A visit to Llangrannog

 'Where shall we go today?' 

We'd met a couple of women, one a poet, in the car park in New Quay the evening before, and they'd recommended visiting Llangrannog, where they lived, so that's where we went. 

First stop, homage to a Victorian poet whose work neither of us have read because she wrote in Welsh, Sarah Jane Rees, whose bardic name was Cranogwen, and who sounds really interesting, having gone to sea as a child with her father, later setting up her own navigation school. She also edited a Welsh language women's magazine for bluestockings and proto-Suffragettes, lectured in America, and lived openly, it appears, with successive female partners, whilst still being a staunch Methodist and founder of the South Wales Women's Temperance Union. Her grave is in the churchyard of St Carranog's Church and, pleasingly, is entirely in Welsh.  

(Incidentally, St Carranog, or Carantoc, is the same saint who sailed across the Bristol Channel in a coracle, landing at Carhampton on the Somerset coast, where he tamed a dragon at the behest of King Arthur and made an appearance in a sequence of poems in my collection, Map Reading for Beginners.)  

Sarah Jane Rees is also commemorated in the village with a very newly unveiled and extremely impressive statue by Sebastien Boyson, who also sculpted the statue of the miner at the Six Bells memorial. 

After lunch on the front, we went down onto the beach ... 

... and past the rock called Carreg Bica, which, according to legend, was the giant Bica's tooth, spat out when he had a spell of toothache.

I think it looks more like an angel from behind. 

From the neighbouring cove, we climbed the steep steps up the cliff to the coast path. 

stonecrop and slate

Our plan was to walk to the end of the Ynys Lochtyn headland, where there's a colony of seals, but it was very hot and we both had spells of feeling slightly giddy, so we didn't descend to the headland, but looked down on it instead from the heights of the cliff path ... 

... before turning around and walking back to Llangrannog via a path set rather more inland than the outgoing route along the edge of the cliff. 

It wasn't the end of the world not seeing seals, not least since we had Cwtch with us who could have disturbed them, and anyhow, we'd seen some back in 2016, further down the coast at Strumble Head ... 

... and our consolation prize was a pair of choughs, seeing off some gulls from their nesting area. 

Round for Six Bells

This photograph of women waiting at the pit head for news of their loved ones following an underground explosion at Six Bells Colliery near Abertillery in June 1960 has haunted me ever since I first spotted it in the National Coal Mining Museum at Big Pit, getting on for a decade ago.  I knew as soon as I saw the stoicism of those women that I had to come up with a response. 

It took years of waiting to be in the right place in my own life, a subsequent visit to Big Pit last year and a trip to the moving memorial at Six Bells itself before I finally set about writing my poem.  

It seemed to me that a form poem would best suit my purpose - one in which lines are repeated in a set order, to mimic the circling of thoughts that go through your head while waiting for news that could go either way, each time worse than before. I was also very aware that the news at Six Bells turned out to be as tragic as it could be, for only three of the 48 men working in the district of the mine where the explosion happened survived.  This meant whatever I wrote had to be unsentimental yet empathetic, and as good as I could make it.  
Eventually I wrote a pantoum and called it 'Round for Six Bells', the idea being each of the six stanzas would toll a litany of loss.  Well, that was the idea, anyway, and this is what I came up with.

Round for Six Bells

Above ground the women are waiting.                                      

Stretchers are piled against the wall.                                           

All that they know is sliding away.                                                         

Their hands grip the railings to steady their fear.   

                                                                  

The stretchers are piled against the wall.                                               

The sound of the hooter is like a wail.

Their hands grip the railings to steady their fear,                                 

to keep worry out of the shadows and small.

                                                           

The sound of the hooter will be their wail

as long as they cling to iron and rust,                                          

to keep worry out of the shadows and small                             

like the bacon left boiling on the stove.                                      

As long as they cling to iron and rust,                                         

they won’t imagine the flesh of the dead            

like bacon left burning on the stove,                   

no point turning worrying into dread                 

                       

so they don’t imagine the flesh of the dead        

their husbands’ skin is blackened with dust                  

it might not be as bad as they dread                    

it was just the faintest of shudders felt    

                       

and their sons’ skin is black, yes, but only with dust               

and all that they know is sliding away               

in that faintest of shudders felt                 

above ground. The women are waiting.             

  

© Deborah Harvey 2014

Once written, the poem lay around for a bit.  I read it at Bristol Poetry Festival in the autumn of 2013 and earmarked it for inclusion in my second poetry collection, Map Reading for Beginners, which is due out this September.  Then I remembered something I had read years ago: an observation Leonard Cohen had made about being duped out of the rights for 'Suzanne' and how he had once heard some people singing it on a ship on the Caspian Sea, concluding that maybe it was appropriate that such a well-loved song didn't belong just to him. 

