Crimes of Cymru: Classic Mystery Tales of Wales – Edited by Martin Edwards

Posted on 05/08/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – August 2023

Macabre fiction has been a particular strength of Welsh writers over the years, perhaps in part inspired by the alluring yet sometomes eerie quality of the landscape.

I have to admit I’m a big fan of so-called ‘tartan noir’ Scottish crime fiction; I enjoy the work of writers such as William McIlvanney, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Denise Mina. Welsh writers are yet to establish a cohesive equivalent genre for their own country, though their colleagues in television have been making enormous ‘Welsh noir’ strides in recent years with bilingual dramas like Y Gwyll, Craith  and Un Bore Mercher.

British Library Publishing have a track record of unearthing classic British crime fiction and producing handsome short story collections featuring some well-known and other less well-known British crime writers from the twentieth century. Martin Edwards was commissioned to edit this latest collection featuring either writers from Wales, writers from elswhere who set some of their stories in Wales or, in some cases, writers who tick both boxes.

Crimes of Cymru is a collection of fourteen stories first published between 1909 and the 1980s. Among the better-known Welsh-born authors featured are Roald Dahl, Ethel Lina White and Arthur Machen. Other Welsh writers, less well-known but equally prolific, include Cledwyn Hughes and Jack Griffith. The rest of the collection is made up by writers from other parts of Britain who set some of their short stories in Wales. This includes Christianna Brand, Ianthe Jerrold and Michael Gilbert.

The short stories presented vary in style and length and, it has to be said, they are of variable quality too. But I think the whole point was to present a representative picture of Welsh crime fiction in the twentieth century, some of the work good and some necessarily not quite so good. In fulfilling this objective Martin Edwards has fully succeeded and has produced a very entertaining collection with an extremely helpful introduction and notes on each author.

Like other collections in the British Library Crime Classics series, Crimes of Cymru gives the reader an insight into a world that is now lost. I’m not so much thinking of the content of the stories and the past times they are set in, though that would be true in almost all cases. I’m referring to the circumstances in which these stories were first published. Most found their way to a readership through monthly magazines with titles such as Crime Mysteries, Pall Mall Magazine, The Strand Magazine and The London Mystery Magazine. Publications such as these may not have paid particurarly well, but they had a voracious appetite for short stories and provided a reliable route to publication for jobbing writers. This is a route, unfortunately that is no longer available to twenty-first century authors.

Crimes of Cymru does not feel particularly Welsh. But I guess that means it accurately reflects the times in which these stories were written, rather than than the more self-confident Welsh literary scene of today.

 

Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards was born at Knutsford, Cheshire and educated in Northwich and at Balliol College, Oxford. A member of the Murder Squad (collective of crime writers, Martin was the longest-serving Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association since its founder John Creasey. In 2015 he was elected eighth President of the Detection Club; his predecessors include G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. He is Archivist of the CWA and of the Detection Club and consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics.

 

Crimes of Cymru: Classic Mystery Tales of Wales
Martin Edwards (Ed.)
British Library Publishing
May 2023
UK – £10.99 (paperback)
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Real Dorset by Jon Woolcott

Posted on 02/08/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – August 2023

So it seemed to me that Dorset is ripe for a sort of psychogeography – a literary tradition that in essence is a sensitivity to the meeting point of place and history, finding meaning in the everyday and making connections across time.

The Real series of books was started by Cardiff writer Peter Finch in 2002 with an alternative guide to his home city. Real Cardiff was so successful that it spawned three further editions and led to Real guides being produced for cities and counties throughout Wales and the rest of the UK. Other writers have created these later guides, but Finch remains as the series editor.

Many of us think we know Dorset from past seaside holidays or from travelling to a Dorset port to catch a boat across the English Channel. But do we really know this ancient county with its Ryme Intrinsica, Beer Hackett and other fever dream villages? Is the ancient  green hinterland beyond the coastal resorts really just part of the imaginary Wessex of William Barnes and Thomas Hardy?

But Dorset resident and writer Jon Woolcott knows this county inside out, having travelled much of it by bike and on foot. But, like other books in the Real series, this is no conventional travel guide. Woolcott makes a point of seeking out the quirky and the overlooked; places that rarely make the glossy county guide books, but which nonetheless capture the essence of Dorset. In Real Dorset Woolcott travels the byways of his home county finding the topographical threads to tug at in order to reveal the temporal layers beneath.

Dorset has no motorways and very few dual carriageways, so the traveller is forced to take his or her time. Woolcott divides his musings on the county into compass point sections. The North covers the area bordering Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. We take long-distance paths such as the Shire Rack, visit neglected settlements like Stalbridge and the ancient hillfort at Hambledon.

