Gwaith 16: Frost at Midday

Helo Pawb

This is just a quick post to show you more of the cold weather under a bright, blue clear sky that I am experiencing here in Corris.

Facing north, on the path running along the fields beside Afon Dulas

After my Tuesday morning Welsh Conversation meeting at the Corris Institute, I went for a walk along my favourite river, Afon Dulas. Even at 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, frost still covered the nearby fields. The village is in a valley that runs roughly north-south, so the sun takes a while to climb above the pine-covered hill and start working on the frost. Even when it was visible, the temperature, courtesy of the cloudless sky overnight and during the day, was still low, so that as I walked, my breath plumed around me.

Sheep cropping through the frost-covered grass

Apart from the frost itself, highlights of this walk included seeing two grey squirrels prance away daintily at my approach; standing still in a field and listening to the irregular dripping of frostmelt from the bare branches of nearby oaks and beeches; and watching six F-15Es, possibly from RAF Lakenheath, roar over the hills and across the valley as they travelled the regular exercise route known as the Mach Loop. As if in defiance to their thunderous flights, after their third pass a red kite appeared above the same hill the jets flew over. At first I thought it was a distant plane, but no rumbling preceded it. The bird rose quickly on updrafts, then winged its way high across the valley. Not unlike the Tornadoes banking and producing contrails, at one point sunlight glinting from the edges of its wings, before it disappeared in the pine woods on the opposite hill.

So, below are more photos from the walk:

Frosted plants in the village

Close up of a frost fern

Frost on one of the kissing gates along the path

Frost on a field

Sundazzle on Afon Dulas

Frozen surface of a pool near Afon Dulas

A F-15E banking as it passes over Corris

Frost on the roof opposite my studio, as I was writing this blog.

As always, I hope you enjoy this post and I welcome your comments.

Cofion Cynnes

Earl

Gwaith 15: Quick Update

Helo Pawb

I arrived back at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris two weeks ago. Apart from a few days over Christmas, when I catch up with Jo in Germany when she travels there with our good friend Soni, I will be here till the end of January working on the third draft of my novel. I plan to write blogs about my progress and anything else of interest, and will also continue to record my research findings during the five weeks I spent travelling around Britain. I hope this mixture of past and present events isn’t too confusing.

As for the novel, some of my research meant I had to go back to the start of the draft and tidy up settings and events in some of the scenes. At the end of my first five weeks at Maelor the third draft stood at 30,556 words. In these last two weeks, I have edited those words and added more than 10,000 words, so that as of yesterday the draft stands at 42,000 words. For me to finish the third draft, which keeps growing, I will need to edit/write approximately 3,000 words per residency day. This is a little harder than it sounds, as I’m a slow writer and I am also trying to fit in my Welsh language and landscape activities, which themselves feed ideas, tone and atmosphere into the book. On top of these tasks, I help out with some Stiwdio Maelor activities, such as the Open Day next Saturday (3 December), at which I’ll be reading a short story and poems written during my time here. Anyone in the area is welcome to come. The Facebook link is here.

Open Day Invitation

Below are some photos of a walk I took early yesterday morning, with the first frost on the ground.

Frost glueing a leaf to the slate banister of the 'zig-zag' steps that start near the Corris Institute

Crunchy frost underfoot

Shadow self-portraint with frost and late autumn birch trees

Walking back to Corris, facing east

Wood smoke drifting over the village

As always, I hope you enjoy this post and I welcome your comments.

Cofion Cynnes

Earl

Gwaith 14: Jodrell Bank and Alan Garner (14 Oct 2016)

Helo Pawb

After a rest day, during which I transcribed notes from my research of the last couple of weeks, Grevel and I drive to Macclesfield for what would prove to be one of the highlights of my trip. Grevel had been in contact with Griselda Garner, wife of Alan Garner, whose talk I attended last year (see this post) and whose books I greatly admired. She kindly offered to take us on a tour of The Old Medicine House. We then would have afternoon tea, during which Alan might put in an appearance, if his hectic schedule allowed it. I was thrilled at the possibility of meeting one of my literary heroes, but first Grevel and I were going to visit Jodrell Bank, which is only two fields and a railway line away from where Alan and Griselda live.

