by Adams, Max;
Llandonna was our first bona-fide Early Medieval Christian site—not that there was much to see in this dowdy cluster of houses, apart from a radio mast sticking out of the hilltop like a leafless Christmas tree. It’s the name that gives the game away. Llan is that early Welsh word for a church enclosure, often circular. A cursory look at such names on the map of the island showed that there had once been at least thirty, probably more, sites with early churches. This was a well-settled, fertile and productive land right through the Iron Age and Roman periods and into the Early Medieval. The north-eastern part of Anglesey is open, broken country, of small valleys, exposed coast and blustery moors, tamed by farmers over the last millennium. South and west there is lower, more domesticated land and a fertile zone, easily cultivated and with rich pastures.
Churches need land to support them; but historians suspect that they were not often given the best land for their foundations; that perhaps they tended to be offered more marginal sites, more easily lost from the royal or lordly fisc, as if to say: sure, have some land—make of this rough patch what you will. In that way, the sweated labour of monk and nun, lay brother and sister, may have been deployed in a more or less conscious way either to colonise the wastes and what little wildwood may have survived, or to bring back into cultivation lands that had been neglected through the death of a lord, through famine and climatic deterioration or conflict. On Anglesey, early church names dominate the less productive land, fringing, as they seem to do elsewhere, the fertile corelands of their kingdoms.
The main Roman presence on the island, courtesy of Agricola, was the fort at Caer Gybi on Holy Island, close to Holyhead. St Cybi was the name of a Cornish holy man and prolific monastic entrepreneur to whom the fort was given in the sixth century to found a royal monastery. His patron, Maelgwyn or Maglocunos, was the nominally Christian king of Gwynedd at the time when Gildas vented his ire against five British tyrants. Maelgwyn was his ‘Dragon of the Isle’, last in the list but first in evil, strong in arms but stronger in what destroys the soul, killer and usurper of his uncle before apparently retiring to the monastic life, only to re-emerge more powerful than before. A formidable king, then; and well qualified as a Dark Age warlord and patron. Gildas must have been gratified that Maelgwyn is said to have died in the great plague of the 540s, the European pandemic that seems finally to have ended the trade in Eastern Mediterranean goods to the Atlantic west. From Gildas’s point of view it would have seemed a divine punishment.
If St Cybi became the royal holy man of West Mon, he had a contemporary counterpart in the east. That evening, after we pitched wearily at a campsite close to another Llan-named village, Llangoed, I walked out towards the easterly extreme of the island at Penmon Point where magnificent views reach south across the strait to the Snowdonia massif and east to the peninsula on which Llandudno sits. That popular tourist destination, once served by daily summer steamers from Liverpool, was the foundation of St Tudno; but long before and after him it was known for its proximity to the limestone headland known as the Great Orme, Wales’s copper mountain. Snowdon sat sulking beneath heavy grey cloud; the verdigris waters of the strait were choppy but the lighting was sublime.
Just inland from Penmon Point is Penmon Priory, a medieval Augustinian abbey, largely intact, which houses some fine pre-Conquest crosses. To my amazement the priory church was still open, just. Anxious not to miss anything, I hurried round it, camera in hand; not the quietly contemplative visit I had hoped for. One should never rush an ancient church; they are places of stillness and silence where time ought by rights to run a little slower than in the outside world. Besides, only at slow pace do you notice what is to be noticed, the little details that make a place special, and which are all the more gratifying to discover for oneself, rather than have them pointed out by guidebook or notice. In addition to the crosses, I had time to register that the church was cruciform in shape with a central tower and pyramid spire; that the crossing arch was dog-tooth Norman, its supporting pillars decorated with grotesque Adam and Eve caricatures. Outside I found a small, tranquil reed-fronded pond and beyond it the setting of an ancient holy well whose waters are dark, clear and still. The original church on the site seems to have been founded by a friend of Cybi, St Seiriol. A son of a king, like Cybi, he evidently found life at Penmon too public and retired, in the manner of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, to a desert place. A quarter of a mile off the point lies a teardrop-shaped island that has variously been known as Glannauc, Ynys Seiriol, Priestholm, Ynys Lannog and Puffin Island. In its third incarnation, some three generations after Seiriol, it became a place of sanctuary for a refugee king, none other than Cadwallon, whose Northumbrian antagonist and former foster-brother King Edwin had hunted him down as he himself had been hunted in exile. Fatally, Edwin supposed that Cadwallon’s exile here was permanent; that it would reduce him sufficiently to be able to ignore him as a potential military threat. In 633 Cadwallon allied with Penda of Mercia to exact his revenge, slew Edwin at the battle of Hæthfelth and went on to ravage the Northumbrian heartlands before himself being killed by the atheling Oswald of Bernicia.