I'm not deluded enough to compare 'Round for Six Bells' with 'Suzanne' or to think that I will ever make any money out of my poetry, but I do believe that poems are like songs in that once they are take their place, however modest, in the world, they don't really belong to the poet any more.  In the narrowest sense, that hopeful little © above can easily be ignored, as recent notorious acts of plagiarism have shown.  But what I'm really talking about is the way they contain enough space for the listener or reader to interpret them in the light of their own emotional truths, which means that each time it is read, a poem takes on a new existence. 

At any rate, I wanted to give something back to the community that inspired me so I contacted the curator at the National Coal Museum and asked if they would display it or maybe just keep it in their archive.  Almost immediately I had a response to the effect that they would 'frame it and hang it where people could read it'.  What's more, it will also be on display at the Visitor Centre of the Mining Memorial in the village of Six Bells itself. I'm honoured beyond imagining. My poem's going home.  

Into the Valley

Our plan was to criss-cross Dartmoor, scattering maps of three hares churches and cards in our wake (Dru) and chatting to passing book traders in the hope of getting a couple of readings (me).  But Dru found she didn't have sufficient three hares cards to make it worthwhile, so we postponed our trip south and west and headed back to Wales instead.  

It was still snowy. Look, up above is the Sugar Loaf looking like ... well, a loaf of sugar.

And here's Abergavenny, the spit of Salzburg.  Sort of. 



And at Clydach Gorge, I saw what I suspect might be my Best Thing of 2013. Already.  

The former mining village of Six Bells was our destination, in part because I am currently writing a poem inspired by the picture at Big Pit of the women waiting for news at the pithead following an underground explosion on 28th June 1960 and felt the need to go there, but also because there is now a 20 metre high monument, the Guardian of the Valleys, to the 45 men and boys who lost their lives that day.  

On our way Dru coaxed the Morris Traveller up a very steep hill to the Church of Saint Illtyd at Brynithel.  Unfortunately the door - carved with hearts and initials - was locked but we braved the sharp-toothed wind to have a fossick around the hummocky, circular (and thus pre-Christian) churchyard with its ancient yew stumps, out of which new saplings are growing.  

Then it was down down down to Six Bells to see the statue known as The Guardian Of The Valleys.  It's been dubbed South Wales' Angel of the North, and there does seem to be a sense of each figure watching over its landscape and offering protection.  But the respective styles and purposes are very different.  

One of the most ingenious aspects of the Guardian is the method of its construction, from over 20,000 strips of cor-ten steel.  Viewed from a distance, the figure seems almost gauzy, there and not there yet solidifying as you approach it.

The sculptor, Sebastien Boysen, describes the impetus behind his work thus: 'I just had this thought, this image of this man - almost stripped bare. Maybe he's one of the helpers or maybe one of the survivors who has managed to come out from the pit.  This man is conveying the sense of loss.  A sense of something that's almost impossible to understand.'  

And there is a feeling of irredeemable loss at Six Bells.  The loss of the valley's pastoral tranquility when the mine opened.  The loss of light, health and life working underground.  The loss of work and community pride when the mine closed with  nothing to replace it.  But at the reclaimed site of the former pit, there is peace, reconciliation and remembrance too.  

After Six Bells we again braved wind and residual pockets of snow to picnic in grand style on Marland Mountain - otherwise known as Hafod Fach - where for a time Dru's family used to farm.  

 

We then headed for Newport Cathedral, which is dedicated to St Woolos the Warrior (or Bearded), whose name is a corrupted, anglicised version of the original, St Gwynllyw.  Apparently he was a King and Confessor, who, like St Illtyd whose church we saw earlier, had a somewhat nefarious career  before he found God and founded the city of Newport.  At one point he even abducted the beautiful Gwladys, daughter of neighbouring King Brychan, who had refused to allow him to marry her, taking 300 men with him to do so.  Only the intervention of King Arthur stopped the ensuing pitched battle.  

Gwladys soon had a son, we are told, who later became St Cadoc the Wise and whose birth Gwynllyw celebrated by going on a cattle raid.  Presumably he indulged in some heavy-duty repentance later.  

The greatest treasure of St Woolos' Cathedral is the Norman arch with its Roman columns stolen, apparently, from the fortress at Caerleon and carved with images that might represent either Noah's flood or the baptism of Christ. Through it, at the East end of the Cathedral, you can see the distinctive wheel window in stained glass designed by John Piper.  

The best journeys end with the sea, or if not quite attaining that, rivers and on a bitterly cold but brilliantly lit April day, the Usk and the Severn both rose to the challenge.  Here is the Transporter Bridge at Newport.  I fancy I'll be back for a ride maybe, on a warmer day, whenever such a dawn might come.