Castles, Poets and the Usual Stuff

After all the half-timbered buildings in Stratford-Upon-Avon, it felt appropriate to continue the theme by going to Wales in Dru's Morris Traveller.

Having deposited Son the Elder in Newport for his Robot Wars sessions, we drove up the Usk valley to Llangybi, stopping first at the St Cybi's well which has A Literary Connection courtesy of T S Eliot, who wrote in his early poem, 'Usk':

'Do not suddenly break the branch, or

Hope to find

The white hart behind the white well.

Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell

Old enchantments. Let them sleep.

'Gently dip, but not too deep.'

Lift your eyes

Where the roads dip and the roads rise

Seek only there

Where the grey light meets the green air

The hermit's chapel, the pilgrim's prayer.'

This sounds a lot less mystical when you realise that the White Hart is a pub.  Unfortunately for the cash-strapped Dru and me, it's a gastro-pub so we had to make do with faggots and peas from the chip shop in Usk, but if you have a few spare coppers to rub together, it might well be worth trying, even if just for the channelling of the poet.   

Llangybi also has a lovely 13th/14th century church with mediaeval wall paintings and all.  See how the walls lean outwards? ... or is it me on the cider? ... no, they are definitely leaning.

This picture is a very rare type of wall painting depicting Christ with the tools of those who work on a Sunday in the process of wounding him.  Hmmm.  Begs the question, just how painful is a black Bic biro and a laptop?  

And this is the top of my favourite headstone in the churchyard.  It holds the bodies of Frederick Evans who died in 1831 aged 2, his father Evan Evans, died 1839 aged 59, and Sarah Evans, a widow until 1867, aged 82.  



'Long nights and days I bore great pain,
To waite for cure twas all in vain;
Till God above he thought it best
To take my pain and give me rest.'

After Llangybi Church but before the faggots and peas, Dru and I took the road less travelled by (probably because it is marked private) up to the castle, which is also known as Castle Tregrug.  En route we were joined by a black dog, which seemed fitting in this shadowy borderland, even if the dog in question was a Labrador with a red collar and a tag in the shape of a bone bearing a Newport postmark.  

Ted found the young whippersnapper a bit of a nuisance.  

The ruins were impressive, however.  I particularly liked the Tower House with its carved remains of fan vaulting amongst the ivy and umbellifers.    

Dru was able to tell me that what looks like an age-old holloway are, in fact, civil war fortifications.  

Having reunited the Labrador, who turned out to be called Sid, with his owners, we went three miles on up the valley to Usk. 

This is Ted waiting patiently for our dinner in the chip shop.

Usk is one of those towns that time forgot, apparently, and whilst not really being Tom Jones country, appropriating the title of one of his hits for the name of a shop selling undergarments doesn't feel like too much of a liberty (bodice).  

Usk Police Station.

'Hey, let's be careful out there!' 

While we ate our not very picnicky picnic we watched locals cooling off in the River Usk, non tidal here and not muddy.   Terrifyingly, some of them were jumping from the disused railway bridge into the not very deep water.  

Usk Castle is less hidden and neglected than Llangibby Castle, but it's still pretty far from being National Trustified.  

This is the view over the town with the Tithe Barn in the foreground.  Trelawney's Cedars to the right were grown from seeds brought back from the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the last resting place of Keats' body and Shelley's ashes.  

The garden is sensitively maintained, with room for wild strawberries ... 

... and a fenced-off forest of Giant Hogweed.  

I liked the way the almost spent valerian seemed to flame from the walls under the hot sun.  

There was a service going on at Usk Church so we couldn't go in, though we did see the grave of the last Welsh martyr, St David Lewis, who was executed for being a Catholic priest in 1679 and buried in the churchyard.  

There was just time for a drink before picking up the Roboteer, so we stopped off at the Hanbury pub in Caerleon, again on the banks of the Usk, only to spot this plaque commemorating yet another poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who, like Eliot, was sufficiently inspired by the area to put pen to paper.  

