Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  “Not so free.” He explained. “In fact my pipe crosses the tidal regions to get into deep water and that is the property of the crown. They charge me for extracting the water.”

  The Crown Commissioners have become rather commercially minded of late. The water in the sea is not owned by Her Majesty, but a pipe to get at it has to cross the intertidal foreshore and that is.

  Nonetheless, seawater was a minor part of David’s costs. Inside the sheds was a sequence of evaporating pans. I had to encase myself in a beard snood, a blue net that promised to contain my facial hair as I watched the snowy crystals being shovelled into buckets.

  Whether as a result of secret processes or extra salinity, the long white fragile flakes had a crunchy purity that far outshone salt from the mines of Chester, or Siberia, or wherever else we get it these days. I stood quietly to one side in a palely lit enclosure while a member of staff, almost unidentifiable in his snoods, gently lifted crumbling and fragile cascades of the crystals out of the evaporating pans with a shovel.

  Môn is part of the Welsh name for Anglesey: “Ynys Môn”, and the syllable derives from the Roman name for the island: Mona. Here they are again, those Romans. They seem to be part of every story round here. Of course, the Romans made salt in their pans by similar methods. Perhaps they had a yen for crunchy condiments too, but I have read that salt is salt. Despite the foodie’s delight in Japanese smoked salt or Arctic salt or even Welsh sea salt, it is, essentially, sodium chloride. Or is it?

  While we waited to move on towards South Stack, we spent a few minutes in the “showroom”, admiring the pure white pottery jars and the bright blue labels, brilliantly designed to capture the tang of the sea. But it’s the crisp and gleaming crystals of the product itself that are really attractive. This is salt with crunch, salt with texture, sodium chloride with some of the magic of natural geometry built into its creation. Halen Môn was taking something industrial and repackaging it for a new upmarket, discerning, sophisticated world here on Anglesey. They even provide a recipe for a pigeon dish, accompanied with chocolate, vanilla Halen Môn and fig marmalade – no help cooking puffins though.

  – JESUS WANTS ME –

  David had offered to take me on to my next appointment and get me that bit closer to South Stack. He started up his 1920s Austin Sunbeam. Jimmy the Jack Russell jumped up on the dickie seat and barked whimpering approval as we rumbled off, through the close-hedged country lanes, across the great flat interior plateau of the island. David extolled his lifestyle. He felt himself lucky to be able to live in such rural bliss, and run a business, cut off from some of the pressures of the mainland.

  We pootled on at 20 miles an hour and stopped by a farm gate to make contact with our cameraman. As we stood in the road, some five of us, talking with the owner of the farm, a big black BMW shot round a corner at speed. Far from slowing down, it accelerated towards us, threading its way though us with inches to spare at nearly 50 miles an hour.

  “Probably lost tourists,” someone said.

  – WILD LAND ROVERS –

  The tourists may have been looking for the nearby Tacla Taid Museum. That is where we were heading now, the Jack Russell sliding about on uncut claws as we turned into a farm and, next to it, a bare concrete courtyard littered with huge vehicles where David abandoned me. I was pointed towards a big green corrugated iron shed in search of Arfon, the owner.

  Arfon was a never-throw-anything-away man, of the best sort. Charming, diffident and the second solidly Welsh person I had met so far on Anglesey, his motor museum, now a successful tourist attraction, had been the only available solution after his private collection of rescued vehicles began to outgrow his garden. Tacla Taid is the largest museum of its kind in Wales.

  He started with a tractor. Having learned to drive at the age of eight, at fifteen he was given an old Massey Ferguson, which he rebuilt and then used as his personal transport. Now he greeted me warmly in the middle of a landscape of glinting chrome. We were on the ground floor of the building: a monument to the popular car. There were dozens of Morrises, Citroëns and Rovers. Most of them had been brought in by farmers or local people – nothing too fancy. These weren’t Maseratis or Ferraris. There was even the brother to my dad’s old Morris Oxford, in exactly the same shade of grey.

