Another space came within a quarter mile, after I’d paced up the hill to a road with, not long afterwards, a house at the end. The tarmac stopped with the last dwelling place, but caught between two high hedges, there was a hidden patch of land where a trackway continued. I could duck behind the grown-out holly bushes and make a nest on a bed of leaves, thickly fallen and held in the windless space between the thickets. It was a calm and quiet place, nothing human had come here, not for years, no path or vehicle, just an old place of passage, holding its space in charming wild decay, bushes hanging their sprouting arms down into the empty place. I lay down in perfect peace, and read until the last of the light had left the sky: The Mayor of Casterbridge, telling of a time when this road would have been used by carts and drovers. I imagined leaves layered over wheel-ruts.
I woke in the night to the rustles of rabbits and once when a spider ran over my face. I felt its first steps onto my neck and held still the urgent impulse to brush it away. I was rewarded by the feeling of a whisper of movement as its dainty legs touched faintly across my cheek and into my hairline. It was a moon explorer, a pod held high on spindly pins, delicately teetering through unknown territory, unaware of the sleeping giant that its landscape comprised. The taint of a spider’s footsteps left no mark at all, just the feeling of being a complete part of this quiet hollow, one of the animals. For a few special seconds, I had quelled my blundering human presence to become just another piece of the natural landscape.
Hills crowded together in the distance as I lapped in and out of valleys, dipping and rising into different river routes. There was no single marker to follow, as I’d been doing with the broad snakes of the dyke and the Severn. The path wriggled, with no clear idea of a direction. It had obviously been invented, having no clear purpose other than tourism. A line had been drawn between places to incorporate possible daily stages and useful tourist-entertainment points, using existing footpaths and taking in small detours for views of a lake, or around a recalcitrant landowner not allowing access. This path feels very different to an old track, to a route that has been laid down by human feet for hundreds of years, that has a clear overall theme or purpose.
In Pontrobert, I sat on a bench for a while watching a blue tit bathe in the gutter of a bus shelter. It flung out intrusive moss pieces before fluttering and shaking wing shivers into water droplets, each catching a gleam of sunlight. Behind the grey metal roof came tips of pink blossom sprays peeping, delicate bravery in the fresh spring sun.
It was April, the time of spring flowers and new lambs. There was a brightness to the sunshine, bright and yellow and new, and my route was taking me through the heart of mid-Wales: sheep country. I came to lambs just born, feeling rude and insensitive blundering into the first moments of their life. I watched the lamb struggle to standing, legs askew in varying directions, nosing its way along the length of mother, not knowing its prize until it found the teat.
Sometimes lambs stayed behind when their mother bustled in alarm at my presence and trotted away. All the mother could do was call to her offspring and remain out of reach, pacing in the background, waiting for it to come further away from my stealthy, predatory stalking. But the lamb didn’t know, wasn’t looking up at the height of this interloper. The gigantic size of me was restricted to two thick dark tree trunks and an unusual smell: no sense of my marauding hands, ready to swoop and manhandle. It stayed at my knees while the mother paced and bleated and I couldn’t resist kneeling to it, smelling its beginning scent of warm lanolin, watching the eyes blink against the light. Perhaps this lamb was blind, perhaps it was ill, perhaps it was too new to realise my threat. I wanted to stay with it longer, touch and cosset it, but took pity on the mother’s worry and walked away.
I passed fragile lambs, tied by the farmer in protective plastic like a pensioner’s rain bonnet, bone-thin and delicate, limbs shrunken below their shanks, below the knee puffed up by a legwarmer woollen coating.
Lambs rushed and vaulted up onto hawthorn roots, earth banks, food troughs, felled trunks, prizing the leap-gained height of a new perch before bucking down again in twisting ecstasy. Skittish and frisky they ran and paused together, enjoying the newness of mass movement. Heads tossing, the lambs formed groups that jumped and capered, a mini-horde at the mercy of impulse, with the potential to spread like liquid splashes in any direction.