The South, East and West sections take us to Dorset’s coastline. Woolcott visits all the obvious and expected places, like Portland, Weymouth and Bournemouth. But he has an uncanny knack for finding overlooked turnings and unearthing odd human stories. Portland lives up to its eccentric reputation, as witnessed by the popular local bumper sticker: ‘Keep Portland Weird!’

The Central section covers the county town, Dorchester, and the ancient settlements of  Blandford and Wimborne. Peaceful as they are today, Woolcott reveals a past of conflict and rebellion in these towns. He also walks the chalk uplands of this area and considers the origins of the chalk giant at Cerne Abbas.

Real Dorset is a worthy addition to Peter Finch’s series of alternative guide books. The pleasure of reading the text is enhanced by Jon Woolcott’s often offbeat black and white photographs.

 

Jon Woolcott

Jon Woolcott is a writer and publisher, who has lived in Dorset for twelve years, and grew up nearby in southern Wiltshire. He currently works for the acclaimed independent publisher, Little Toller, where he also edits The Clearing, the online journal for new writing about place and nature. He has been Communications Officer for Cranborne Chase AONB and held senior marketing and buying roles for Stanfords, Waterstones and Ottakar’s. His writing, which often focuses on Dorset, has appeared widely, including for The Guardian, Caught by the River, The Bookseller, Sightly Foxed, Echtrai Journal and History Press.

 

Real Dorset
Jon Woolcott
Seren 
April 2023
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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Brittle With Relics: A History Of Wales 1962 – 1997 by Richard King

Posted on 01/08/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – August 2023

This is a history of a nation determined to survive during crisis, while maintaining the enduring hope that Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.

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I was looking forward to reading Brittle With Relics because the period of Welsh history that Richard King covers is one that has long fascinated me and, having previously read two of his books about music, I knew he was a very capable researcher and writer. It was also recommended to me by Liz Dexter, a friend of this blog, who was involved in the book’s production. But, I must admit, when I first received my copy, I had my doubts. The central concept of this book is a series of vignettes, arranged thematically, taken from almost a hundered interviews he conducted. Was this just a cheap cut-and-paste job, I found myself wondering. I needn’t have worried: Brittle With Relics is, perhaps, the best ever portrait of Wales in the late twentieth century. This is oral history at its most incisive and revealing. Some of King’s interviewees are household names: Neil Kinnock, Peter Hain, Dafydd Iwan and Leanne Wood, for instance. Others are less well-known but are nonethelees important to the strands of the story that King weaves together. Activists, and in particular women, from the Welsh language campaign, miners’ support groups, the second homes campaign and CND are given great prominence.

The final two decades of the twentieth century witnessed several crucial steps in Wales’s journey towards re-asserting its national identity and for the Welsh to recover their self confidence as a people. This process resulted in the creation of a Welsh National Assembly and Assembly Government in 1999, which later evolved into the nation’s Senedd and Welsh Government. Prior to this, the Welsh Language Act of 1993 put Welsh on an equal footing with English for the first time and , incrementally, began to reverse the decline of the Welsh language. The establishment of a Welsh language television channel, S4C, had already brought Welsh into the daily discourse of both native speakers and learners from 1982 onwards.

But prior to all of this, the 1960s, 70s and 80s were a grim time for Wales. King bookends the 60s with two tragedies : the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley in North Wales to provide water for Liverpool and the destruction of a primary school in Aberfan by the collapse of an unwisely placed coal tip. Tryweryn is still notorious for the arrogance of Westminster in insisting the Welsh-speaking community of Capel Celyn should be flooded, despite the opposition of 125 Welsh local authorities and 27 of Wales’s 36 MPs. In Aberfan 144 people were killed, including 116 children at Pantglas Junior School, when a spoil heap slipped down a hillside and engulfed the school. Local people and the National Union of Mineworkers had warned the National Coal Board about the danger of Tip Number 7 and the fact it was built on a stream, but they were ignored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This period also saw the winding down and removal of heavy industry in Wales. Jobs in coal, steel, quarrying and manufacturing all disappeared. But this was not just about the loss of jobs, it was about communities; vibrant, confident and self-reliant communities were destroyed:

I’ve really got to blame Thatcher for all of this, because how did a town like Maerdy, a hard-working heavy industry place, turn into a hard drugs kind of community almost overnight? (Dewi ‘Mav’ Bowen)

The thread that runs through the entire period covered by Richard King’s book is Cymraeg, the Welsh language. Yet, committed as he is to the future of Cymraeg, King chose to write his book in English. This, I would suggest, allows him to include Anglophone Welsh voices within the text and to reach out to non-Welsh speakers within Wales and beyond. Thus, he is able to create a sense of Welshness that is uncompromisingly inclusive but undeniably Welsh. My own extended family, or at least those of us living in Wales, enjoy a mixed English, Polish and African-Caribbean heritage. Yet we are all proudly Welsh. This, I would contend, is indicative of a new Welsh indentity, an inclusive one; a national identity for the twenty-first century. It is, I suspect, an identity of which Richard King would wholeheartedly approve.