  “They are essentially simple pieces of technology,” Arfon told me. “That’s their great virtue. You lift a bonnet now and it is all sealed away, but in the old days you could repair any car if you had a mind to it.”

  Or any vehicle, I assumed. On the upper level of the shed stood an array of tractors. “Ah yes,” I said boldly, “Tractor heaven. I have one of these at home.” I proudly slapped my hand on to the flimsy metal engine-cover of a Massey Ferguson.

  “That’s a 1956 petrol-driven Massey.” Arfon said.

  “Oh.” I was abashed. “Mine’s a diesel-driven 1963.”

  ‘You mean one like this,” said Arfon. He took me over to another vehicle, three tractors down the row.

  But I wasn’t there to admire the tractors, or the huge military cranes, or the two Vauxhall Carltons – ugly beasts from the nineties, which were developed to be the fastest full four-seater cars on the road and still brought a tear to Arfon’s eye (nothing Italianate about them, I guessed). I was there to find a humble “Land Rover Series One.” Sure enough, Arfon had a fine specimen. A stout green box on wheels, standing by the shed door.

  This vehicle, which revolutionised life for the British farmer, was born here in Anglesey. It started as a notion of Rover’s chief engineer Maurice Wilks. He originally drew a sketch of his concept in 1947 in the sand of Red Wharf Bay, a few miles from where we stood. He took a Rover engine and stuck it into the jeep and tested the thing in Tros Yr Afon. The hybrid, all-terrain workhorse rumbled on its way. Over four million have subsequently been made. 65 percent are still working.

  I was expecting the first model to be a brutish thing, ready to clamber up the 700-foot mountains of Anglesey, but it felt oddly slight.

  While Arfon’s helper raised the shutters for us, I guided the Land Rover out and onto the road, heading west for South Stack. The gear stick needed an element of gentlemanly negotiation, like a drunk being persuaded to go in through the door. You didn’t want to push too hard. Just help it in the general direction and, yup, it got there. The cabin seemed to be a little loose on the chassis, but that was a natural wobble.

  Arfon sat beside me, beaming with pleasure at the sheer excellence of the thing. He loved its straightforwardness. He revelled in its quiet purposefulness. He chuckled out loud as a man on a bicycle defiantly overtook us and he urged me on, as we came down the hill to a deserted beach, mounted over a mini dune, and slithered across a bank of stones down towards the sea.

  “Are we going to do this?” I asked.

  “That’s what she’s made for,” he said.

  I stopped on the sand.

  When we needed to do it all over again for the camera, several times, Arfon was happy to leap out and adjust the differential locks on the wheels. He let me dig her out of a spin and run her back and forth on the perilous descent. She still had plenty of muscle in her, but not in a showy way, just quietly capable, even if a push-bike was faster. And, clearly, that was what Arfon admired most of all. She was “proper”.

  I stood back and watched as Arfon reversed her one more time and drove away up the hill: Welsh grunt.

  – LIME WASH –

  A small squared-off building sat on a mound of land in the middle of the waste of a wide bay. It was glowing in the sunshine. It was called St Cwyfan’s. Originally founded in the seventh century, the church I was walking towards had been built in the thirteenth century. It was about a quarter of a mile away. The foreshore I was crossing had once all been land. I was able to appreciate the power and wildness of Anglesey’s south coast, which faces down St George’s Channel towards the mouth of the Atlantic at the southern
end of Ireland, because fields, which once joined this nodule of earth to the rest of Anglesey, had been utterly swept away by successive storms 400 years ago. The island continued to erode until the end of the nineteenth century when an architect called Harold Hughes from Llanfairfechan raised the money to protect it. He made a retaining wall around the remaining cake of island and restored the church.

  Now, as I walked up the steps I passed a sign warning me of the danger of being stranded (and, indeed, of stepping backwards to get a good view of the simple building). I was greeted by the volunteers who had gathered to limewash the walls.

  Lime is a magical substance to traditional restorers. “A useful, beautiful and benign natural finish”, according to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, it is catnip to a caring builder. You mix the white powder with water. It starts popping and boiling or “going off”, and then it has to be applied to a walled surface. Today it enjoys a fairly sacred status; it wasn’t always so. Wordsworth hated the whitewashed cottages in the Lake District.

