Symbolic Forest

As I said last week, things are slowly opening up here once more. Last week we could travel locally; from today, in Wales we can travel for leisure anywhere in the country so long as we don’t enter or leave it. I was somewhat tempted to spend the whole day driving to Porthmadog and then back again, just because I could, even though it would be an entirely pointless and childish thing to do.

It dawned bright and sunny, and The Child Who Likes Fairies immediately said: “can we go to the beach?” Naturally, I expected the beach would be packed, as would all of the standard inland tourist honeypots: Cwmcarn Forest, the Sugar Loaf, Pen y Fan, the Blorenge. “The Welsh Government are asking people to avoid flooding beauty spots,” said the news on the radio. I looked at a map, and picked a mountain overlooking Cwmbrân instead.

Mynydd Twyn-Glas is the mountain between Cwmbrân in the Eastern Valley and Crumlin in the Western Valley. It’s really just a slight rise in a broad-shouldered plateau, named Mynydd Maen on its south and Mynydd Llwyd on its north; and the whole, being common land, is also known as Mynydd Maen Common. The southern flank drops off sharply into steep-sided ravines thickly and densely covered with plantation conifers, the southernmost being the aforementioned Cwmcarn Forest. Being traditionally common land it’s now open access land. Despite this, I was surprised just how quiet it was: birds, bees, a handful of off-road bikers and another handful of dog walkers. We wandered across the open moorland, just above the edge of the forest, occasionally shouting into the trees and hearing the echo back from the other side of the ravine.

A line of pylons strides across the moor, linking the upper valleys with the power stations of Newport. The wind whistled through them with an eerie note, singing the minor-key chord of a distant angelic choir.

We saw a distant, intriguing stone slab, looking for all the world like a gravestone in the middle of the moor. Naturally, we headed straight for it.

B H
Boundary of Minerals
Settled by Act of Parliament
1839

Apparently there a few of these stones scattered at intervals through the area: the Act in question is 2 & 3 Vict. c. 38, “Sir Benjamin Hall’s, Capel Leigh’s and others’ estates: exchange of mines and land”. Sir Benjamin Hall MP is the “B H” of the stone: MP for Marylebone for over 20 years, he played a significant role in improving British public infrastructure, and is also possibly the man who Big Ben was named after. However, despite his important role in the history of London, his background was always in South Wales, his maternal grandfather (and source of his wealth) being the Merthyr ironmaster Richard Crawshay. The other side of the stone, incidentally, has “C H L” for Capel H Leigh.

Closer to the summit of the mountain, we found another stone. This, however, is much simpler.

On top is a simple cross, and on the other side, other letters.

This is a boundary between parishes, rather than mineral owners, hence I suspect rather less money was spent on it. Llanfrechfa Upper Parish, on the one side; Pontypool Parish, on the other.

Finally, we reached the summit. Being a plateau, there wasn’t a dramatic view, just gently shelving moorland. In the distance, the Severn shined silver, down by the wetlands and the mouth of the Usk. England faded away into mist. The big difference—the sign we had reached the summit—was the strength of the unobstructed wind blowing across the mountain.

“I’m freezing!” said The Child Who Likes Fairies.

“Maybe next time we go up a mountain,” I said, “you’ll wear more layers of clothes like I said you should.”

“I’m never going up a mountain ever again,” she replied. “Ever.”

“What if next time we want to go in the mountains,” I offered, “we find a train that goes near some mountains and look at them out of the window?”

“As long as it takes us back down the mountain again once we’re at the top,” she said. And that, I think, is probably a fair bargain.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Mynydd Maen, Mynydd Twyn-Glas, The Children, Benjamin Hall.

With pandemic restrictions slowly starting to ease, people in Wales can now start to travel about a little bit more, so long as they stay within five miles of home. We took the opportunity to head to one of the local nature reserves, Newport Wetlands, by the mouth of the Usk.