The Lovell Telescope

Jodrell Bank is the home of the Lovell Telescope, a huge white radio dish the size of Big Ben. It started listening to the universe in 1957, the same year  Alan Garner started living at Toad Hall, which he restored and which now comprises, along with The Old Medicine House, one half of their current residence.

Scanning the heavens

The telescope scans galaxies, listens to and tracks pulsars and quasars. Grevel and I wandered through the Planet Pavilion, the exhibition room in the nearby visitor complex, and read the latest information about black holes, dark matter and dark energy, our minds boggling at the numbers involved when looking at the mathematics of the space-time continuum and the masses and sizes of the far-flung entities the universe has created.

Another view of the telescope, as tall as Big Ben

After playing with the various experiments into and reconstructions of astronomical insights in another building, the Space Pavilion, we walked around the telescope itself, a magnificent structure, with beautiful curves and a spider-web structure of girders supporting it.  Flights of jackdaws dove off the top lip of the dish and swooped and wheeled using the updraught created inside it.

Jackdaws wheeling above the dish

We continued our own exploration of science by playing with the various exhibits ranged around the telescope. One of them involved rolling balls down an incline and arranging bells so they rang at equal time spans, not as easy as it sounds. Our favourite was using the whispering dishes that feature in Alan Garner’s last novel, Boneland. They are about 100 yards apart, but when you whisper into the focal point of one dish a person standing at the other one can hear you. We were also fortunate to watch the radio dish in action, this enormous achievement of 1950s British engineering (parts of it were made from naval gun turrets) slowly and steadily moving to a new position to explore the heavens.

A school group playing with the whispering dishes

A close up of one of the whispering dishes

Then it was time for lunch at the Planet Pavilion cafe, with its wall-mural timeline of events from the big bang to the present day and a great view of the telescope. After a quick walk through the amazing nearby aboreum (which contains the Sorbus Collection, a display of all the different varieties of rowan and whitebeam trees), we headed off for our visit to The Medicine House.

Display board at the arboreum

A whitebeam tree

A Rowan tree, with unusual pinkish flowers

With much clanking of old locks, Griselda greeted us—‘Welcome to Fort Knox’—and then took us on a two-hour tour of the sixteenth century timber-frame house, once thought to be an apothecary’s abode but now known to have been a factory for making patented medicines (Samuel Johnston/Johnston Brothers). The Old Medicine House, which Alan and Griselda acquired in 1970 and attached to Toad Hall, is the heart of the Blackden Trust, the educational charity Alan and Griselda set up to protect the buildings, the land surrounding them, and the history discovered there. And what an amazing history there is. My favourite exhibit was the display case that contained over 10,000 years of artefacts found on the property itself, from the Mesolithic to the twentieth century, flint blades to musket balls. Another fascinating aspect of the house was the apotropaic marks made in corners of rooms or near chimneys, doors and windows. Such marks, generally double Vs (Virgin of Virgins), were meant to ward off evil. Then there was my delight in seeing the original owl service that served as inspiration for Alan Garner’s famous work, The Owl Service, which used the story of Blodeuwedd in the Fourth Branch of The Mabinogion.

The Old Medicine House

Part way through the tour, while we were in the Blackden office area, Alan Garner pop his head in to discuss some matter and said hello to Grevel and me. Later, when Griselda sat us down for tea and what looked like and tasted like giant Anzac Biscuits, Alan joined us for a wide-ranging discussion about everything from his recent projects (including a wonderful book called The Beauty Things, of which I bought a copy), to his approach to archival research and research in general (‘Always look to the anomaly’), to Griselda’s education approaches at Blackden. Entertaining banter and stimulating insights absorbed us for an hour or two, until it started to get dark and it was time for Grevel and I to leave. I am thankful to Griselda and Alan for being so generous with their time.