Another new lamb still had the red cord hanging down from its belly, fresh and bright and blood-red, the last live line of contact from one body to the other. I squatted down and watched for a while as it wandered around its mother, nudging against her nuzzling licks, her pleasured grunts. It found its legs had taken it to the hawthorn shelter it was birthed against and I watched as this lamb closed its eyes, blinking dazedly as it absorbed the scent of this new thing. Crusted bark rough and dry, sap flow pushing, lichen-coated, beetle-tracked, swaying and creaking: tree.
I saw that lambs don’t always easily find their mothers. I saw lambs start from their game, or knuckle up from a small snooze with no idea where their mother was. I watched as lambs called over and over, seemingly not hearing the answer from a patient parent. I saw them run towards a sound, only to divert to a nearer, grazing, white cloud. I saw them run towards any sheep and try to kneel and drink, only for the mother to smell their backsides and butt the interloper away from their dangling udder.
Coming through a field between Dolanog and Pont Llogel, towards a long, straight trackway that was probably once a railway line, I realised I was being followed by a herd of ewes. They were bundled together, unable to control their curiosity. I’d peep back over my shoulder as I walked, watching them take long languorous sniffs of the air where my scent was being wafted back towards them. Each flaring of their nostrils was their tasting of me, their learning about what exactly I might be. If I stopped and turned around, they stopped too, eyes flicking to one another, reading the group mood and watching for the next decision. They edged and twitched, wanting to come and investigate me but unable to step outside the group dynamic which has them to do as the others do: stay together, follow each other.
I was coming to know sheep. I saw the many ungainly ways in which they get stuck in their environment. I found sheep, alive and dead, twisted and trapped and wedged in wire fences. I was coming to know their calls, like a prehistoric herd of herbivores, opening their throats to blurt out a foghorn bleat. I came to know the way they communicate as a group, the ways in which they are curious, and the ways in which they are scared. I knew the smell of them and their marks and trackways, the ways they shape the ground.
Their faces were starting to tell me who they were. The brute, bulbous ugliness of a Texel ram, the inquisitive pointed rabbit-ears of a Blue-faced Leicester and startling clarity of the Badger-faced breed’s black markings, a brown collar mark showing Welsh-mountain blood. Occasionally, I even saw the long, curled wool hanging over the smiling face of a Cotswold or the heavy-rolled layers of a robust and regal Merino ram. I knew I’d entered the higher places when I began to see the button eyes and small, cross-stitched mouth of a true Welsh mountain sheep.
I came to a hawthorn barrier between two fields, made obsolete by the wire fence, and allowed to grow from a thick, squat hedge into rippled trees, short and gnarled. Branches had become elegant grotesques, bark-scaled and moss-coated, like their bulging root fists. These are ancient trees, once placed to mark a holloway, to line a place of passage. Now they shelter grazers, their branches twisting and merging.
The wind is gentle and sweet, creaking in the rub of two branches together, humming the holes of each metal gate in the mellow pitch of panpipes. The low sound of a gate singing to itself, it’s a beautiful thing to walk into.
Searching for an evening bed, I came at last upon a round flat mass of trodden hay, where seasons of sheep coming to devour a bale laid in the same place had trampled down a flat, yielding, and sweet-smelling base, their own threshing circle. I lay down, and watched the sky darken through the hazel branches,
catkins shivering.
I watched two crows attack a red kite – a game of slow placement in the sky before a swooping, sudden attack. It looked like the crows had the best of the kite, hitting and bundling it downwards in an awkward falling movement that first drew my attention. I watched as they disengaged and circled each other before they swooped in again, their numbers putting the kite at a disadvantage. Incredibly, the kite was able to turn upside down in the air several times, presenting each diving crow with bared talons in a last second effort of aerobatics, forcing them to judder away and abandon the attack.