The coast from Cardiff to Chepstow is the stretch of anciently-reclaimed marshland known as the Gwent Levels. They are very important ecologically and archaeologically, having been reclaimed from the sea several hundred years ago. Ah, so you might think, the Newport Wetlands are a surviving non-reclaimed portion of the Caldicot Level, that has somehow lasted a couple of thousand years without being taken as farmland? Not so. The Newport Wetlands are reclaimed, reclaimed from industry.

The corner where the River Usk meets the Caldicot Level has, since the 1950s, been the site of the Uskmouth Power Stations. Over the years a whole family of power stations has been built here, generating electricity in various different ways, but for the first few decades the major power source was coal, brought in by rail. The burning of coal powder creates a lot of very fine ash which can be somewhat difficult to find a use for, and is fairly hard to move without accidentally creating a sandstorm. To get it away from the power stations it was mixed with water and pumped as a slurry into “ash lagoons”, giant industrial waste lakes where the ash could be left to slowly turn into clay.

In this century, the power stations stopped burning coal, and the ash lagoons were returned to nature. Rather than abandon them to nature in-the-raw, though, or return them to farming, they were seeded with reeds and turned into a carefully managed and curated wetland nature reserve. They are liminal spaces, therefore, across multiple boundaries. Not just land-versus-sea, but also industry-versus-nature, human-versus-wild. Notably, because the ash lagoons were built by surrounding a patch of land with embankments and then filling the enclosed space with slurry, the wetlands are now several metres above the sea on the one side and the reclaimed marshland on the other. Some careful and cunning hydrological management must be going on to ensure that the wetland reedbeds stay wet and at the sametime the fields below them stay dry. And, of course, the pylons still stride proudly across from the power station’s fields of high-voltage switchgear.

At the moment, with all facilities other than the car park closed, the wetlands are a quiet, almost ghostly place. Peaceful, with not even many birds in sight yesterday. The wind blows through the reeds and the tide gently splashes in across the mudflats; one of those cunning, powerful tides that mocks you with the gentleness of its splashing as it outruns you across the mudflat. We stuck to the paths, peered through the slats to see what birds we could see, and enjoyed being more-than-walking-distance from home for the first time in a few months. The overhead cables hummed with power, a cormorant flew over the top of us, and a bumblebee carefully surveyed the land around.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, gwlyptir, wetlands, Gwlyptir Casnewydd, Newport Wetlands, Gwent Levels, edgelands.

Regular readers will know that for the past couple of months I’ve slowly been working on some cross-stitch. Today, it was complete; it feels like much longer than a couple of months.

Shocking news, I know, the idea that I’ve actually completed a crafting project for once—at least if you ignore that it still needs washing, blocking and framing.

I’ve already moved on and started my next cross-stitch project. However, it’s something of a step-change in difficulty.

Instead of cream 14-count fabric, this is black 18-count fabric, with lots of dark brown stitching to do on it. The squinting is already giving me a headache.

The previous posts in this series are *part one*, *part two*, and *part three*.

The other posts in the new series are *part five*, *part six*, *part seven* and *part eight*.

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, Battle of Hastings.

The wind truly howled last night. The storm came in and the rain battered hard against the windows, keeping me awake half the night and making me almost believe we had been magically transported up into the mountains. Every so often I would hear a scrape outside as someone’s bins went past, or a For Sale sign from further down the street, and I wondered idly if, by morning, we would have accumulated a harvest of poorly-secured neighbourhood trampolines in the garden.

When morning dawned, the recycling boxes were scattered around the garden but nothing seemed to have blown in and nothing blown out. By the time I sat down at my desk with my second cup of tea, the wind had abated, the rain stopped, and the sky was clear and blue. It looked as if it was going to be a fine bright sunny day, and the weather forecast concurred that no more rain would be coming.

