“Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown, and of wonder . . . ”
—George Borrow, Wild Wales
I step silent across the flagged floor below weathered slates and beams, sleep-held family breathing behind, the only other sounds the scratching of terriers’ claws as they push past into rain-remembering grass—and somewhere among the waiting trees a blackbird hailing a new day of toil and danger. Then I am tramping through silver, shocking grass, soaking instantly even through army boots, leaving a dark line leading to the dingle that dashes a stream down the slope in an understory of moss-stockinged trunks, fragrant ferns, and Ordovician erratics.
Aided by an ashplant, I compel my not-yet-limbered legs upward in the predawn, cold hamstrings stretching and breath catching, as I see how the sun is fingering through the canopy and picking out subshades in “grey” lichen, dew-spangles on sphagnum, ichor-hued rowan berries, and a gnat squadron sparked into electric activity by warmth after the dampness of the darkness. A gate clicks open and closes, then another—old and oxidized, but nowhere near as old as the stone wall that writhes like one of the apocryphal black adders of this area around the head of the tiny valley, differentiating this particular part of Radnorshire from another particular part.
The trees fail after several tortured hawthorns, and I find myself on a moor from a dream. My shadow streams uphill, pointing straight at the wind and rain-worn prominence that is one of the highest and steepest of these Carneddau Hills. It looks like a knuckle on a fist, and carries old colors—Cambrian greys, stretched browns, greens of growing thinness. But as I ascend on my second wind, the sun dismisses the lingering wyverns of the night and lends texture to everything. I notice new-lit lanterns of gorse blossom, and see that the sheep-gnawed fairway is not just grass, but a mat of mosses, fungi, heathers, and tiny alpines whose names I long to know, among them maybe the Radnor lily, found (or noticed) nowhere else on earth—spikes, seedheads, and florets in star-white, yolk-yellow, and peacock-purple weaving in and out of one another in defiance of exposure, the acid earth, and the acute angles up which I am toiling, masochistically crosswise to the sheep tracks. Slopes slide away steeply and satisfactorily behind as I make the final ascent, and can stand straight again.
Cwmberwyn Camp is marked Fort on the Ordnance Survey map, the Gothic lettering signifying this is an historic site—although this is perhaps unnecessary to note in a country as careworn as Wales. In any case, there is little specific history that can be attached to this spot, because no one now can ever know which particular Iron Age patriarch’s people heaped up stones to give some semblance of shelter and security, let alone who or what precisely they were afraid of, out there in the humped and howling wilderness beyond their rampart and fires.
That wilderness seems less menacing on an early morning in August, when all of south-central Wales looks as if it has been made for me, a stupendous papier-mâché diorama marching to all horizons, with painterly effects in thousands of shades—peaks above cloud collars, streamlets like snail trails, drifting rain curtains, stray sunbeams searchlighting solitary farms and scattered sheep, who outnumber humans hereabouts by ten to one. Visible from here on a day like this one are the Brecon Beacons, the Black Mountains, the Cambrian Mountains, Plynlimon where the Wye and Severn rise, Rhos Fawr on the high and treeless plateau of Radnor Forest, and beyond that a hint of England. I envy the wild things that know this vantage point so much better than I ever shall—the mistle thrush, the ring ouzel, the red kites, the buzzards, and the ravens that kronk and coast overhead in vast transparency, or the pair of mountain hares that lollop past, luckily unseen by the dogs, who are watching the feral ponies grazing up to their fetlocks in gorse.
Radnorshire is one of the 13 pre-1974 counties of Wales (some make it 12, by excluding Monmouthshire), and the second smallest in Britain (after Rutland). It abuts Herefordshire and Shropshire in England, and the Welsh counties of Montgomeryshire, Brecknockshire, and Cardiganshire. Its location implies geopolitical contention, and this indeed it has experienced—although its remoteness meant that it did not experience as much hardship as more strategic parts of the Marches. Yet occasionally events here have had implications as far away as London—or even Rome, for this was the center of resistance to Roman occupation, where Caratacus (called Caradoc in Wales) presided over an alliance of Ordovici and Silures that defied the legions for years even after Caradoc had been captured and taken to Rome.