ST SEIRIOL’S WELL
It was late in the day; after a couple of brisk showers the skies cleared and a magnificent sunset played its hand. I climbed to the top of the hill to get a view of Priestholm, with the priory church below and before me like a sentinel overlooking the strait. Among emerald pastures soaked in golden yellow light lay the scattered ruins of settlements, as there are everywhere on Anglesey. They are conveniently labelled ‘native’; few have been excavated properly, and it’s hard to say if their very obviously Iron Age affinities (the remains of circular houses) confine them to the prehistoric period or if they may have continued as the vernacular architecture of the island right into the Early Medieval period. The tiny villages and hamlets that line the back lanes are composed of neat, low, whitewashed cottages with small square windows, slate roofs and painted doors. Many of these were once the cottages of fisherman, and you still see coils of rope and the odd lobster creel hung up on a gable end or next to a porch. Where they are exposed to westerlies, often there is a hardy hawthorn or crabapple tree in a garden hedge, bent to the wind.
The reliability of those prevailing westerlies has always been a useful marker for the traveller; more constant in its footprint than a sun beneath cloud, a new moon or the northern star at midday. I had been pondering for some time how Dark Age travellers made their way through strange landscapes. I had already seen how the names of significant places might have offered clues. Climbing a prominent hill has always been a good way to gauge the lie of the land. In Dorset I had found that the hollow lanes of old route ways, like lines on the tube map, disorient and lead the traveller astray, giving the land a secretive, arcane and frustratingly distorted shape in the mind. It had been my plan on this journey that, at a suitable point, I would discard my maps and walk as it were au naturel, falling back on simple navigation methods, an innate sense of direction and knowing that, at times, I would get lost. But I hoped to work out how ancient travellers negotiated these lands, or at least to experience it second-hand. Sarah and I planned to climb Snowdon, and then part—she had a date with Loch Lomond and her wetsuit; I was aiming for the medieval pilgrimage site on Bardsey Island off the end of the Llŷn peninsula, a hundred odd miles away. After Snowdon, I told myself… after Snowdon. Meanwhile, I must decode the significant place names of north Wales: the Pens, Tys, Uchafs, Coeds, the Hlafod, the Llys and the Llan. I have a reasonable, if cautious, handle on English place names. Gaelic is beyond all ken; Welsh was enough to make the head spin. Nevertheless, the linguistic rules by which names change through time and warp from their original are well understood, if dangerous territory.
On the next day, during our progress south and west back towards the Menai Bridge, Sarah and I passed through an undistinguished village called Llandegfan (another early church site, foundation of St Tegfan, but no sign of him in suburban crescent or cul de sac). There wa
s an air of what I can only call petitbourgeois self-consciousness (pelargoniums and brutalised rose bushes against bare soil; trim lawns; block-paved drives; sensible cars). Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a sticker on a lamp post, which bore the imprimatur of Cyngor Sir Ynys Mon (Anglesey County Council) and the Heddlu (Welsh Police) and which said:
Nid oes
croeso yma
i fasnachwyr
Heb
wahoddiad
The convenient English translation on the opposite half said:
Uninvited
Traders
are not
Welcome
here
Beneath was a bilingual note, in smaller print, of which the English vernacular version was: ‘Please leave and do not return’. The warning to uninvited traders got me thinking about how the stranger or newcomer to a place negotiates an unfamiliar land, finds the inside track; I thought about it all the way to the foot of Snowdon, all the way to the top and down the other side, by which time I had figured out how Dark Age travellers managed to navigate through an unknown landscape.