Cover of the First Edition (source)

A plate from the Owl Service (source)

On the wayback to Manchester, Grevel stopped off near Wilmslow to show me Lindow Common, which is near Lindow Moss, the site of the famous Lindow Man, a body discovered in the peat bog in 1984. The body belonged to a healthy male in his mid-20's who may have been a victim of a ritual sometime between 2 BC and 119 AD: after a last meal of charred bread, Lindow Man was strangled, hit on the head, and his throat cut. Memorial benches line the trail around the Black Lake in the middle of the common, a tradition that doesn’t seem to occur elsewhere and may have something to do with the area being a ‘thin’ place (a phrase I recently discovered through a friend of mine). Intriguing idea.

We arrived when it was dark, so this photo of the Black Lake might give you a sense of the place (source)

As always, I welcome your comments.

Cofion Cynnes
Earl

Gwaith 13: Exploring Three Sites in Cheshire (12 Oct 2016)

Helo Pawb

After my research on Ynys Môn, I left for Manchester, to enjoy for a few days the gracious hospitality of my friend Grevel Lindop and his wife, Amanda. The day after my arrival, he took me to visit two megalithic sites neither of us had seen before and to return to a favourite.

For some unfathomable reason, at each of the sites we were greeted by ravens, which hovered nearby as if checking us out and were still there when we left the site.

The first site was the Bullstones (sometimes known as Bullstrang), one of the best-preserved stone circle and burial sites in Cheshire, which is situated near the town of Macclesfield. A circle of millstone grit cobbles surrounds a single monolith. Excavations at the site revealed a cremation burial with an urn, a flint knife and a flint arrowhead. Apparently, there is evidence that a Bronze Age settlement existed close to the Bullstones. The setting itself gives amazing views of the surrounding countryside, including that of Shutlingsloe, which features in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. The Bullstones are aligned with Shutlingsloe at approximately 50 degrees, which apparently is the angle of the summer full moon-rise nearest the solstice. Intriguing.

The centre monolith and some of its cobbls

A close up of the centre monolith, as a bed of smaller cobble stones than those in the circle around it

The monolith with Shutlingsloe in the background

The second site we visited was a relatively unknown one, the Allgreave Menhir, which was discovered partially buried on land belong to Burnt House Farm and re-erected close to where it was found. It is about one mile south-east of the Bullstones and bears a resemblance to the great standing stones at the Bridestone Burial Chamber some 4.6 miles to the south-west (which we were to visit another day). The stone is on a north-south axis, with a flat face on the south side, a sun-face, and a tapering body of feminine curves to the north. On the west side we found a niche that contained carved indentations that fitted our hands. The reasons for the flat face and the niche are obviously lost to time, but I can think of a possible use, which I may include in my book and so won’t reveal at the moment.

The east side of the Allgreave Menhir, showing its tapering curves

The south side 'sun-face' of the menhir

My hand in the niche with its curved indentations and guidance protusion

Our third stop was to the site that overwhelmed me with awe the last time I visited it, Lud’s Church. We had our lunch at Castle Rock and Grevel pointed out that the Allgreave Menhir seemed to be made from the same water-eroded sandstone as the massive stone blocks we later climbed for the superb views of the surrounding areas.

The trail to Castle Rock

One section of Castle Rock

Another section

To the accompaniment of robins, crows, jackdaws and ravens, we then walked past birch, oak and rowan, the masses of bracken still green under the thick canopy. At the end of the trail, which was smothered with autumn leaf litter, we climbed down into the hallowed place that actually featured in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Grevel descending into Lud's Church

 To our right as we entered we discovered a section of the chasm we didn’t remember from before. As Grevel said, the site plays tricks with time and place and memory. The deep chasm itself is always damp, and so is rich in ferns, moss, lichens, fungus, and tufts of long blades of grass. Oak, rowan and birch lined the tops of the jagged walls. As I did last time, I felt awe at this site that had existed for over ten thousand years and had seen peoples of different tribes and times standing here as I did and possibly worshipping the dripping silence. There is a presence I can’t explain, especially at the deepest, widest section of the chasm. The shadows, the quiet, the wet massive rock walls and overhanging rocks covered in many shades and textures of green, all combine to slow one down, ground one in the moment. As we made our way towards the exit. Grevel spotted, at the end of a small moss leaf, a drop of water filled with emerald light. Then another drop. And another. Magical.