We saw ourselves emulating the civil rights movement in America. One of my first poems in my first book, Mwyara (Blackberrying), was about George Jackson, about the Black Panthers, Angela Davis. These were on my radar as much as Tryweryn and Cymdeithas yr Iaith. (Menna Elfyn)

The long history of the campaign for language equality in Wales started in 1962 with the founding of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh Language Society. Taking inspiration from the civil rights movement in the United States, Cymdeithas yr Iaith launched and sustained a long campaign of non-violent direct action demanding that Welsh be accepted on an equal footing to English. Their targets were always property, such as road signs, and not people and the activists always made a point of taking responsibility for their actions, often waiting to surrrender themselves to the police. As a result, hundreds of Welsh language campaigners served time in prison during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Miners’s Strike of 1984-85 was a watershed in the dismantling of heavy industry in Wales and, as a direct result, the destruction of the communities these industries supported. The Thatcher government, King argues, picked a fight with the express aim of destroying the power of the NUM. The mining villages destroyed in Wales and elsewhere were no more than calculated collateral damage.

There were families that were practically living under martial law and people think you’re exaggerating now, because they couldn’t imagine it. (Christine Powell)

King highlights how the miners’ strike brought together a variety of campaigners from across Wales – language campaigners, peace activists, LGBT groups, musicians and artists, But central to this movement, he makes clear, were women.

This is the point where the interest in the miners started to change and this is the point where the union had to change its attitude to the women, because now people were realising what was keeping the strike going was the women. (Siân James)

What I really love about this book is that, within its 500 pages, Richard King gives due regard to the importance of popular culture, and in particular music. For many of us the music we discover in our teens and which forms us in our later years is an important part of our identity. King doesn’t just consider the more high-profile Welsh bands, such as Manic Street Preachers, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals, but he features other less successful but, he argues, just as influential artists like Datblygu and Y Cyrff.

Throughout the eighties and that period of Datblygu, Y Cyrff, Fflaps and Anhrefn recording Peel sessions, we all felt strongly that it was important that we sang in Welsh on those sessions. (Rhys Mwyn)

But, notwithstanding the decline and disasters of the period of the 1960s through to the 1990s that Brittle With Relics portrays, this is ultimately an uplifting book. Despite the narrow referendum victory for devolution in 1997, support for the Senedd is now solid throughout Wales, as indicated by the overwhelming 2011 vote on increasing the Welsh Government’s powers. And according to the language app, Duolingo, Welsh is the fastest growing language in the UK. (Full disclosure here – I’m a Welsh learner with Duolingo myself!) Interest in independence for Wales is growing. But, to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve come from. Which is why Richard King’s book is such a valuable contribution to this debate.

 

Richard King

Richard King is the author of Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and a Rough Trade, The Times and Uncut Book of the Year), How Soon Is Now? (the Sunday Times Music Book of the Year) and The Lark Ascending (a Rough Trade, Mojo and Evening Standard Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize).  He was born into a bilingual family in South Wales and for the last twenty years has lived in the rural county of Powys, in mid-Wales.

Brittle With Relics: A History Of Wales, 1962 – 1997
Richard King
Faber & Faber
Fewbruary 2022 
UK – £21.00 (hardback), £12.99 (paperback)

 

Cofiwch Dryweryn image – Ifan Morgan Jones. (CC BY 2.0)
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The Valley

Posted on 23/07/2023 by Bobby Seal

From Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places by Gareth E. Rees (Elliott & Thompson, 2020):

Some factories enter local lore in more subtle ways, especially when they are shrouded in mystery and rumour. In 1966, Bobby Seal, an eleven-year-old boy from Mold, went walking with his friends in the Rhydymwyn Valley in Flintshire, North Wales. Usually they’d stop by the river to try to catch fish with their bare hands, but on this day, they felt adventurous and followed the river upstream into unfamiliar territory. Sunlight flickered through gaps in the treetop canopy as the boys pushed further up the valley, which began to narrow and darken as its sides rose ever more steeply. Bobby tells the story:

The grass underfoot was lush and untrodden, suggesting that few others ever walked this way.  We all felt uneasy, though none of us would admit it.  We laughed and joked trying to lighten the oppressive mood, but soon we fell silent. Even the birds had ceased their singing. As we rounded a bend in the river, we beheld the massive rampart of what appeared to be an ancient fortress: a high concrete wall spanning the narrow neck of the valley, crested with metal railings and barbed wire. We edged closer, wary of our proximity to the river, which was now a narrow concrete channel, dark and forbodeing. However, the path came to an end and we were unable to proceed any further. Not wishing to linger in this gloomy spot, we retraced our steps and re-emerged into the world of light.