We had breakfasted in Beaumaris, that Edwardian—Edward I, that is—stamp of the colonial boot. It looked very pretty but still, the historian in me felt uncomfortable: in Edward’s new settlement only English and Norman-French residents had civic rights and the native Welsh of Beaumaris were largely disqualified from holding any civic office. I was disturbed to find a graffito on the wall of the loo in the café, to the effect that the Welsh are all illegitimate—and worse. I was angry. I tried to wash it off or wipe it away with a paper towel, but it had been scrawled with a permanent marker. Like Edward’s castles. Onwards, in any case: to the bridge and a chance to walk across it, to look down on the whole length of the strait, to marvel at Telford’s brilliance (he built it as early as 1826, before the Brunels started to dig their tunnels and plot their railways; before the Stephensons constructed Rocket, and only just after the opening of the Stockton–Darlington railway) and to ponder what a permanent link does to an island race. Hamish Haswell-Smith, the champion of Scottish islands, removed Skye from the new edition of his magisterial guide to Scotland’s islands after the bridge was built across Kyle Akin from Kyle of Lochalsh. Some folk don’t like their island status taken from them. The early monks would have sympathised.
On the south side of the bridge Sarah and I parted temporarily: she to fetch the car we had left in Bangor; me to walk on to a campsite rendezvous with her at the head of Llŷn Padarn, St Padarn’s lake, half a dozen miles to the south of the Strait. Padarn was another contemporary of Maelgwyn, king of Gwynedd; a roving churchman and founder of monasteries, supposedly a Breton from Armorica, to where a large number of British refugees are said to have fled from civil war and Anglo-Saxon invasion. It seemed impossible to avoid the saintly step of some early holy man in this land. The giants were there too: sky-high electricity pylons ferrying massive voltages from coastal power stations into and across the mountains, steel skeletons swaggering through glen and cwm, effortlessly fording river and straddling high pass, each pair looking like a monstrous tug of war between rivals for domination over the land. But this is a richly diverse landscape, too, full of small farms, hilltop forts and cairns, streams that drain glacial lakes and half-abandoned tiny cellular fields that must go back to a time when pioneer farmers enclosed what they could cultivate or cut in a year, expanding and contracting as the whim of fate and the ancestors dictated. This is a much quarried landscape: the scars are there for all time; and one curious by-product (for me) of the slate industry is its use for fencing: often I saw a field enclosed by long lines of vertical slates wired together. There are apparently impoverished villages and hamlets of small, ungenerous cottages, evidently affiliated to now defunct industries and looking as though they needed rescuing from whatever fate distant governments had invented for them. From poor villages, back lanes, power lines and scrapyards the land re-dressed itself in upland fatigues: narrow footbridges across waterfalls; ramshackle farmyards with geese and chickens and rusting machinery, bailer twine holding everything together; through long-abandoned fields thick with new rowan and field maple, bramble and bracken thicket, down rocky paths between exposed crags and into the shade of the mountains. All afternoon the air cooled.
Having successfully rendezvoused at the head of Llŷn Padarn, that evening Sarah and I walked beside the banks of the Afon Rhythallt along the line of an old industrial railway, to a small village pub where we ate well in a buzz of bilingual conversation. I remember, many years ago, harbouring the unworthy thought that the revived Welsh interest in their language was a convenient tool for making the English, the Lloegr, feel unwelcome and stupid, and therefore as discouraging of intercultural friendship as the English refusal to learn foreign languages. This time my encounter with yr iaith Gymraeg prompted overwhelmingly positive thoughts. In this part of Wales, at any rate, use of the indigenous language feels completely natural, everyone is effortlessly bilingual and equally happy to engage with linguistically impoverished monoglots like myself and Sarah. I have often thought that one should not be too hard on the English for their poor command of languages: after all, English is the second language of many nations, a global lingua franca. Which is the most natural second language for the English to learn: French? German? Spanish perhaps? Or—if our choice is governed by the size of linguistic populations or the future prospects of our graduates in a globalised economy—Mandarin, Russian or Hindi? After this trip I feel I know the answer. The English should all learn Welsh at school—it is, after all, the linguistic descendant of the native tongue of these islands, beautiful to listen to and rich in lore and poetic tradition. And the Scots should probably learn Gaelic. Wales has pulled off a remarkable feat in resurrecting its language, in giving it currency and absolute relevance.