View of the bend in the chasm which is at the widest, deepest part

View to one end, from the bend

View to the other end

When we emerged into the brightness of the day, the silence and awe stayed with us.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Cofion Cynnes
Earl

NB: I had inserted a video of the view from the top of Castle Rock, but it doesn't seem to work on some devices, so have had to delete it. Sorry about that.

Gwaith 12: Ynys Y Fydlyn (10 Oct 2016)

Helo Pawb

As mentioned last year in my posting about Ynys Y Fydlyn, I learnt about its existence from my friend Grevel Lindop, who told me it was likely the last holdout of druids during the Battle for Ynys Môn. I felt a special connection to the site because of this history and decided to visit it again, even though I had not yet worked out a way to use it in my novel.

After 30 minutes of driving, I threw on my hiking boots, jacket and backpack and headed down the gravel path I had missed on my first visit. A short walk later, past gorse and bracken covered outcrops, through the smell of soft cowpats, and past the small lake at the back of the beach that is almost dried up at this time of year, I landed on the shingle beach of Ynys Y Fydlyn.

Bracken and gorse alongside the trail

The dried-up lake and the slopes of dead bracken

First view of Ynys Y Fydlyn

 As I wasn’t sure about the tide, I climbed along the rocks and slimy seaweed at the base of the eastern half of the island, which is no longer connected to the western half, and made my way to the westernmost point of the island. No wildflowers greeted me, as they did the previous visit, only soft, deep, hair grass and rocks stained and covered with pale green moss.

Part of the path across the top of the island

Below me was a rocky outcrop just above sea level, which I imagined would have seen druids and their supporters scrambling into the small willow-framed and horse- or bullock-hide covered small craft called cwrwgls (from which we get ‘coracle’) as they try to escape the approaching Roman soldiers.

The outcrop at the end of the western half of Ynys Y Fydlyn

Not long after I arrived, I looked to the north, from where a bitter wind was blowing, and noticed rain clouds developing. I hoped they might indicate a shower only. I was wrong. I dragged on my waterproof overpants and tried to wait out the rain, but it kept swirling around me with no let up. I left for the eastern section, as I knew there was an outcrop that might provide shelter. It did, so I sat out the storm and, when it eased, ate my lunch and meditated for a while. At one point, 20 or more pheasants burst out of the gorse and bracken at the top of the promontory opposite me and dropped down into the bushes at the base. There appeared to be no reason for this apparent panic, but I imagine a predator of some sort had spooked them.

View westward, from the inner isle, showing the inlet and the two island sections

My meditations and my explorations around site itself had prompted ideas, which I duly wrote down in my small notebook. As the tide started to turn I thought it time to head back home. However, when I reached the beach and double-checked my pockets, I realised I had dropped my small pouch with crystals and stones gathered from various places. I rushed back to the western section and found it where I had put on my overpants.

Tide flow across the inlet

Another of my colour and texture photos

As the tide wasn’t coming in that quickly, I stayed awhile and mused some more on the possible scene in the sixth century when the Romans stormed this last refuge of the druids. I wondered why the Celts had come here to launch themselves to Ierne (Ireland) or Ynys Manau (Isle of Man), when other places on Ynys Môn seemed closer to those destinations. I came up with some ideas, though they will need further thought before I use them in the book. What I can say is that if I flashback scene about the struggles at Ynys Y Fydlyn, I’ll set in a storm even more dramatic than the one I experienced, with the bellow and crash of waves on the rock below where the druids would be trying to launch their cwrwgls, while above them their warriors are fighting the Romans to their last breath.

Scene of past combat?

After giving thanks to the spirits of the past and of the place itself, I scrambled back to the shingle beach and, with pheasants diving into bushes as I moved past, strolled back to my car.

Last view of Ynys Y Fydlyn. Compare the clouds to the photo up the page

Odd arrangement of dragonflies on a fence post during my walk back

As always, I welcome your comments. All the best to whatever projects are giving you bliss.

Cofion Cynnes

Earl