Several days later I told my dad about our walk and asked him if he knew anything about the strange dam up the valley. He told me that we’d clearly walked a long way and that the dam was part of the perimeter of an old factory.  The factory was dangerous, he told me, and we should keep well clear of it.

My friends and I did keep away. But that wasn’t quite the end of it.  Through my childhood I picked up snippets of talk from adult conversations referencing the ‘bomb factory’.

Bobby discovered as an adult that during the Second World War ICI ran a chemical weapons research facility known first as the X-Site and then the Valley Works. It was one of a series of secret and carefully protected factories used to manufacture and store mustard gas, despite its use being banned under the Geneva Protocol.

Valley1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Valley2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rhydymwyn Valley was ideal for such a facility because of its steep sides and dense woodland, which concealed the factory from enemy bombers, and its natural limestone tunnels, which could be used to keep the chemicals safe. Bobby also told me:

The factory was involved in some of the early gas diffusion experiments that formed the basis for the Manhattan Project – the Allied nuclear bomb.  Later it played an important role in similar experiments which led to the development of a British nuclear weapon.

Because of the extreme sensitivity of its operations, the factory’s existence was kept hush-hush, existing only in fragments of adult chatter that Bobby heard as a youngster. There was much speculation about how else the valley’s limestone tunnels were used after the war, but the only confirmed function was to house strategic food stores during the 1950s and 1960s for use in national emergency. Even today, says Bobby, officials are cagey about allowing access to the now derelict site, which is fenced off and patrolled by guards. Sentry boxes line the old rails that used to carry materials between its various flat-roofed buildings, spaced out so that if one exploded, there would not be a chain reaction. These are now empty. Their loading platforms overgrown. Paintwork peeling. Flanked by signs reading: ‘DANGER: Keep Out’. Derelict or not, it seemed there will still things inside this place that needed to be kept out of the public eye.

In 2015 Bobby gained permission to explore the bomb factory, so long as he was accompanied by a guide. As he reached the southern end of the site, the valley began to close in on him. The light dimmed and it grew cold, evoking a sensation that he’d not felt since his boyhood adventure in 1966.

Boy1At a corner of fencing, he looked through the slats to see a steep drop to the valley below. He was standing on the top of the concrete dam: the same fortress in the woods that he had gazed up at as an eleven-year-old. Water trickled down the wall and pooled in a narrow channel far below. And there, at the foot of the structure that had haunted his memories for almost half a century, he thought he could see four young boys gawping up at him, silent and wide-eyed.

 

Acknowledgements
Text: © Gareth E. Rees. Quoted from his excellent book Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places (Elliott & Thompson, 2020)
Memories: © Bobby Seal. The full story of the Valley Works is told here
Picture of boy: ibrahim62, Pixabay (free for use)
Other images: © Bobby Seal

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Wrexham Workhouse

Posted on 14/04/2023 by Bobby Seal

Having just read Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, with its depiction of a Victorian church almshouse, and recently discovering that one of my own ancestors, Mary Elizabeth Raley, was an assistant matron at Wakefield Workhouse in the nineteenth century, I felt compelled to investigate the history of my local workhouse.

Wrexham Workhouse Infirmary was opened in 1838 and closed in 1948. It was built on a site to the west of Wrexham town centre and was designed to accommodate 400 inmates. It had separate accommodation wings for the different classes of inmate (male/female, infirm/able-bodied, adults/children) with each wing radiating from a central hub.

wrexham_workhouse_1838

Wrexham Workhouse Infirmary, 1838

The workhouse was run by a Board of Guardians who were elected by the ratepayers of the Wrexham Union. The Board appointed a Master and Matron to oversee the day-to-day running of the workhouse. Able-bodied inmates were expected to toil in the workhouse’s workshops or farm. Infirm inmates were provided with food, clothing and shelter, but were not expected to work.

The workhouse was a place of last resort for the poor and needy. It was a harsh and unforgiving environment where inmates were subjected to a strict regime of discipline and hard work. Women with more than one illegitimate child, for instance, were required to wear a distinctive dress. However, the workhouse also provided a basic level of support to those who were unable to support themselves.

