the rivers we cut
                                   the artificial divides
                      lead us to the shore of source

Allen Fisher – Place

Julie continues her journey upstream. She reaches the Church of All Saints Old Parish at Llangar, the so-called Church of the White Stag.

Then to Llangar, a tiny village near Corwen with a white-painted church. It squats on the banks of the Dee overlooking its confluence with the River Alwen; it watches and it waits, occupying this same spot for more than seven hundred years. Her thick stone walls glow in the setting evening sun and cast long shadows over the gently flowing waters. The building is indifferent, though it sees Julie it does not acknowledge that it has done so. It crouches, a vast white stag surveying its kingdom.

It neither repels nor welcomes the woman it sees in the river that it guards, it just accepts that she is there in the way one would notice a passing shadow. But Julie is tired; her lifeforce is ebbing away and she needs to rest; to close her eyes and enter the kind of sleep that one does not know for sure that one will ever awaken from. She drags herself out of the river and struggles of the bank. The church breathes in and she drawn towards it, stumbling across the grass for much of the time on her four limbs like some creature from the forest. The door is open and she enters. Standing at the back of the nave she is aware that no human soul is within, though she is aware of some other presence.

Picture of the River Dee near Corwen ©Bobby Seal