Water trickled behind me in a small cut at the side of the field, trees rooted deeply either side of it, drinking from it, their growth shaping the way the water ran downhill. I sat and looked over Lake Vyrnwy, the white rushes of water falling down the black stone dam, the turrets above it. Reeds ran away down the slope ahead of me, reeds and stunted hawthorn trees, their branches holding lichen as if they’d filtered it from the air. Ahead were the hills that surrounded the lake, green fields squared the sides or segments of dark pine; above the tree line there were bare tops that sustained only coarse grass and patches of bracken.
Vyrnwy is the first forced reservoir in Wales. England decided it needed water and that land in Wales could be drowned to provide it. The surveyors came, and then the Act of Parliament, and then the dam. Houses were built to replace the submerged village that now gave water to the thirsty city of Liverpool. Today the village is a memory, the outrage and broken homes forgotten in a lull of light on water, on small waves lapping at lake edge, quiet views, kayak holidays and picnic spots. Water forming infrastructure that was never any other way. A full third of the valley bottom was underwater bog over winter, they said, the land unusable, growing only reeds and willow groves. But still, the lives of 400 people were changed irrevocably, deemed unimportant, their feelings overridden in the search for water provision for tens of thousands.
I looked from the water to the pine darkening the hillside. Another forced land change; 100 years ago the UK government required wood for war, so bought up farms through compulsory acquisition and started a mass tree-planting operation to secure the country’s timber supplies, employing up to a fifth of the country at times. Now, it’s just another cash crop. Farmers plant their own fields, taking coarse land out of pasture, where the earth is stretched too thin over stone to support nutrition, and the sheep struggle to find good feeding. The pine has become normal; it’s easy to forget that all here was once farms, without this cloaking plantation silence.
Patches of dark pine mix into the wilder grasses, and fields of undrained ground are left to be marshland, sporting longer grasses and reeds, and not artificially seeded by more palatable turf for pasture. I hadn’t seen this landscape since I left home, and descended into the calmer farmlands of the English/Welsh border. As I turned away from the Severn Valley at Welshpool, onto Glyndŵr’s Way and into the wilder territory of the mid-Wales uplands, it felt like a return to home territory; pine forestry wasn’t beautiful to me but its presence was familiar and comforting.
Walking away from the lake and through Ddol Cownwy, the final small set of houses in the miles of pine forest on my route between Lake Vyrnwy and Llangadfan, I came to a broken-down chapel with an ancient K-reg car out front. The inside was a mess of moss, mould and tattered plastic, the tyres were flat and grass was growing up around it. A flattened front seat and greening duvet proved that someone slept in here, once. The chapel door was open, a long-broken lock and useless length of chain hung from the tattered latch. I ducked under the clinging rosehip trails and into the building. Light filtered down through a gap in the roof, to where small plants had begun to grow in the mossy drip-hole beneath. The place was ragged, only remnants of chapel life clung to the broken building. There were pews at the front, a cross painted on the wall and a faded flower-border at the seated congregation’s eye level. It was a small room, where the faithful of this small village in remote Powys had come to seek reassurance and a meaning to the direction of their lives. Now it sat as a holder for other dreams, for those who might come with little in the way of funds, to buy it, to scrape together tools and knowledge, repair and rebuild it, making it into a home where new dreams might come, new life from decay. The building waited in silence and held all these dreams, those of past and future, the repetition of years of hope and peaceful prayers layered into the walls, sunk through the peeling paint and into stone itself.
Arriving in Llangadfan I found the Cann Office Hotel and sat in the pub until it got dark outside, too tired and dazed to move. Two pints didn’t help and I made a lazy bed-choice, squeezing an unsavoury sleeping spot out of a flat gravel bed alongside an electricity substation. It felt like a precarious place, I couldn’t go too far away from the road or I’d be in view of the house next door, but equally, anyone walking along the pavement only had to turn their head at the right moment to see the whole of me lying there, exposed as a rough sleeper. It didn’t feel pleasant, but once it was dark I’d rather sleep somewhere easy than begin the walk into the black unknown, stumbling over trip-hazards and nervous of what I couldn’t see.