In 1894, the British Medical Journal set up a commission to investigate conditions in provincial workhouses and their infirmaries. Following a visit to Wrexham, the commission’s report revealed that ‘the tone and management of this house impressed us very favourably; the officers seemed to regard their charges as human beings to be cared and planned for.’ Nevertheless, some improvements were recommended. BMJ

However, Peter Higginbotham, in his extensively researched 2021 book Workhouses of Wales and the Welsh Borders, paints a much less rosy picture. He reports grim medical and sanitary conditions at Wrexham and instances of disease being spread by sick and well inmates having to share the same limited privy provision. An inspector’s report in 1920 gave a depressing picture:

Building is roughly built, the walls unplastered and the wards badly ventilated. There are no damp courses in the walls and the floors in many parts are worn through and harbour dust and dir. Most of the windows are of iron. The arrangements for rapid exit in case of fire are very unsatisfactory and in view of the inflammable nature of the buildings, which are full of dirt timber, this is of considerable importance.

apartments

Apartments near site of former Wrexham Workhouse Infirmary, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wrexham workhouse eventually closed in 1948 as part of the national abolition of the Poor Law system. The building was later demolished and the site is now occupied by part of the Maelor Hospital.

 

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The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness by Amy-Jane Beer

Posted on 03/04/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – April 2023

We come from water, and water runs through us. It carries our chemistry and our stories. It shows us more than itself: all the colours and none. We are mostly water for all of our lives, but water is only us for a short time before it becomes something else. Perhaps we leave something of ourselves with it.

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As a biologist, a nature writer and a kayaker Amy-Jane Beer has spent much of her life in and around water. But it was the tragic death of her friend, Kate, in a kayaking accident on the River Rawthey in Cumbria on New Year’s Day 2012 that proved to be the eventual catalyst for her to write The Flow.

Kate’s death was a shattering blow to Beer and caused her to fall out of love with rivers and paddling. Several years later, while visiting the scene of her friend’s death, Beer has a sense of Kate’s presence, but not the catharsis she had hoped for. She was inspired, however, to embark on the travels and research that led to this book.

Just like water The Flow eddies, swirls and percolates. And, as with water, Beer’s narrative meanders along across 400 pages, sometimes gentle, other times powerful, but always relentless in its cyclical lifeforce. She moves effortlessly from science to mythology, embracing nature and human activity and weaving in her own personal story.

Her journeys take her to Dartmoor, Wales, Scottish salmon rivers, the Fens, the chalk streams of southern England and rivers closer to her home in Yorkshire. Beer writes in a style that is discursive, but which is at the same time engaging and easy to follow.

Throughout The Flow, Beer explores some of the biggest challenges facing the vital resource that is our water today. This includes issues related to pollution, overuse, and climate change. She discusses the ways in which these challenges are affecting ecosystems and communities around the world, and highlights some of the innovative solutions that are being developed to address them. She also examines the issues around access to our rivers and the varying demands of farmers, landowners, walkers, wild swimmers, anglers, paddlers and the statutory authorities.

The Flow is a work of contemplative beauty. But it is also a call to action. Even as I write this review my news feed is telling me that UK water companies released untreated sewage, tens of thousands of litres of human waste, into our rivers 825 times a day last year.

Amy-Jane Beer

authorDr Amy-Jane Beer is a biologist turned naturalist and writer. She has worked for more than 20 years as a science writer and editor, contributing to more than 40 books on natural history. She is currently a Country Diarist for The Guardian, a columnist for British Wildlife and a feature writer for BBC Wildlife magazine, among others. She campaigns for the equality of access to nature and collaboration between farming and conservation sectors.

 

The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness
Amy-Jane Beer
Bloomsbury
August 2022 
UK – £17.09 (hardback) £9.89 (paperback)

 

 

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The Edge of Cymru: A Journey – by Julie Brominicks

Posted on 30/03/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – March 2023

Like biodiversity, Cymraeg survives, but only just, sustained by the farming community, championed by campaigners, enabled by legislators. A language survey in 2013-2015 found only 24 percent of the population spoke Cymraeg – but that 41 percent of 3-15 year olds did. Cymraeg was threatened but unlike biodiversity, was incrementally, painfully slowly, clawing its way back.

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Julie Brominicks is an environmental activist and, before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a teacher. A native of Shropshire, Brominicks attended university at Aberystwyth and spent much of her teaching career in Wales. In the years immediately before deciding to try her hand at earning her living through writing, she was part of the education team at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, North Wales.