  Personally, I prefer the slightly oatmeal off-white colour that I first encountered on a similar newly-painted chapel in Orkney. I only learned recently that that particular antique look derived from impurities. Today we have to add pigment to get it to that shade. And then we have to slap it on.

  The volunteers got me a full coverall, some goggles and a pair of gloves. Lime burns, especially the eyes. Like refugees from CSI on a particularly noxious murder enquiry we paraded out to the side of the church and started applying our milky protection. Limewash hardly adheres to a brush at all. I stuck my frazzled spokes of hair, worn down by previous use, straight into the bucket and lifted out a loose liquid that seemed to pour back as quickly as I transferred it to the wall.

  There were two other coats on already. Applying white on white is frustrating. Maybe that’s what got Adolf Hitler into a bad mood. The house painter can enjoy the first coat, even relish the second, but lime needs five coats, starting where? Finishing where? Have I done this bit or not? Gradually we worked along the wall, feeling our way more by a sense of dampness then anything else.

  Limewash flies in the face of modern convenience. It needs to be replaced every five years, perhaps more quickly if the winds blow in from St George’s Channel. If storms can carry away acres of Anglesey they can certainly make short work of a few layers of damp paste. Experts will tell you that lime is best, because it breathes. Sealed-in water does the damage to old buildings. With lime coverings the damp is absorbed – but then evaporates again.

  My non-expert eye, however, peering at the wall through dirt-encrusted goggles, valued something else entirely: a living response to the climate. North Wales is sometimes about embracing weather rather than fighting it. The rain and the wind come hurtling in and the side of the chapel of St Cwyfan constantly adapts. It creates a subtle impasto, like the sky in a painting by Boudin. The blank wall becomes a soothing, continually-changing canvas of fading tones.

  Can a building aspire to be a living part of the landscape? Yes, if it is constructed out of the rough stones of the cliff and painted with the earth. The old church squatting down in the face of the prevailing weather, hunkered against the storms, felt entirely appropriate to its setting: simple and spiritual, despite its new and gleaming paint job.

  Now I was due to continue with the help of a cycling club from Aberffraw. They started me off in gentle cycling country in the dunes of the south coast, and then let me wander across the island on my own.

  – THROUGH THE MILL –

  Halfway to my next destination, I paused in a green lane by a hedge in a road shadowed by trees. A gravelled drive ran off to the south, leading to a hidden large farmhouse. The wind rustled through the leafy tunnel above me and I hiked the bike over to a gate to gaze across a pasture to cattle and a serene, rural idyll. We were a long way from the tourist edges of Anglesey now and in the heart of Ynys Môn. This Welsh Anglesey is also known as Mam Cymru, “the mother of Wales”.

  Living in a post-industrial technical world (in which we are happy to eat avocados from Israel and arrange cut flowers from Kenya) it is sometimes difficult to appreciate how important simple agricultural fertility once was. Humans radically changed their expectations and found ways of controlling their environment less than three hundred years ago. Before that, for the previous six thousand years, Anglesey represented true wealth. There was no sense of it being “a quiet and remote spot”. It was Mam Cymru. It was “the mother” of the nation because of its reputed capacity to feed the whole of Wales. These rich flat fields were like Sicily to Rome – the granary – the supply store of the country. There were once 50 windmills scattered across the elevated plain of the island to serve that harvest. Now only one remains: Melin Llynnon.

  I cycled on, turned a corner and quickly spotted it ahead, standing out on a prominent hillock, 30 feet high and whitewashed, with a straight row of square windows leading up to a conical, tiled roof.

  I was well ahead of the camera crew now. They wanted to get some shots of me from a distance. The site itself was breezy. There were high washed clouds. I poked my head into the first building I came to, and two women in pinafores looked up from their baking.

  “Oh, we are expecting you,” said the older one. “Look. We’re just making your lunch.”