'What have you two been up to?' asked Son the Elder, after our traditional post Robot Wars debriefing.  

'Oh, castles ... and poets ... and ... '

'The usual stuff then,' he interrupted.  

Well, quite.

To Hell and Heaven in a Morris Traveller

The novelist, Julie Hearn, has written me a commendation for my forthcoming novel, 'Dart', and I wanted to repay the favour without compromising her - or my - integrity, so came up with the idea of taking her on a jaunt.  And a jaunt not being a proper jaunt unless you do it in a Morris Traveller, Dru joined us too.

From Julie's home we headed to Fairford to see the mediaeval glass in St Mary's - the only surviving complete set of windows in the country.
  

I was especially struck by the great West window, with its depiction of Heaven and Hell. 

Above is St Michael (or at least his legs), weighing souls to determine whether the owner will go to Heaven or Hell.  And to the left here he is in full, with his beautiful and astonishing butterfly wings.

Not so beautiful is the fate of those deemed unworthy of paradise.  In the corner is Satan, looking like something from a Steve Bell cartoon.  Far more horrifying is the poor demented soul being wheeled to hell in a handcart courtesy of a rather laid back looking blue demon.

You can see the West window behind me and Julie in the next photo.

The other windows were wonderful also, although some were very graphic. (There were a lot of decapitated heads and at least one baby being stabbed.)  Other windows showed saints with faces just like ones you might see on the bus.  The one above, of the Ascension, reminded me of a 1960s album cover.  Look at Jesus's feet disappearing into cloud!  They're just like the stone carving above in Wells Cathedral.

When you are surrounded by so much coloured light, it's easy to miss other, less ostentatious beauty things.  Like this angel painted on the wall, high to one side of the arch separating the nave from the chancel.

And the Soup Dragon outside.

  

While we were in the charity shop over the road, one of the volunteers told us to head for Lechlade Church, where there was a stone in the wall carved with lines from a 'Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade' which Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1815.  The path through the graves has been renamed Shelley's Walk in his honour.  After Keats' Walk in Winchester on Saturday, this seemed to synchronous to miss, so off we went.

The church is described as one of the six finest in Gloucestershire, but we found it a bit bland after Fairford.  There was an interesting if rather horrifying mid 13th century sculpture depicting the martyrdom of St Agatha ...

... and an irritating grammatical error in a 20th century stained glass window of St Ursula, dedicated to the memory of Thomas and Sarah Hawker.  Bloody greengrocers' apostrophe's get everywhere.  

After Lechlade, we made our way to William Morris's Kelmscott Manor, somewhere very dear to my heart.  Julie had been there before also, while researching her novel 'Ivy' about a young artist's model and laudanum addict working for a minor Pre-Raphaelite artist, but it was Dru's first visit.
She took a highly illicit photo of Julie and me in one of the corridors, and another with the iconic front elevation of the Manor behind us. 

We also popped into the Village Hall, designed by Ernest Gimson in memory of Morris, and the Church of St George, the churchyard of which contains Morris's grave.  There must have been a wedding the previous weekend because the ancient font was full of white flowers and the scent of lilies was just this side of over-powering.  There were more flowers wreathing the pillars, where during Morris's funeral which coincided with Harvest, there were rings of oats and barley.


We lingered for some time in the north transcept admiring the mediaeval wall paintings, particularly this one of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden yet not looking too distressed by their fate.
 

We had hoped to go to Buscot also, to see the Burne-Jones paintings, but time was not on our side, so we adjourned to Julie's house for tea and to plan part two of our jaunt in the autumn.

On the way back to Bristol we again passed the prehistoric Uffington White Horse, and I vowed to get back there with Ted for a walk before long.  A final stop in Wantage brought us face to face with a statue of Alfred, again my second of the week, having encountered him the previous weekend in Winchester.  Funny how things go sometimes.

Thanks to Dru for - amongst other things - doing all the driving, and to Julie for being another kindred spirit to add to my precious collection.  Feels really good to have made another Friend-in-Jaunting.