The Welsh, wrote Gerald of Wales affectionately in his 1191 Journey Through Wales, are
light and active, hardy rather than strong and entirely bred up to the use of arms; for not only the nobles but all the people are trained to war, and when the trumpet sounds the alarm the husbandman rushes as eagerly from his plough as the courtier from his court . . . they anxiously study the defence of their country and their liberty . . . for these willingly sacrifice their lives . . .
The people of the principality were renowned for their archery long before the bow became important to English fighters. Longbow arrows were capable of piercing four inches into solid oak, or pinning riders to their steeds through their leg armor. The effects of the longbow on enemies were described by Philip Warner in his 1997 book Famous Welsh Battles, as
its rapid rate of discharge, averaging twelve arrows a minute, could blanket a target on which they descended like a dark vengeful cloud. The recipients would suddenly notice that the sky had gone dark and there was a curious sound like the hissing of geese. In the next moment, all would be groans, screams and confusion.
Such incoming would often be followed by seething waves of “dagger-men,” hated and feared even by their allies for their rapacity and reckless cruelty. With tactics like these, and in such guerilla-friendly terrain, it is scarcely surprising that Wales has more castles per square mile than any other country in the world.
The area that would become Radnorshire was as restive as anywhere along this 160-mile frontline, as can be attested by Offa’s Dyke (built to guard against the depredations of kings of Powys), the remains of several Norman castles, and even the stockiness of church towers, which were often expected to have military as well as metaphysical functions. The Gwynedd prince Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (nicknamed “the Great”) certainly found it a receptive recruiting ground when in the second decade of the 13th century he sought to unite the Welsh and rid the Middle Marches of their cruel Anglo-Norman overlords, the Mortimers and the Braoses (the latter family better known in Scotland as the Bruces). This revolt induced Henry III to decamp from London to Painscastle in Radnorshire, then a thriving town, whence he ruled England for seven weeks in the summer of 1231.
His grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, has gone down in the plangent tale of Wales as Llywelyn the Last—that is, the last leader of a united Wales. All realistic hopes of independence expired with him when he was slain on December 11, 1282, in obscure, inglorious circumstances near Builth Wells just across the Wye—an event touchingly commemorated in a badly painted mural in that town. The town may even now have a bad conscience in this matter, because its garrison supposedly refused him shelter the night before he was killed, local chiefs may have led him into a trap, and a local resident showed the English army a ford over the Irfon so they could attack the Welsh in the flank. Angry nationalists long traduced townspeople as the “Traitors of Buallt.” The contemporary bard Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Goch wrote in anger as well as anguish,
For the killing of our prop, our golden-handed king,
For Llywelyn’s death, I remember no-one.
Llywelyn’s head was dispatched to London, while the rest of his body was interred before the high altar at Radnorshire’s huge Cistercian Abbey of Cwmhir. Over the following three years, said a laconic observer, “all Wales was cast to the ground.”
Yet Wales would rise again—with revolts by Rhys ap Maredudd in 1287, Madog ap Llywelyn in 1294, and Llywelyn Bren in 1316, and various schemes for invasion and subversion dreamed up by the many exiled Welsh fighting on the Continent but still thinking of home. Radnorshire played a minor role in these events, but in June 1402 it was the setting for the greatest ever defeat of the English by the Welsh, when Owain Glyndwr, the last native Welshman to bear the title Prince of Wales, met the English at the Battle of Pilleth (also called Bryn Glas), near Presteigne.
Accounts vary, but it seems the English leader, naturally a Mortimer, leading an array of Marcher gentlemen and levied tenants from his estates, ordered his forces uphill just above the church at Pilleth. (The tower still stands, despite having been fired by Glyndwr’s troops.) At once, Mortimer’s levied Welsh archers turned round, perhaps suddenly inflamed by seeing Glyndwr’s legendary war standard, the Golden Dragon of Cadwaladr, and started to fire on their overlords. An unknown but substantial number of English died, their pillaged and women-mutilated bodies left contemptuously unburied for months. (The site would be left untilled until the 1870’s.) Mortimer was captured, and threw in his lot with Glyndwr to the extent of marrying his daughter and going along with Glyndwr’s scheme to topple Henry IV and divide Britain into three—Wales to Glyndwr, the south of England to the Mortimers, and the north to the Percys. He must have reprehended his decision seven years later, as he lay dying of starvation at the siege of Harlech.