Even though there were reports from the Bristol colleagues of hailstorms so violent they were setting off car alarms, the weather here still seemed positively bright and friendly by midday, and the forecast still promised peaceful sunny calms. I set out for my daily walk without a coat, wary that with one I would overheat. Nevertheless, when I was at my furthest from home, the sky began to darken. The further hilltops faded from view. First fat, heavy fast-blown drops of rain fell on me, as I trudged down a muddy lane; then sharp-stinging hailstones a few millimetres across. I stopped by the wall of one of the village chapels, noting how the village on the other side of the valley had faded into murk and disappeared.

By the time I reached home again, the sky was clear and the sun was out, but I was chilly and damp. I probably shouldn’t trust the weather forecast quite so much next time.

Keyword noise: winter, weather, seasons.

Work has stolen and sapped all of my energy this week. I’ve still found time, though, to go out walking; and although the weather has been bitterly cold there are signs that spring is coming. The trees are full of songbirds, too.

I’m entranced by this fallen electricity pylon, lying on its side battered and derelict, its structs bent and broken like some ancient reptilian fossil. My own local beached plesiosaur. I keep watching it from different angles; I really should come by with the Proper Camera.

Similarly, I keep watching Mynydd Machen from different angles. I can see it from my window; sometimes invisible, sometimes flat and two-dimensional in mist, sometimes so bright and bold I could reach out and pick it up. On the wide-angle phone camera, though, it always looks small and disappointing.

There will naturally be a proper railway history post at some point; I just need to put it together and decide exactly what I want to say, other than “this railway is much older than all those fancy modern upstarts like that one from Manchester to Liverpool”.

And finally, all cats are grey, as The Cure once upon a time said.

Keyword noise: photography, Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, Mynydd Machen, rheilffordd, railway, cats.

When I was younger, when most of the books I had were ones The Mother had bought from the local library’s “Withdrawn Stock” pile, one book she bought me was a 1960s beginners guide to going camping. I probably still have it, somewhere, although I’m not sure exactly where. It didn’t assume you would be going purely for the sort of camping we did, where you stayed on nice regular smooth green pitches, oh no. It covered the whole gamut from that sort of camping to wild camping, cycle touring, canoe camping, mountaineering, any sort of camping you might imagine. From it, I learned tips I’ve never come near to trying in real life, such as how to light a petrol stove,^* or how to cook meat by strapping it to your car’s engine. I learned that in Scotland, you may have to sign the Poisons Register at your local chemists in order to buy meths, and that if you’re worried about camping near wild animals you can buy a tent to pitch on top of your car’s roof. One factoid from this book has stuck in my mind ever since, because of its gnomic inscrutability.

Do not drink Alpine river water—it contains powdered granite.

What effect does powdered granite have on the body? Why is it so dangerous? As there was no explanation at all, I have been left wondering ever since. As a child, I even wondered if maybe it would somehow turn you into stone, your skin going grey and hardening as the powdered granite flooded your arteries. I’ve still never been to the Alps—although I have camped along parts of the Rhine, which I suppose is still Alpine river water in a certain sense even when you’re a long long way downstream—but if I do, I’m sure subconsciously I’ll be treating the river water as if the slightest amount ingested could be fatal.

I’ve been thinking about that when going out for walks around the local area. When I lived in Bristol the local river was generally quite murky, full of silt and algae. The slightest rain and it would be a turbid brown colour. The river here is crystal-clear, and if you can’t see the bottom it’s a deep sea-green.

It always flows dangerously fast. If it rains, it rises, and going by the rubbish in the trees it can easily rise ten feet above its regular level. As soon as the rain stops, it only takes a day or two to start falling and for the water to clear again. Within a week there are gravelly banks and shallows, although with the strong currents always there a few feet away.