The journey described in The Edge of Cymru took place over a 12-month period in 2012 and 2013 and was prompted by the opening of the new Wales Coast Path. By linking the northern and southern ends of the coastal path with a walk along the Welsh-English border, Brominicks took on the challenge of walking over 1,000 miles around the edge of Cymru. She admits that she put very little planning into the actual journey and simply walked for several hours each day and pitched her small tent wherever she found a suitable spot. On most weekends she would be joined by her partner, Rob, and every few days she would return by bus to her home in Machynlleth to shower, clean her clothes, renew her supplies and, when required, sign on.

Brominicks has spent the years since completing her journey researching the political, social, economic and natural history of Wales. The fruits of this research are skilfully woven into the narrative of her book and transform it into something that is much more than a simple description of walking trip. But it is Julie Brominicks’s own journey, her inner reflections, that make The Edge of Cymru such a compelling read.

Brominicks wrote this book while she was on the cusp of several major changes in her life. She was in the process of making a significant career change from being a teacher to becoming a writer, she was planning to get married to Rob and she was questioning her national identity as the resident of a small country in a globally-connected world. Having been born in England, Brominicks now identifies as Welsh, has been learning Cymraeg for some time and is a supporter of Welsh independence. One of the questions underlying her journey was, having embraced Cymru, was Cymru ready to embrace her?

She tries to converse in Cymraeg with some of the people she meets. Discouragingly, many respond in English. Others though are patient and courteous, seemingly pleased at her efforts to learn their native tongue.

Suddenly I understood that Cymreig rural society was shy. That people were unwilling to speak out of turn, were unhurried and thoughtful in a way I appreciated.

Quite rightly, Brominicks uses the Cymraeg names for all the places she journeys through. As a Cymraeg learner myself I’m fine with this, but perhaps a small place-name glossary would help people who speak English and other languages to orientate themselves as they follow her journey. On the subject of orientation, it would also have been helpful if the publisher had provided an index.

On the evidence of The Edge of Cymru, Brominicks is a writer driven by passion. She laments the loss of habitat and biodiversity that affects Cymru as much as everywhere else. She mourns the decline of of rural communities and the social problems this brings. But her prose comes to life when she describes the landscape of Cymru; her writing is frequently lyrical and sometimes extremely moving.

Light shone through kelp that lifted and fell with the swell. I didn’t know how to appreciate it. The red translucent kelp made me want to cry. It was all so beautiful.

Julie Brominicks

authorJulie Brominicks was an educator at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth. Now a writer, her locational nature features and environmental articles are regularly published in BBC Countryfile Magazine. She lives off grid, in a caravan, in a secluded valley near Machynlleth. She is a longstanding walker, mostly around Europe. She blogs regularly at juliebrominicks.wordpress.com

 

The Edge of Cymru: A Journey
Julie Brominicks
Seren
November 2022 
UK – £12.99 (hardback)
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Narrow Boat by L.T.C. Rolt

Posted on 24/02/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2023

Not only have these waterways introduced me to the peasant and the craftsman, but they have recaptured for me that sense of place which swift transport, standardisation and ever more centralised urban government are doing their best to destroy.

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I found myself drawn to L.T.C. Rolt’s Narrow Boat because, while researching something I am currently writing about Chester, I read in several places that Rolt is regarded as one of the city’s most famous sons. Narrow Boat is a classic memoir of a journey he and Angela Rolt took along the canals of England during 1939 and 1940. The book was first published in 1944, at a time when the canals were becoming neglected and forgotten due to competition for trade by road and rail transport.

Narrow Boat tells the story of how Tom and Angela Rolt refurbished an old narrowboat called Cressy, which they had purchased for just £40. They spent several winter months renovating the boat, fitting it with a tiny kitchen, a coal stove, and all the necessary equipment needed for a life on the canals. With Cressy in working order, the couple embarked on a journey that would take them on a voyage of exploration across the canals of England.

The journey starts in Banbury and takes the Rolts through the heart of the country, navigating across the East Midlands, Cheshire and through the West Midlands back to Oxfordshire. Later journeys, after the period covered by Narrow Boat, took them all over England.

Along the way, the Rolts meet many colourful characters, from other boaters and fishermen to canal workers and lock keepers. Rolt is a skilled storyteller, and his writing transports readers back to a time when the pace of life was slower and simpler, and the canals were a way of life for many people. As a qualified engineer, Rolt has particular insight into how the canal system was developed.  He explains the engineering behind the locks and how they work, the history of the canals, and the towns and villages that they pass through. He also describes the wildlife that he sees, from herons and kingfishers to water voles and otters. The book is illustrated with Rolt’s own drawings, which adds to its charm. This anniversary edition also features a series of evocative photographs by Angela Rolt.