After Glyndwr’s defeat and disappearance, Radnorshire settled down into pastorality, a place for graziers and especially drovers who passed through endlessly on their way to the markets of England, in a two-mile-an-hour tremendous noise and dust of iron-shod, lowing, black cattle and yapping corgis, along ancient undulating routes marked out by prominent pines. However, it was also a place for outlawry, and bandits long plagued the hills around Knighton and Presteigne. It took Tudor rough justice to deal with this problem, with the Presteigne assizes executing some 5,000 malefactors in just eight years in the 1530’s. It is hard to visualize such scenes in today’s handsome, somnolent town, with its dignified church of St. Andrews (which incidentally contains a rare and magnificent 16th-century Flemish tapestry), and the little Lugg, which trickles along the eastern edge of the conurbation, dividing Wales from England. Yet a curfew bell is still sounded each evening at eight o’clock, a sonic connection to ancient alarums.
The Tudors were of Welsh origin, but this did not stop them treating their ancestral homeland with their usual unsentimentality. Abbey Cwmhir was dissolved, and emparked. The Welsh legal system was swept aside, and the language excluded from official business. In 1536 Radnorshire was fashioned out of two old cantrefi (hundreds)—Maelienydd and Elfael—and two smaller commotes—Gwrtheyr nion and Deuddwr. The redolent antiquity even then of these superseded land divisions may be surmised from the facts that cantrefi often followed the frontiers of Dark Ages subkingdoms and even dialects, while Gwrtheyrnion translates evocatively as “the land of Vortigern.”
With such reason to resent the Crown, it is perhaps ironic that most of Wales favored the Royalist cause during the Civil War, and Radnorshire was no exception, at least partly because Charles I had spent much of his boyhood on an estate between Evenjobb and Presteigne. There were only skirmishes in the county, but the embattled monarch passed twice through Radnorshire in the straitened period between Naseby in June 1645 and final defeat at Chester that September, on one especially deflated occasion reportedly complaining that Bush Farm near Old Radnor where the famished royal party once overnighted should be renamed Beggar’s Bush. The halcyon days of 1642, when Radnorshirers paid generous tribute to Prince Rupert at Radnor Castle, must have seemed impossibly distant:
Some brought him pieces of plate of great antiquity, as might appear from the fashion thereof. The common people brought in provisions for the maintenance of his court such as young kids, sheep, calves, fish and fowl of all sorts and some sent in fat oxen. Everyone was striving for the credit and glory of his country to exceed in several expressions of generous liberality.
Radnorshire was fated never to become fashionable—too infertile, too Welsh, too far from London—and there is an indicative 17th-century doggerel:
Alas, alas, poor Radnorsheer,
Never a park and never a deer,
Never a man of five hundred a year,
Save Richard Fowler of Abbey Cwmhir.
But in the 18th century, a farmer near Llandrindod cashed in on the Georgian craze for “taking the waters,” and sought to attract health tourists with chalybeate cures. This was so successful that the following century the municipality changed its name to Llandrindod Wells. The town today accordingly resembles a transplanted segment of Surrey, with an attractive if faintly dispiriting blend of Victorian/Edwardian red-brick villas, hotels, and golf courses. Its Home Counties appearance would probably have dismayed the landscape artist Thomas Jones, born at Cefnllys in 1742, and early inspired by that borough’s rough cow-spattered pastures slanting down to the frothing Ithon, and the Iron Age ramparts overlooking the ancient circular churchyard with its brooding yews, and the earthed-over town. However, Llandrindod also hosts the interesting Radnorshire Museum, where there is a notable collection of trilobite fossils—oddly echoed in the displayed crest of the World War II ship HMS Scorpion, the building of which was partly funded by subscriptions from Radnorshirers—and a rare sheela na gig, whose crudely cut face and pulled-open pudenda yell of primitive lusts from one corner of a politely antiquarian room.
As well as sufferers from gout and dyspepsia, the 19th century ushered in walkers, cyclists, fishermen, and artists who saw the district as a kind of Brythonic Bavaria. There was also a great engineering scheme of the kind at which the Victorians excelled in the Elan and Claerwen valleys, large tracts of which were submerged between 1893 and 1904 to guarantee a water supply to Birmingham.