Is this water clear because it’s falling off the South Wales mountains, down from the fringes of the Brecon Beacons southwards, rather than soaking through the Gloucestershire soil? Or it it irredeemably toxic? I wouldn’t have thought so, and I’m sure the water is a lot cleaner than it was one or two hundred years ago. Moreover, is this what Alpine river water looks like? As I walk along the riverbank can I fantasise that I am walking along some Swiss mountain stream packed to the gills with powdered granite that will strike me down at the slightest sip? It’s rather unlikely (and the geology here is probably very different), but it’s a nice thought. It is, at least, another reminder that I’ve moved from the lowlands and I’m now in the mountains, if only in their foothills.

Update, 15^th June 2021: I’ve found the guide to camping I was talking about, and written about the exact quote.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, water, dŵr, afon, river, Afon Ebwy, River Ebbw, mountains, mynyddoedd, camping, gwersyllaf.

The ongoing February, which feels as if it is the longest month of the past 12, is sapping my writing energy. Hopefully the oncoming spring will sort that out: today I saw my first queen bumblebee of the year flying purposefully around the neighbourhood looking for a spot to start her nest. This post is something of an appendix to the previous, with a few more photos. I’ve been repeating previous walks, but this time with the good camera.

I’ve been repeating previous walks, but this time with the good camera, which is why regular readers might spot some similarities. At some point I will tell you much, much more about the history of this particular railway, but not today.

It was built in the 1820s, as a plateway; I suspect that low wall on the right was put there in the 1890s when it was widened from single to double track.

Hopefully as the weather warms and the seasons change, my writing energy will come back too.

Keyword noise: photography, Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, rheilffordd, railway, Bassaleg, rural, countryside, river, afon, church, eglwys, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

I’m still taking some time to get used to the idea that we live on the edge of the countryside now. Yes, the village we live in is something of an unfocused suburban affair with no real centre, Victorian terraces and post-war cul-de-sacs^* with churches and chapels and grocery stores scattered through it in a random, unplanned and unfocused way like cherries in a fruit cake. Nevertheless, we live on the edge of it. A few minutes away, after going up one dead-end and taking a short-cut between two others, you are out among fields. Oak trees and pine plantations look down on you; and further up the valley, you can see the beginnings of mountains. If you climb the ridge, and look back, our village and the neighbouring ones are spread out below you; and in the distance the Severn Sea is a silver gleam on the horizon in front of a blue and misty Somerset.

As the countryside goes it’s fairly busy with people, especially at the moment when exercise has to be within walking distance. At any time of day, even a weekday, there are dog-walkers, joggers, pony-exercisers and people like me just off out for a wander down all of the lanes and up many of the paths. And this is what I’m not used to: all of these people, or almost all, will greet you with a cheery “Hello!” as they pass.

Coming from an inner-city neighbourhood where that sort of behaviour would have people assuming you were trying to rob them, I’m really not used to having to respond to it. I still can’t work out the timing. As someone approaches, I start to think: “are they a greeter? Or a not-greeter? They don’t look like a gre…” and then a sudden “Hello!” startles me and my greeting in response turns into a strange, half-strangled squeaky grunt somewhere between brain and voice.

The best answer I have is to fix them with eye contact before they speak and give a firm, silent nod. The sort of firm, silent nod that says: we are passing by on equal terms, as people who Appreciate the Landscape and do not need to spoil it with Unnecessary Noise. Even if they say something, the Firm Silent Nod is a good approach to take, removing any risk that my vocal cords will malfunction and produce something unintelligble at a key and crucial moment. Stoic fellow-travellers, we can be, briefly united in the siblinghood of tramping the land. There’s no need to spoil the illusion, now, is there.

This might not work in a few weeks time, when I’ve spotted the same people more than once. For now, that hasn’t happened; as yet I don’t even recognise people who live on the same street as me. If people start to see me frequently and it starts to become awkward, maybe I’ll have to come up with a different strategy. We’ll have to wait and see.

* or, if you prefer, culs-de-sac

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, countryside, rural, walking, etiquette.

