Four Journeys in the Black Mountains: Part 4

Summer by Tim Cooke

Yesterday, at the Llanthony Show, a middle-aged man in off-white overalls told us of the kill: a large woodpigeon torn to shreds in broad daylight, stripped of flesh and left bleeding, steaming on the hot road. I could smell its guts in the boiling air. Today, we are walking from the crooked church in Cwmyoy to the Cliffs of Darren, in search of the savage culprit. I’ve never seen a peregrine.

In the sixties, JA Baker wrote remarkably of these birds, navigating his Essex landscape – tedious to describe, but coloured with love – tracking a familiar falcon and tiercel pair by the feathery havoc left in the wake of their almost-cannibalistic hunting. It’s a psychotropic, metamorphic celebration of a brutal nature, and his words now seethe before me: “As soon as the hawk-hunter steps from his door he knows the way of the wind, he feels the weight of the air. Far within himself he seems to see the hawk’s day growing steadily towards the light of their first encounter.”

The Vale of Ewyas, I wrote when we first visited, might be derived from the large quantity of yew planted here to arm the bowmen of turbulent years past. Nine months on, I’m not so sure – the valley’s birds are its lifeblood, wild and prehistoric, beyond language. I like that “Ewyas” so closely resembles “eyas”: The Valley of the Eyasses. The Bloody Valley of the Beautiful Eyasses.

We set off from the church around five, leaving behind the bleating of a sheep we’ve just disturbed, like a clap beneath a bridge, and stride along what feels like a holloway, stamped and rolled into the earthy terrain by generations of ancient locals. It’s a haunting hundred-and-fifty-yard trek, and we do it in silence. The air is thick with manure and ghosts traversing their trade routes, their backs and shoulders cracked beneath the weight of living.

We turn left onto a narrow track that runs beside a wooden house, calling to mind the neat longboats that line London’s canals; it’s a cabin of sorts, and there are people there. Three women with dogs chew the fat, midges dancing like starlings in the slowly fading light. “Have you seen any peregrines?” we ask. They smile suspiciously and pause for thought. One, with an affirming bush of short grey hair, takes our fate into her hands: “That way.”

We push on into an uneven field, craggy and mole-ridden, and I veer off course, drawn by the allure of an uprooted trunk at the top of the slope. From this vantage, I have a clear sight of the Gaer and the stretch where the Stone of Revenge leans – our regular haunts. It dawns on me that I am treading a territory I have only ever seen from a distance. How strange and surreal it feels to be walking amidst the view; it’s as if we’ve been absorbed into a painter’s composition – perhaps a Turner. I am seized by colour and suspended in oil.

We descend a steep bank and cross an arid stream. I catch the scent, learned in childhood, of an animal carcass – of carrion. We arrive at the foot of the cliffs and wait: ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty and forty. We pull grass from the ground and watch planes cut white lines into the sky, the clouds folding around us, the day drawing to its close. Then, without warning, the first call, like a child, penetrates our trance and we’re up, binoculars at the ready.

Here they come: one, two and three, emerging – all soot and cream – from a distance beyond the tops of trees. They stoop, one after another, and rise again, swooping from left to right and darting with a grace and precision I would not have believed. It’s over in less than a minute; in turn, they drop onto a dung-stained ledge and disappear, their shrieks abating – softer and softer, until the only noise is that of our baby’s mewl as she pulls away from her mother’s breast.

Part 1: Autumn
Part 2: Winter
Part 3: Spring
Part 4: Summer

Four Journeys in the Black Mountains: Part 3

Spring by Tim Cooke

The Gospel Pass, or Bwlch yr Efengyl, runs from Abergavenny to Hay-on-Wye, or the Town of Books. It’s a narrow vein of a road that winds between two mountains, the Twmpa and Hay Bluff, and climbs almost 2000 feet into the air. This morning, from the car window, it looks like a scene from a horror movie – perhaps because we’ve just learned that An American Werewolf in London was part filmed here. Columns of mist like cirrus clouds, or wisps of geyser residue, slide in channels down the emerald mountainside, slipping between rocky outcrops and sheep.

We’re sat in the back and Chloe, my girlfriend, is resting her head against the glass, beads of luminescent rain pulling together and then apart like something scientific beneath a microscope. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes heavy and her belly full of life.

This is a landscape rich in art and literature: not far away, Watkins mapped and marched his ley lines; Machen dreamt his gothic visions; Iain Sinclair tore himself from Hackney for Landor’s Tower; and, of course, Eric Gill took residence in the former monastery at Cappel-y-FFin. I’ve mentioned Ginsberg, and I recall reading Bruce Chatwin’s beautiful On the Black Hill at the nearby Green Man Festival, immersed in its desolation and gentle triumphs. A year later, caught in a torrent of dark valley rain, we watched Super Furry Animals sing of an oppressed mountain people. Turner painted here, and it’s easy to see why.

As we roll over the pass, I imagine the artist – not quite as large or gruff as Timothy Spall – in a horse-drawn carriage, clattering through history. Two kites dive for prey, baring their bloody breasts, the windscreen a movie theatre. Early-bird cyclists in yellow and green Lycra are catching worms, trading the road for a loosely contained arable wilderness. We smile as the light shifts and the mist gleams with an ecstatic lustre. This is a place of deep time and memory, of Deep Magic.