Despite these changes, there were still distinctive aspects to Radnorshire rurality, many recorded by Francis Kilvert, an Anglican vicar who lived in the district between 1863 and 1879, whose diaries are minor classics. On July 3, 1872, for instance, he visited diminished Painscastle, still pawkily conscious of having once been a considerable town, with its royal memories and its own mayor. Kilvert found the present incumbent of that once-important position with “the rest of the village statesmen lounged in the inn porch.” He found the mayor marvelously lugubrious:
The Mayor took us to the quarry and discoursed without enthusiasm and even with despondency on the badness of the roads, the difficulty of hauling the stone, and the labour of “ridding” the ground before the stone could be raised . . . After some talk at the quarry about ways and means, we parted, the Mayor returning to his mayoralty which had no emolument, no dignity and no powers, he “didna think.”
Kilvert’s Church was then in occasionally angry competition with Wales’s chapel-going sects, the latter a legacy of post-Civil War Puritanization. This struggle for souls was entered into enthusiastically by another author of minor classics, George Borrow—uncompromising Anglican, scattergun philologist, and erstwhile gypsy. His indispensable 1862 travelogue Wild Wales details dozens of small adventures in long-distance walking, doctrinal disputation, discussions of lake monsters and second sight, extempore chanting of odes, eulogia of ales and umbrellas, denunciations of sherry and railways, and unbridled showing-off. It was Borrow who (on a later journey) recorded an exchange with a hotel maid in Presteigne who, when asked whether he was in Wales or England, replied pragmatically, “Neither Wales nor England, sir, just Radnorshire.”
This has become a kind of local cliché, even used by the local tourist office, and the idea is aided by the hybridization of English and Welsh people and place-names along the boundary, and the early eclipse of spoken Welsh. But in most borderlands one culture predominates, perhaps all the more self-consciously for feeling vulnerable—and in Radnorshire it is the Celtic rather than the Saxon. This admittedly inchoate impression is aided by the largeness and loneliness of the landscape, the majority of place names especially as you move westward, the ring forts and standing stones, and even the smell of the drizzle that so often descends, which seems to carry the breath of bracken and the tang of sheep.
Radnorshire may be geographically marginal to the Welsh identity, but it is not imaginatively marginal. The locally made Red Book of Hergest (written circa 1382) was one of the two sources for The Mabinogion, the national epic of battles, blood feuds, castles, dreams, enchantments, giant kings, magic cauldrons, princesses, prophecies, and psychopomps instrumental in the revival of Cymric consciousness from the 19th century onward. The shire may at times be pragmatic, but even leaving aside memories of Caradoc, the Llywelyns, or Glyndwr, it also aches with archetypes, still seems to stare west rather than east. It is still a landscape a beast might look out on, as a disconcerting wooden wolf head leers through a window in the very centre of Knighton. It is impossible to explore these echoing uplands and not fall into romance—Arthur, Merlin, Gwyn ap Nudd in his underworld, deities drowned in foliage, the Black Dog of Hergest (which some say was the model for The Hound of the Baskervilles), and the dragon under Radnor Forest, legendarily pinned in place by a cordon of churches dedicated to St. Michael.
Looking over the boundless panorama from the knuckle of this hill, I think, too, of the early Christians, founders of cells and mission churches out in that desolation, some of whom actually used the elephantine eighth-century font at Old Radnor, the oldest in Britain. Time falls in, and I recall an inscription in that church:
For a thousand Years in thy Sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a Watch in the Night.
Imagine oneself in any other dawn, and it is easy to understand both euhemerism and angelology. It seems so cheap to chortle at that world, their innocence—better to listen to secret harmonies, like the locally born Jacobean composer John Bull, assembling precise pavanes and glorious anthems against that wild geography. Did this vigorous virginalist—who, according to George Abbott, the then archbishop of Canterbury, “hath more music than honesty”—ever remember Radnor from Low Countries exile?
The Church that Bull and Abbott both served—and all the chapels—are now usually empty, and today the pinning down of monsters is carried on by a new kind of priest, whose tedious tirades are diffused by the media mast that surmounts the Black Mixen, transmitting high above the heather, explaining everything away, making everywhere the same, binding Wales to anti-Wales more effectually than the worst of the Mortimers could have imagined.
But today at least, and seen from this particular prominence, Radnorshire is still a debatable as well as covetable country, a frontier not just between nationalities, but between legend and reality, past and future, sleep and alertness. Now, with the sun so remorselessly rising, my early escapade is over. There is just time for one last long look over the stirring shire, before starting the long scramble-slide down to earth, back into the valley where mist persists, but everyone will by now have shaken awake.
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