Astronomy fans probably already all know about the Nasa rover Perseverance, which landed successfully on Mars yesterday evening. The Child Who Likes Animals Space was greatly disappointed that the landing wasn’t going to happen until well past bedtime. “You wouldn’t find it very interesting anyway,” I told him. “All you’ll see is a bunch of people in a control room cheering. You won’t get the good pictures until later.” Indeed, although there was one slightly low-contrast black and white photo through within a few minutes to prove the lander had touched down the right way up, at the time of writing the good exciting stuff is due to be revealed shortly.

As the sun went down, though, the sky outside was crystal-clear and Mars was clearly visible a few degrees above the Moon. “Shall we get the telescope out and look at Mars ourselves instead?” I suggested, and of course The Children jumped at the idea.

I’m getting a bit bored of starting posts on here with “Since we moved house…”, but this is the natural point where I have to say “Since we moved house…”. Specifically, since we moved house, The Child Who Likes Space’s telescope has sat in its box in a cupboard; after all, it is February in Wales and we have hardly had a clear night since we moved in. So last night was the first time in this house that I took the telescope out of its box, set it up in the garden on the camping table, and looked to see what we could see.

To be honest, I wasn’t very hopeful. The new garden has a bright-white LED streetlamp shining straight into it. Moreover, as soon as I went outside, on came an automatic outside light. Could I find an off-switch for it anywhere? No, I could not. I was rather d, given these problems, to see that the sky was a wonderful bright blanket of visible stars, much clearer than anything we could ever see in Bristol.

Mars was easy to find, but still is barely more than a dot with the magnification we have available. After looking at Mars, we saw Orion was bright to the south, so zoomed in on Betelgeuse and then the Orion Nebula, or Messier 42 to its friends. In Bristol, the Orion Nebula only ever appeared in the eyepiece as a pale fuzziness which barely stood out from the background sky. Here, it was startlingly clear by comparison, a cold blue cloud against the background sky. Compared to our previous attempts to observe it, it was an entirely different experience.

By now clouds were starting to roll in from the north, so we packed everything up and went inside. As one last thing to try, I pointed the telescope at the moon and tried holding my phone to the eyepiece. Previously when trying this, I produced possibly the worst astrophotography ever. Last night’s attempt, therefore, can take the second-worst spot.

Maybe at some point I’ll actually get a proper adapter to strap my phone into and produce something slightly better.

At some point, when we can travel more widely, we’ll have to try putting the telescope in the car and heading up to one of the dark sky sites in the Brecon Beacons, to see just what we can see when we are out of town altogether with no streetlamps and no lights in neighbouring windows. For now, we’ll just have to wait for the next clear night, and see exactly how dark it is when we’re just in our own garden. Fingers crossed.

Keyword noise: astronomy, Mars, The Children, Betelgeuse, Messier objects, Orion Nebula, The Moon.

It being a couple of weeks now since the house move, I feel surprisingly settled-in already, and a big proportion of stuff has now been unpacked and sorted out. At some stage I will write a fuller account of what happened on move day itself, and all the stresses that had to be overcome, but today is not that day.

This post, though, is partly about how different it is living here. Not about the neighbourhood or the landscape, different though they are, but how different it is to move from an old, fragile, Victorian brick-built terrace to a modern house on a modern housing estate. Not just about how physically different the spaces are, but how I have moved away from an old building with an old building’s atmosphere to somewhere that, spiritually speaking, is much more fresh and bare.

That paragraph is really just a long-winded way of saying: the new house, I’m pretty sure, is not haunted. The old house, I can’t say that about.

Regular readers will have seen my post the other day about *Surviving Death*, the recent TV series about, well, evidence there is an afterlife. In that, I naturally concentrated on the bits of the documentary it was easy to be sceptical about: frankly, it’s more fun to write and I assume more fun to read. That isn’t to say, though, that I’m prepared to rule out the possibility that something can survive after death, or that ghosts exist, or anything else along those lines. All I’m sure about is that, if anything of that kind does exist, it will be completely different in every way from anything you, me or anybody else has ever been able to imagine. So I’m approaching this from a sceptical angle, but an open-minded sceptical angle. All I will say is that when I went from spending most of my time out of the house, to most of my time sitting in my bedroom working, I became less and less willing to say that the house, for definite, was not haunted.

