Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  The little boy behind me was looking increasingly rueful. Each obstacle was getting higher. Or rather, the ground was getting further away, because we were effectively traversing out across the slope and by now the ground was 30 feet below and the slack wires that had to be negotiated were slacker.

  Jason the ex-marine was standing way below me. His massive hams of shoulders had become mere quail legs surmounted by a shaven pimple. This was his head from which emanated advice. “Lean out!!” he called.

  Lean out? I couldn’t release the hold on the branch I was next to. If you ever wondered whether you were a tree-hugger, try this assault course. You will embrace trees far more fervently than you have ever hugged your children. Never has a warm, red, fat trunk seemed so comforting and cosy.

  “Reach out for the next rope beyond!!” That was another favourite instruction, hollered up from somewhere in the void, and not bad advice when the grip on the rope I had in my hand was faltering so badly.

  “I think I may be having a heart attack.”

  “No, no, you’re doing fine!”

  Well, what the hell did he know? Jason was barely visible now. And I wasn’t going to look down anyway.

  I had the presence of mind, if not to bleat, then at the least to address my director in a hollow tone. “I do think we have probably got enough of this by now,” I croaked.

  “Oh yes, undoubtedly,” Chris shouted back.

  “Shall I come down?”

  “There’s no way down,” Jason shouted. “You have to go on to the end to get down.”

  “You are quite right, though,” Chris shouted. “We’ll get the camera up to the end. Hang on there.”

  This was a fairly redundant instruction. I was hanging already. Whether I could sustain my dangling was mere conjecture on his part. I pressed on, with the lemur behind me skipping across in seconds, and finally, after three impossible bridges and two suicidal ones, I reached a final platform high in the upper branches of a straight Douglas fir that was now swaying perceptibly in the breeze.

  Francesca, the course instructor, was waiting for me. She could have taken a course in advanced astrophysics and a PhD while she did so. “OK. So the way down is very quick,” she explained. We were standing on a minute wooden platform. “I am just attaching this cable to your harness. You can’t feel it but it comes into action as you fall and slows your descent.”

  “What descent?”

  “You just have to step off.”

  I looked down. The forest floor was a long way below. This was a demanding “step”. A number of people were looking up at me. They were barely discernible.

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “Yes, it’s easy,” said Francesca firmly.

  I intrinsically believed her. My operational intelligence understood that this well-respected tourist attraction would be shut down if their automatic descent-arresting wire failed on a regular basis. But my body was now beyond rationality. I was required to step off into the void. I couldn’t do it. I have lowered myself off skyscrapers, climbed north faces and abseiled down ventilation shafts, all in the name of television “jeopardy”, but this was one small step for a man and one giant step for an abject coward. Not since the top board at High Beech swimming pool at the age of eight had I felt so challenged in my bowels.

  And then from some 60 feet I sensed a growing impatience somewhere down below. Well, bugger that. I went.

  I don’t believe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or that “Geronimo!” stuff. I didn’t make a great whoop. I might have whimpered. I walked off like a man on the scaffold. Whoosh. Clunk. And I fell to my instant death.

  Er… no. In truth, I whizzed down to land perfectly safely just like everybody else. An unseen hand grabbed me from behind and slowed my descent. Not so slow, however, that I didn’t feel an appreciable jar when I hit the ground. I forgot to bend my knees.

  Jason slapped me on the back. But, as I smiled weakly and nodded pathetically, in my peripheral vision I could just make out that six year old who had followed me. He was giving me a surprisingly adult look.

  – ANTIQUE SHOPS –

  The village of Llangernyw straddles the main A548 between Llanrwst and Llanfair Talhaiarn. There’s a church and a big, busy pub, a tiny shop and a few houses scattered at the crossroads. The river Elwy glides through quietly and the road noisily. I was there to look at another tree, but as I passed I noticed that there was an unusually discreet antique shop tucked a little way up the southern road. At last, some chance of making contact with north Walian furniture. I was almost trembling as I pushed the door open.