Cressy

But Rolt also displays his downright grumpiness with the modern world at every turn. Those of us who support the environmental cause can sympathise with his objection to polluting factories and urban sprawl but, oddly, he rails against the supposed evils of the cinema too. The Campaign for Real Ale would also be surprised to learn that it was the Victorians who ruined the English pub. Less amusing, however, is some of the archaic language Rolt casually uses when referring to race and religion, terms which most modern readers will find unacceptable.

Narrow Boat is, nonetheless, an engaging and informative book, a satisfying mix of travel writing and social history. It describes a world, the working canals of England, that is now all but gone. But its importance goes beyond the book itself. Narrow Boat created a deluge of interest in England’s canals and led directly to the creation of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) in 1946. Having been replaced by rail and later by road as the primary network for commercial transport, the canals faced an uncertain future and the threat of closure. Energetic campaigning by Rolt and other members of the IWA successfully saved much of the canal network from that fate and allowed it to be transformed into the wildlife habitat and resource for  leisure that we have today.

L.T.C.Rolt

RoltLionel Thomas Caswall Rolt was born in Chester in 1910. A prolific writer, he specialised in biographies of some of the major figures in British civil engineering, most notably Brunel and Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways, and was an enthusiast for vintage cars and heritage railways. He played a pioneering role in both the canal and railway preservation movements. Rolt died in Gloucestershire in 1974.

 

Narrow Boat
L.T.C. Rolt
Canal & River Trust
First published 1944.  Anniversary edition 2014
UK – £14.99 (paperback)
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Resurrection River by Pete Evans

Posted on 22/01/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2023

The Alun is a river of tranquillity, of droughts, floods and trade; fortunes made and lost. At times it doesn’t exist at all and yet at the same time it is two rivers!

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For anyone who has lived in north-east Wales, who likes to get out and about and enjoys walking, the River Alun is a constant if low-key presence. As a river its demeanour is rarely spectacular and it flows through only one town of any significant size. Yet its labyrinthine course from the Denbighshire hills, looping across Flintshire and through the rural outskirts of Wrexham before joining the River Dee at the English border means that, as you travel through the area, the river seems to pop up everywhere.

Pete Evans certainly seems to feel this way. For many years he has lived in a village called Hope close to the banks of the lower Alun. He too refers to the meandering of the Alun and its  seemingly ubiquitous presence in this part of the world. But it was not until I read his Resurrection River that I realised there were two branches of the Alun, one the natural course of the river and the other, man-made, heading off in a totally different direction. It was not just a case of the Alun seeming to be in two places at once, it really was its own watery doppelganger.

To research Resurrection River Pete Evans followed the course of the Alun on foot from its source in the hills above Llandegla in Denbighshire toits confluence with the Dee near Farndon where Wales meets Cheshire. He also took a diversion across Flintshire to trace the major underground man-made branch of the river to where it joins the Dee estuary near Flint.

Unlike other rivers, such the Dee or Thames, there is no established walking trail following the entire 30-mile length of the Alun, so Evans had to improvise a route. His first problem, however, was finding the definitive source among the myriad streams and springs on the rain-sodden south Clwydian hillside where the OS map suggests it starts. In fact, Evans returns to that hillside in his final chapter, after completing the rest of the journey, as he was never completely satisfied that he had found the actual source. I shall avoid any further spoilers about how this final quest turned out.

Alun

The upper Alun near Loggerheads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Alun, Evans makes clear, was a working river. Its upper reaches pass through an extensive area of limestone and, since before Roman times, it has been mined for lead. North-east Wales also had an extensive coalfield and the Alun flowed right through it. Evans records at least 35 mills, mostly derelict, along the 30-mile length of the river. These were used variously for corn milling and to provide power for the lead, tinplate, timber, paper and brick-making industries.

The most extensive industrial intervention on the Alun is the Victorian-era Milwr Tunnel. This runs some 10 miles from the upper Alun at Cadole to join the Dee estuary at Bagillt. It was built to help drain Flintshire’s lead and zinc mines and still discharges an average 23 million gallons of water a day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main river continues from Cadole, often disappearing completely from view, especially in summer, into the limestone caverns below the valley floor. It passes through the Valley Works at Rhydymwyn, formerly a chemical weapons factory and now a nature reserve and then on through the county town of Mold, home of the renowned Bronze Age gold cape. The lower Alun then winds its way through  Hope and Caergwrle, with its former Victorian spa, skirts north of Wrexham through the intriguingly named Wilderness Valley and ends up at the Dee just beyond Rossett.

Valley_Works

The Alun at the Valley Works

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evans’s book is richly illustrated with his own colour photographs and he shares his extensive knowledge of the human and natural history of the area in a very readable fashion. But the story, he suggests, is never finished:

The Alun is a perpetual story, constantly changing, continually having her secrets revealed. New chapters could be added, pages tweaked for time-circular eternities.