  Built in 1775, the mill still grinds corn, and the flour is used in the bread and cakes served in the café. Its great sails continued to turn until 1924. A storm damaged the cap in 1918 so that it couldn’t turn to the wind, but it was used for a further six years whenever there was a south-west wind. It was bought in 1978 and restored by an enlightened council.

  Lloyd, who met me up by the great white pepper pot itself, was preparing to close up. He was going to give me a lift to South Stack, but before he did that, he wanted to secure his machinery. Like a tall sailing ship, the power he routinely employed was immense and unpredictable. The design of the mill, which may seem Heath Robinson to us, was ingenious and precise. It used an exact technical knowledge of the capacities and limits of timber, the strength of the wind, and the capacity of the engine. It is no surprise that millers were at the forefront of industrialisation. But for this operation, he had me to help him.

  Lloyd needed to lock down his sails at the right angle to the wind. There was a short piece of wood sticking out of the lower sail near to the centre of the apex. Having determined the wind direction and allowed the sails to back round so that they faced the “wrong” way, he asked me to flick a rope over this wooden protrusion, in order for him to tie the system off. It was 15 feet above my head. I needed to get a wave to travel along the rope and then loop that wave over the stick with a flick of my wrist. Lloyd showed me how to do it, pretty much with his hand behind his back, while talking to me. Then he left me to it.

  Sometimes a principle can be totally comprehensible and yet impossible to perform. Years of throwing rope on boats meant that I understood how rope behaves, but the actuality of flicking the bottom of the rope and twisting it to one side, exactly in sequence, so that the slack travelling hump of rope danced to one side as it reached the top became frustrating. Eight times I nearly did it. Nearly is not enough. Lloyd meanwhile ran around his windmill attending to other business and as he passed me on one of his circumnavigations took it out of my hands and did it in one. Then he disentangled it and handed the rope back to me.

  I think I did it on twist and flick number 16. And from then on I could do it every time.

  Having disengaged the sails we now had to block the machinery. We went into the shell of the building, climbing upwards on narrow stairs past the carefully organised elements of the mill system. The power from the turning sails is translated to the mill wheels. But it is also used to perform all the other heavy functions of the mill. It runs a winch that lifts the sacks of corn to the very top of the building. The force of gravity can be used to separate and control the feed to the wheels. Ri
ght up in the attic under the hat of the roof we finally came to a significant and impressive piece of wooden Meccano. Vast cogs translated the horizontal turn of the sail shaft into the vertical turn of a post through the middle of the building.

  Lloyd now scampered around this fearsome engine. He jumped over blocks and stepped across an open void. He encouraged me to follow him and we took up station in front of the massive piece of clockwork. The idea was to apply a chock or brake, and the active part of the brake was a long, heavy balk of timber. By jamming this into the mechanism it would prevent it turning. But I was lifting the long heavy piece of timber by one end only. The other end waved hopelessly about.

  “Go on, you’ve got it,” said Lloyd.

  I didn’t think I had, but I pushed it forward and it seemed to lodge in the gap.

  “That’s great,” said Lloyd and led me outside onto a small balcony.

  We gazed out over the sweep of Anglesey. Lloyd pointed to the hilly west where I was heading, up a steady slope, to get to the high cliffs of South Stack. We turned to look north, where the very technology that we had just settled for the night was entering a new phase. The bay was littered with wind turbines. Not many were turning.

  You might have expected Lloyd, a miller, and a man who learned his trade anew in order to run the only working mill in Wales, to be an advocate of wind power and he was, for his purposes. He ground corn when the wind blew. Windmills once dominated the fens in the East of England. Similarly, they pumped when the wind blew. Both these local sources of power were used intermittently. They provided their locally required power in bursts of energy as it was needed.

  Lloyd shook his head. Wind suits the needs of any system that can wait and work as required. Over a period of time the wind will blow enough to pump the fens dry and enough to deal with a harvest. But we cannot currently store electricity in any meaningful way. He wondered whether those wind machines we were looking at could ever be more than a partial solution to our current power needs.