat. The house is so big that during winter the second floor used to be closed off to conserve heat. In the 1920s ten members of staff maintained the exterior of the estate alone. Wagner is reputed to have come to call and, as we all know, Wagner wrote “Parsifal”. Perhaps he took inspiration from the Holy Grail at Nanteos? Already febrile minds are beginning to see connections. Mine certainly was. The cup that Nanteos sheltered did definitely exist. Whether Wagner saw it is doubtful.

  I bounced up a long private drive that comes off a secluded by-road beginning at the very roundabout that marks the entrance to Aberystwth. There were a few cars scattered around the large square of gravel in front of the porticoed entrance where I slewed to a halt. Leaving a dove-grey, stone-flagged hall, the manager Mark Rawlings-Lloyd immediately escorted me on a tour, which included my room for the night.