All the time I walked, I had intense and vivid dreams, swirls of surrealism about meetings and mafia members and Mexican violin maestros and felt-tip pens floating down a river. But waking up was even more surreal; I’d have to remember where I was each morning, allow the knowledge to trickle into my brain that yes, I’m sleeping on the ground, I’m in a field, it’s because I’m doing a long distance walk, a few thousand miles. This is my life now, I’ve been walking for weeks and I’m going to be walking for months more. There’d be a split-second realisation, the blast where all this hit me. Woah, would go my half-asleep brain and I’d just lie there in wonderment, trying to absorb the insanity.
Once I left Llangadfan, the smaller twists of the path climbed and swivelled through muddy fields at first, then small stream-bottomed hollows levelled out to a wide, high plain, with higher hills lined along the horizon. It was the high lands, there were reeds throughout the fields, other undrained fields of long yellow marsh-grass, folded and lying on itself in a melted tangle. I looked at it, a trap to pull and hinder stumbling legs, and felt glad that the path followed the road here; that kind of terrain would take hours to walk through.
I came to the only houses on the long road in the Nant yr Eira valley: farm buildings and barns, with the road running between them, a small chapel next door. A woman was crossing and stopped to say hello, jumping in surprise when I said I was raising money for Penny Brohn.
“I had treatment there, fifteen years ago,” she said. “For breast cancer.”
Caroline invited me in for lunch. She and her husband were a warm and friendly couple, living a very basic smallholders’ life, isolated subsistence living, people who’d escaped from expensive England and taken on a farmstead with geese and two cows. We ate a simple meal, soup and homemade bread. Caroline had warm round eyes and thick, centre-parted hair, Mick was grizzled and grey. They were good people.
They asked if there was anything they could do for me and I took a deep breath, unused to being so open about my needs.
“You could take my rucksack ahead for me? It would help me to walk more quickly and I’ve a big day today, over the high hills and down around the corner to my friend Annie’s.”
“Yes, we can do that” they said, and my heart sang.
I set off along the long thin road with lighter steps. It was so much easier without a bag; I could walk faster and more upright with no weight at my shoulders. The path turned away from the road and up into the winds, and with no more shelter from the valley I was blown and battered as I paced up the high hill towards the forest. Head down and shoulders set against the gusts, I crossed several fields, turning round to take one last look at the quiet valley, blue skies and scudding clouds, before heading towards a line of dark pine trees.
The wind stopped, as if at a switch, and I gasped and stopped to steady myself. The abs
ence left a ringing in my ears, my head spinning in the aftermath. The silence in the forest was deep. Moss banks stretched away either side of a small stream that silvered between roots and thick peat overhangs. The branches of the trees brushed low, forcing me to bend and twist around them to follow the narrow path. The trees grasped at me and when I looked between their trunks I saw deep green moss-beds, scattered hillocks glowing phosphorescent lime in gleams of sunlight. There was silence, just faint flutters and flickers of birds dispersed throughout the foreign trees and in that silence there was a calling. The moss-beds were whispering to me, a siren song, inviting tired travellers to bed down in their thick, deep softness.
It felt as if there might be an entity pulsing at the heart of the forest, drawing living beings into its essence, down into its deep-held stillness. It was the forest itself that lived, each tree a tendril of the whole. If I turned from the path, ducking past branches, twisting between interlocking trees, into gaps of thinning needles until I couldn’t turn back, maybe I’d never leave that place again.
I thought of a book of Swedish folk tales I’d read as a child, with its forever-remembered illustrations of bulbous trolls, gnarled hands and hanging curls of hair, tied-leather clothes and scattered rings and jewels. Then there was the tiny princess, frail and shining, who dropped her golden-heart necklace into a brown and shrouded forest pool and, in bending down to look for it, holding her long hair to either side of her face, forgot all else in existence and became a cottongrass plant, white fuzzy head bobbing in the wind.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 7