  It was a small room and a crowded one. A good moment, when the gloom settles and the eye ranges around: a quick assessment followed by a longer careful trawl.

  Perhaps the real antiques have all gone by now. These days junk seems to get offloaded from an Eastern Europe Euro-Antique frontier. Beaten-up, wormy, crudely-painted boxes that look as if they might have been for the house pig are stacked on tables with oddly short legs, sawn down because the bottoms had rotted away with endless sluicing of some hovel’s floor.

  What I was looking for is called “country furniture” by the trade: the plainer the better. I was seeking straightforward Welsh objects made with good oak or fruitwood, with a strong, warm colour acquired over many years. It would be heavy; if there was imperfection, so much the better. One of the experts we spoke to about Welsh dressers told us that you can often tell if a dresser is authentic by the back panelling. When they were first made, craftsmen used any scrap of wood they could get and, as such, the panels were not uniform. Mass production of course changed all this and many back panels were replaced with new mass-produced planks as damp cottage and farmhouse walls rotted the wood over the years.

  I doubt very much that the average Welsh farmhouse was furnished to look like “World of Interiors”, with beautiful spare pieces in a shaft of light on a worn stone floor. Photographs taken at the beginning of the twentieth-century show kitchens that look like chaotic, dirty pubs. Hundreds of jugs hang from the ceiling and wild, gap-toothed inhabitants are crouched down amongst highly polished pieces of copper in dark, almost black caves. The furniture can barely be glimpsed in the gloom. And yet they had it. And they bought it locally.

  Here in Llangernyw, I immediately noticed that there was no dresser on display. I was struck, however, by two eighteenth-century, long-case clocks, sometimes called “grandfather clocks”. They were standing against the wall. The usual cumbersome large “head” holding the clock-face was balanced on a coffin-sized box, with a door in front, where the pendulum swung.

  I knew the type well, because, naturally enough, we have a similar one in my family. It is in my Pembrokeshire dining room. My mother had presented it to me with the usual forceful ritual. It came from my father’s “side” and bore the legend “Cardigan” on its decorated face. I was proud to have it in Wales. Like myself, it had come home. After all, Cardigan was only 25 miles from my little farmhouse.

  I peered closely at the face of the clock in the shop. It had “Llanrwst” painted on it. “That’s close to here, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Bethan, the owner, from behind her counter, barricaded into the corner by stacked furniture. “It’s the next village up the road.”

  I was impressed. “And the other one?”

  “That’s from Abergele. Just down the other way.”

  This was truly local. Here were two pieces of relatively complicated furniture, the same basic idea, but with individual and identifiable personal variations, made within a few miles of where I was standing.

  “So did you go to auctions to retrieve these and bring them back to the district?” I asked.

  “Oh no.” She seemed amused by the notion. “They both came from local farmhouses.”

  Bethan and her husband, who repaired the stuff they sold, rarely visited a
uctions and certainly never got on the road to go trawling through Romanian or Montpellier markets. Both of the clocks came from local families who had passed them down by inheritance and now found that they really had no need or perhaps space for them. Bethan had been asked to sell them. She acquired all her stock by similar methods.

  I was excited. This was the vindication of the Welsh furniture story. Not only were the pieces proper heirlooms, which had stayed and been polished in the locality, they were made by local cabinet-makers.

  “There were seven clockmakers at one time in Llanrwst,” Bethan pointed out. It was a tiny place. “There was one in this village too.” Llangernyw was even tinier.

  We speculated on how the system worked. They had probably sent off to Birmingham for the clock mechanism, which was painted up in some little slum factory. Perhaps that factory provided, as a service, the name of the village of origin under the views of castles or roses (or, for the more elaborate mechanisms, entire seascapes with square rigged ships flying flags under rotating mechanical moons.) The local man then sawed the planks of oak and constructed the case. And of course every modern, model farmhouse, with staff to set to work and cows to milk, needed a clock in their parlour.