Surviving Death didn’t really touch very much on ghosts. Maybe they’re considered a bit passé in a world where a medium promises to rustle up the spirit of a lost loved one almost on-demand. The sort of haunting I’m talking about is also one very light on evidence, with nothing other than strange feelings, curious hunches, and the like.

Last March, back when the death rate started to climb and everyone was told to stay at home, I made sure I had a suitable working space. Previously when I worked from home I’d done it at the kitchen table, which was almost tolerable but not really. For one thing, the dining chairs were fine to sit on for a couple of hours but were rather painful after a whole day. The kitchen was hot in summer, cold in winter, and the wi-fi dropped out whenever the microwave was on.^* The bedroom, on the other hand, was large, directly above the wi-fi base station, and kept me nicely out of the way. I bought a cheap little desk—more of a table really—that just fitted into the bedroom’s window bay, found a slightly more comfortable chair than a dining chair, and settled down to a life of working in the window bay, tapping away at my laptop and watching the neighbours walking up and down the street, not to mention the local magpies, squirrels and occasionally foxes.

I quickly became used, though, to something else. Somebody would come and stand over me. I don’t mean I heard anything, but that I could see somebody out of the corner of my eye, who wasn’t there when I looked at them directly. They weren’t always there, but they would come and watch over me, maybe two or three times per day, when I was busy and when nobody else was around. I never saw them directly, but I knew they were there just as I knew when a living flesh-and-blood person had walked up behind me. They always approached from the same side, from my left, the direction of the doorway, never my right.

Was I just seeing my own hair moving out of the corner of my eye? Or noticing the curtains moving? But if so why only ever on the one side of me? My eyesight is rather asymmetrical, it’s true: my left eye’s sight is much worse than the right. I will, of course, never know the answer. But it’s easy to think that a 130-year old house will have had people die inside it, particularly in the large bedroom; or will have emotions and spirits become attached to it in a way that a three-year-old house will not have.

You can never trust what children, small children, say. But I remember that when they were much younger than they are now, or were a year ago even, The Child Who Likes Fairies said a man would come to play with her. An old man, she said, would come into her bedroom and talk to her. What he said was never specified, but apparently he seemed friendly. As you will have guessed, nobody of the sort had ever been in her room. Nowadays, she has no recollection at all of any of this.

Was the old house haunted? It’s not a question I can honestly give a yes to: there are too many unknowns and too little evidence. But equally, I feel I can’t say for certain that the old house wasn’t haunted. It’s not a question we can ever get an answer to, and I very much doubt a medium could help, or diving in kitted up with night-vision cameras and temperature sensors. For that matter I never had any feeling there was anybody watching when I was in bed, even though I have in the past, when living in other places, had the classic “old hag” night terror. Only when I was working, concentrating on my screen, would the figure come into the room to wonder what I was doing.

Now we have moved on and are unlikely ever to know what is happening to that place, and how it is changing from when we lived there. If it was haunted, I hope the ghost who lives there is happy with whoever is there now. I hope he finds them as intriguing as I apparently was. Since moving, I’ve been sitting at the same desk, working away on the same computer, staring out of a different window, and never feel there is anybody watching me, or that anybody I can’t see has walked into the room. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, there is some distinct qualitative difference in what I feel I am perceiving. Whether that is something paranormal, or something else about the nature of the building, I would never be able to even begin to work out. Subjectively, though, whether there was a ghost or not, is there really any difference that matters?

* This is a very normal problem, so if you find your wi-fi often has problems at around the same time each day, check to see if it corresponds with cooking activities.

Keyword noise: paranormal, ghosts, ghost stories, The Children.