Pete Evans

authorPete Evans is a writer and tour guide based in north-east Wales. He is the author The Holy Dee and leads walking trips.

Resurrection River
Pete Evans
Carreg Gwalch
May 2017
UK – £6.95 (paperback)
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Edging the City by Peter Finch

Posted on 19/01/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2023

Circumnavigating the city and then writing home had been on my mind ever since I’d encountered Iain Sinclair’s walk around the M25, London Orbital, which came out in 2002. But it was the Covid crisis that pushed it and the directive that for exercise citizens had to remain remain within the confines of their local authority. Stay Local. No border crossing. But what could that mean? Just how big was my local authority? How far out did it go and where did it end?

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Peter Finch has been a ubiquitous figure on the Welsh literary scene for over forty years. As a writer he is best known for the Real Cardiff series of books but has also written about music, produces walking guides and is a published poet.

During the 2020 Covid lockdown Welsh government rules meant that none of us could travel outside the boundaries of our own local authority without good reason. Being a seasoned jobbing writer, Finch seized on this situation as the perfect opportunity for a new project, rather than worrying about it being a limitation on the walking trips that had become so much part of his writing process.

Peter Finch, like many of us who are psychogeography curious, read and was intrigued by Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital back in 2002. Sinclair wrote about a circular walk he completed around the outer edge of London following a route as close as possible to that of the M25 motorway. The walk revealed new aspects of the city and took Sinclair through unfamiliar liminal zones, each very different in character to the London that he thought he knew.

Finch, a life-long resident of Cardiff, felt that a similar journey around the border of his own city might result in new insights about it. Not just discoveries about the edges of Cardiff and the places where it butts up against neighbouring boroughs, but more general insights into the nature of borderlands.

His first task was to plot his route on a map, which he reports was no easy challenge. Inspired by Finch’s book, I tried today to draw up a walking route around the outer edge of my own local authority area and can confirm the difficulties with this process that he writes about. Other than the sections of Cardiff’s boundary where it follows a road, a river or the sea, transposing a line on an OS map to the reality on the ground is no mean feat; especially if, as Finch decided from the outset, you rule out knowingly trespassing on private property.

In very simple terms, Cardiff is bounded by the Vale of Glamorgan to the west and south-west, the M4 motorway and a range of hills to the north, wetlands and the boundary with Newport to the east and the Bristol Channel coastline to the south-east. Finch began his journey in the south-west corner of Cardiff and, in a series of walks, followed the city’s boundary in a clockwise fashion.

It was hard, writes Finch, to accurately follow the border as intended and he often found himself straying away from it. Either further into Cardiff or over the boundary into other council areas. He was surprised to find how rural much of the outer edge of the city was and, this being during lockdown, he encountered very few other walkers out and about.

Finch is a natural storyteller and he provides us with an engaging account of his journey. Cardiff is his territory and he knows it well. He fills in his descriptions of the places he passes through with episodes from the city’s history, tales of its characters as well as his own anecdotes. Like many cities, Cardiff has expanded rapidly over the years, particularly after the industrial revolution and the city’s role as the world’s busiest coal-exporting port.

 

The_Garth

Cardiff from The Garth

Cardiff has steadily absorbed villages and whole swathes of rural land, pushing its urban boundaries outward. As he walks, Finch observes scores of new housing developments, retail parks and industrial zones near the edge of the city: evidence of Cardiff’s ongoing expansion.

As a block of land Cardiff comes in at roughly 8 miles by 12. Following its borders on a map with a map wheel, including the long section of tidal mudflats to the south-east, Finch calculates that the border extends for just over 41 miles. His walk, with diversions around buildings and gardens, the occasional climb to a hilltop viewing point and for his meanderings when the route was not clear, totalled almost 73 miles.

With Edging the City, Finch has created a work that is not just a walking guide, but is an historic record of a particular time and place. He puts flesh on the narrative bones of his journey with the monochrome pictures and coloured maps he uses to illustrate his book. There are also links to useful online resources he has created.

This is a fascinating and informative book. It is also, perhaps, a source of inspiration for those of us who feel tempted to try something similar in our own area.

 

Peter Finch

AuthorPeter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff.  He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter. He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s. From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales. He specialises in books about the Welsh capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 volumes), Edging the Estuary and The Roots of Rock From Cardiff to Mississippi and Back.  His latest books written alongside the work of photographer John Briggs are Walking the Valleys and Walking Cardiff.

 

Edging the City: A Journey Around the Border of Cardiff  
Peter Finch
Seren
August 2022 
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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