  They probably needed a fine heavy “coffer” or chest to keep blankets in too. She had one from a local farm. And they might have needed a strong “carver”, or well-made armchair, in heavy sawn (not turned) oak. She had one of those. The farmers would have needed a court cupboard, possibly something fine and highly carved. There was one against the back wall, though we both shook our heads over that, because it was a little too refined. There were lustre jugs, which went on shelves to twinkle in the fire and Staffordshire dogs, often won at fairs (and called fairings as a result) which would have added to the shiny clutter. All these things I noted and rather wanted, but there wasn’t any sign of that other staple, the dresser.

  “Oh, we do get them,” said Bethan, reassuringly, implying that, if I just hung around for a few years, some nearby family would tire of theirs and call her in.

  She didn’t really want to discuss prices. It was a bad time. Five years before, the market had been strong, but during the recession it had collapsed. In truth she wondered whether the demand would ever come back. Black oak was not as fashionable as it had been. Most people weren’t trying to fake up a romantic olde-worlde atmosphere like me. They preferred wipe-clean Ikea. She was perfectly aware, though, that there were still collectors who honed in on really good items. And I knew what she meant. The authentic, sturdily-made piece of country furniture is a lovesome thing. I have no doubt that when Bethan gets her dresser it will be the real thing. But I didn’t have years to wait.

  – YEW OR NON-YEW –

  I crossed the road to the churchyard of St Digain’s. I knew what I was looking for. Tommy Cooper (yes, that really was his name), the gardener, was sitting on a grave and pointed the way. “It’s over there,” he said. “You know originally there was no fuss about it at all.” He went on. “It was all covered with brambles and nettles in that corner but we’ve cleared them away now.”

  I looked across at a large, but not specifically giant, yew tree.

  “An expert told us that it was 4,000 years old, but other experts disputed that and came down to have a look. They decided it was 4,800 years old. And so they settled on 4,500.”

  I walked over to the tree and then through it. The thing itself is a group of limbs now, as many ancient trees are. It looked as if it had sprouted from a stool or pollarded trunk. I was just guessing. Experts would undoubtedly point out that it was never “harvested” as a pollarded tree would have been. It was more probable that the central trunk had rotted away. It had lost its middle section. The two outer parts, continuing to thrive, had simply divided and branched out into separate trunks. Taken around the whole lot, it now measures more than 10m in circumference, which is part of the method for calculating the age.

  Yew has the advantage of being able to fracture and split as branches become too heavy, without diseases infecting the whole of the tree. A gardener making hedges will tell you that fresh growth springs from any cut. As a result this ancient organism appeared to have spread like a splayed hand, and its dense, dark, tiny leaves now shaded a considerable bare patch of earth, grown into a slight mound from many centuries of steadily dropping needles. Evergreens shed dead leaves throughout the year, rather than in the autumn.

  Tommy explained that, until they had been alerted to the potential age and status of the tree, the church had kept its oil tank in the middle of it. Rather too many dead branches were cleared away as it was “freshened up”, and the loss of these apparently prevented “dendrochronologists” from getting a really accurate measure of its age. But the Tree Council has now named it one of the “50 great trees of Britain”.

  Viewed close up, the wood twisted and furled like rope. The bark was warm and red and, at the older intersections of the branches, the grain of the tree swirled like melted chocolate. Gazing into these whorls one appreciated the age of the thing. There was something thick, dense and knotty there.

  Yew makes great hard furniture with wonderful colour. Otherwise you might have passed by without a second glance: just another yew in a churchyard. A few moments’ meditation, however, under the canopy of this ancient living thing invites the making of connections. They say that yews are pagan trees, that they predate Christianity and have connections with ancient holy sites. Julius Caesar noted that the Gauls and other north Europeans committed suicide by taking poison from yews in order to escape his clutches. The oldest wooden object in the world is a spearhead made of yew, found near Clacton in Essex and estimated to be between 350,000 and 450,000 years old. Certainly these grave trees, a symbol of darkness in any churchyard, were part of the ancient world and its mysteries. They remain mysterious. But just the name is tantalising. The Latin countries call it a Taxus, but the word we use has some sort of old German origin. The Welsh for yew is ywen.