MENAI BRIDGE
Snowdon’s peak was hard won. We took the long ridge route from our camping pitch at Cwm y Glo, where the view along the lake towards Llanberis—an egg-white and lapis sky poached in blue-black peaty water, the perfect sensuous U of the valley sides and Snowdon magnificently brooding on its alpine throne—made you want to put it in a jar and take it home. The marked path was invisible: it was all yellow gorse and purple heathery bog, with unsuspected ankle-breaking potholes; and the consoling prospect of cairn, burnt mound and hut circle that had lured us (or me) up there could not be seen beneath the blanket. As we reached our first viewpoint just below Cefn Du, a raw scar of abandoned quarry, and made a short descent to the trail above Llanberis (St Peris: sixth century), we saw our first trekkers. I had hardly seen any serious walkers all year and had begun to fear that we were a dying breed. But Snowdon is Britain’s busiest mountain. Ahead and to our left the unmistakable chug of a steam train betrayed the line of the rack-and-pinion railway that takes reluctant climbers all the way to the summit in relative comfort. We kept to the long, round-about route of Maesgwyn and the Snowdon Ranger path, undemanding until the last section of zig-zags that drags you up the side of Clogwyn Du’r Arddu and onto the north ridge of Bwlch Glas. Here it was like being in the Lakes on a bank holiday, almost queuing to get to the top and surrounded by yapping or panting dogs. With a full rucksack, despite being in pretty good shape after a year of walking, I was glad to get to the top, even if the dizzying view came into focus only rarely from that clouded, misty height. Yr Wyddfa, the great tumulus, in ancient lore the tomb of a giant called Rhitta Gawr, is the mythical heart of the land of the Britons, the Eryri of the Historia Brittonum where the embattled tyrant Vortigern fled from his persecutors.
I have had few more surreal experiences than walking, glasses all steamed up and feeling somewhat overdressed and overequipped, into Hlafod Eryri, the modern café which sits just below the summit of the mountain at about three and a half thousand feet. It was standing room only, fuggy with the breath and sweat of walkers all hugger-mugger with trippers wearing T-shirts. We managed to get a sausage roll and a cup of hot chocolate and stoo
d, semi-dazed, wondering at this overwhelming congregation of humanity in a wild and desolate island palace in the clouds. What the ancestors think is not clear. A small, fundamentalist part of me thinks that taking a railway up to the top of a mountain to a café is somehow disrespectful to the spirits of the place; but I also think it wonderful that the wheelchair-bound and the semi-ambulant can stand or sit on top of the world and share in the majesty of the view.
Here Sarah and I went our separate ways. She returned to the campsite and the car by the more straightforward route to Llanberis. I took the south-west ridge, Bwlch Main, a narrow, sometimes steep, rocky path that fell away dramatically on both sides and which in winter and dense fog must be deadly treacherous; but I was soon below the cloud, and the high country of the Snowdon range opened out ahead: tumbling streams and concave slopes, distant green valleys mottled by cloud and sun; sheepfolds, grey ridges and peaks, glacial lakes steeped in Arthurian legend (Excalibur lies at the bottom of one of them, supposedly). I still had a long walk ahead of me, so I kept up a good pace, easy enough with the big pack propelling me downwards into Cwm Llan. I stopped once or twice to take pictures, munch on an apple or oatcake with a mouthful of cheese. The descent had been exhilarating; now the quiet of the cwm, the jostling of soft waters in the burn and the occasional raking call of a raven lent the afternoon a timeless quality. Once, I followed the tempting line of an old mineral railway, hoping it would bring me out onto an easier path. It ended in a precipitous drop where an incline once transported slate down into the cwm below. I backtracked and came onto the marked path high above a sheepfold and small abandoned farm, below which a cataract tumbled towards the cwm of Glaslyn, the ‘black pool’. Now I came into a land of veteran broadleaf woods, scrub birch and planted spruce. Instead of following the old mule trail down into the cwm direct, I tracked the contour round to the south-west, through bracken and sheep pen, splashy bog and craggy cleft, past another roofless old farmstead and shieling until, now level with the hills across the valley, I saw a densely wooded hump ahead of me which could only be Dinas Emrys, the fortress of Ambrosius Aurelianus. By now I had left all other walkers behind.