  Was this particular great bush here some holy thing which predated the church itself? Was I standing under a tree which had begun to grow around the time that Stonehenge was being erected? Did later Christians simply employ pagan holy trees as sites for places of worship? There is a certificate celebrating the yew’s 4,000 years, signed by David Bellamy. Others are more stingy. They assert it is only about 1,000 years old, which might mean that the early Welsh saints planted this tree themselves to dignify their place of worship. Either way, the Llangernyw Yew had seen some history. Nothing more spectacular, I sensed, than the steady passage of the seasons and the quiet pace of a rural enclave, but it invoked awe and contemplation and respect.

  – CONWY TWITTED –

  Once I stopped the bleeding I was left with a visible scar on the dome of my forehead. I found the camera crew and we filmed me trudging across the footbridge several times. “Does it show?” I asked Nick.

  “What?”

  “My wound.”

  He looked at me and then played film back on the camera. “Yes,” he said.

  We got hold of some pink, liquid make-up and dabbed it into the cut. I didn’t feel this was good for it, but I imagined that make-up had to have some antiseptic precautions. Now, with what appeared to be a loathsome pink skin infection on my brow, we resumed filming and I wandered into Conwy itself.

  Shut the gates, town council! Here was a walled town, with some of the finest medieval ramparts in Europe, with fine medieval gates at the quarters, and still a daily chaos of cars and buses pour in, taking a short-cut, the only cut to the bridges across the Conwy River.

  Edward I would have done something about it. He was full of rules. He built the castle at the end of the thirteenth century to control the Welsh. Apparently, the fortress was originally whitewashed, which was difficult to imagine as we walked under its black and grey eminence now. Wales is believed to have more castles per square mile than anywhere else in the world. There are
over 600 across the country. It is estimated Edward I spent £15,000 building this one in Conwy, the largest sum spent on any of his Welsh castles. No surprise, then, that it’s regarded as one of the finest surviving medieval fortifications in Britain. They kept out the locals, who were only allowed in on market day. Perhaps the modern traffic is a revenge for that.

  I found my dresser in a clock shop in the upper reaches of the town. It was simple enough, made of oak, with its lower areas enclosed by cupboards. Ken, the owner of the shop, could place it exactly. It came from Anglesey, he told me; so not exactly local-local, but certainly not from far away and definitely, with those cupboards underneath, from north Wales. You see there are distinct differences in Welsh dressers depending on where they were made. In north Wales they were more akin to a cupboard and the traditional image of a Welsh dresser. In the south they were more like a sideboard, while in mid Wales, some were ‘crooked’, designed to fit into the small corners of workman’s cottages. As a result some experts argue that the mid Wales dresser is the true ancestor of the modern fitted kitchen.

  Ken pointed down to an empty space on the lower level between the doors to either side of his specimen. “It has a dog kennel here,” he said. I was sceptical but he was utterly convincing. “The farmer came in and his tea was on the table and his sheep dog was ordered in there, or that is what I have always been told,” he said.

  The dresser had a lovely dark colour. How did they get that? I understood you had to be careful of modern furniture polishes and their chemical glazes.

  “They used boot polish,” Ken told me. “My father kept this shop before me and I was often put to work as a child to polish the tables and it was always plain boot polish. That’s what the ladies in the farms used. It made them darker.” We admired the colour for a moment. “If you had wanted to buy this dresser five years ago,” Ken explained, “it would have been a lot more. The highest price I have heard for a Welsh dresser was paid at an auction in Chester. It was in excess of £45,000.”