In Hay, we walk for hours. We buy meat and drink coffee on a raised platform in the centre, enjoying the crowds. We browse antique shops and pick up an encyclopaedia of British birds. I buy first editions of Lydia Davis, Michael Chabon and Ginsberg from a shop I’ve come to know quite well. I’ve also bought collectible books here by Seamus Heaney and WG Sebald; I’ve toyed with Kilvert’s diaries – only really because of the pub round the corner named after him, where I’ve sunk delicious pints of fruity amber ale.

Back at the farm, I take in the view of the Skirrid and think of Owen Sheers – this is his territory. I see mole traps and recall, for some reason, Cynan Jones’s sparse and ferocious novel The Dig. In the evening, I place my new books on the carpet by the roaring fire and watch as the flames ripple and dance on the front covers. An owl calls from the barn. We sleep.

Part 1: Autumn
Part 2: Winter
Part 3: Spring
Part 4: Summer

Four Journeys in the Black Mountains: Part 2

Winter by Tim Cooke

It’s a cold, bright morning at the foot of the Black Mountains. My girlfriend, her parents and I walk along a stony track beneath an arc of brown and purple larch. Our steps splash in the flow of a shallow stream, which for this stretch alone is at one with the trail. A slight man, grey and elegant in a wild sort of way, approaches from behind and initiates gentle conversation. He comments on the crisp weather and tells us about his roots in North Wales, before delving into the years he spent in East London; he talks about his family in Hackney and a clothes factory relocated to Abergavenny.

As we speak, shafts of golden light peter through the sparse foliage and catch on our precautionary waterproofs. The old man is wearing a black Leninist cap and he leans on a stick that he’s smoothed, dried, oiled and tipped with metal. I ask him the way to the slanted church in Cwmyoy; he beams and takes the lead.

We emerge from the cover of trees into a farmer’s field peppered with evil-eyed sheep. A murder of crows erupts from the crown of an ash in the distance, while our chatter rumbles on. The ground is sopping with last night’s deluge and we struggle, at times, to stay afoot. Across a road and river, we join a lane leading up to our destination: St Martin’s Church, a medieval structure that tilts askew due to debris caused by the glaciation of the Llanthony Valley. A bird with a crimson tale, perhaps a rogue black redstart, sweeps from one side of the pathway into thick hedgerow on the other, just metres ahead.

In full view, the church looks like an image from an illustrated work of gothic literature. Its fluid shape dips and shifts and sinks like a river current, its grounds crooked with ancient gravestones; buttresses built in the 1960s prop up the leaning tower. Looming behind is a mountain split in half by a landslide that was caused, rumour has it, by a violent earthquake that cracked through the valley during the crucifixion of Christ.

We remove our jackets and rest our poles against the porch wall. Our guide slips quietly through the church door before us. As we enter the main room, the owl-like song of an accomplished flautist rises from the pews and swallows us whole – the old man, like CS Lewis’s Tumnus, controls the mood, adding anaesthetic to an already-reverential atmosphere. Monuments carved by the famous Brute family adorn the walls. One reads: “Death, like an overflowing Stream/ Sweeps us away, our lifes a Dream/ An emty Tale; a morning Flow’r/ Cut down & wither’d in [an] hour.”

Part 1: Autumn
Part 2: Winter
Part 3: Spring
Part 4: Summer

Four Journeys in the Black Mountains: Part 1

Autumn by Tim Cooke

The farmhouse is long and yellow, perched near the brow of a steep hillside on the outer limits of the Vale of Ewyas, otherwise known as the Llanthony Valley. The stone structure is flanked by three large wooden barns with asbestos roofs; a runnel of grey smoke seeps from the chimney into a swirl of dense Welsh rain. We pop our heads round the door and wish the old couple inside a good day – they are leaving the area, after twenty-five happy years – before re-joining the tarmac lane to the summit of Twyn y Gaer.

Historically part of a border territory disputed by the Welsh and English, the slice of common land that stretches along the ridge is laden with spectres. Immediately to our left, as we splash through deep puddles and trade the veil of trees for open plateau, is an Iron Age hill-fort chosen, you’d imagine, for its elevated views over three valleys below. The bracken here is brown and shallow, the rowans flared and ready to thwart witchcraft. Gorse is aplenty.

We stride into a brisk wind, ascending a sharp incline to the crest of the fort, where a small cairn marks the spot to stop and take in the cinematic panorama. The rain has thinned to mist and casts a glassy sheen over the landscape, adding an ethereal aspect. Of his visit to the area, the poet Allen Ginsberg wrote: “valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean/ tonned with cloud-hang –/ Heaven balanced on a grassblade.” The skeleton of a tree we can’t name protrudes into the westerly scene, jagged and dreadful, like a monument to violence.

Snaking sporadically around the peak is a series of entrenchments cut into the ground – bow-and-arrow pits, perhaps. It has been proposed that the name “Ewyas” derives from the large quantity of yew planted here to arm the bowmen of turbulent years past, when all able-bodies were expected to practise archery after church on Sundays. We descend a gentler slope on the far side and merge onto a wide track that runs directly above the Llanthony Valley.

The cloud cover suddenly breaks and light begins to leak from the ether. To our right, the cliffs of Darren are sun-dappled like leopard print; the perfect spot for peregrines, we say, before spying a possible hen harrier. We’ve also seen buzzards, a kite and ravens galore, tumbling and croaking like bronchitic toads. In all its lopsided glory, the crooked church of Cwmyoy rears its ancient head.

Without deviation, we soon arrive at the Stone of Revenge, a modest reminder of the story of a Norman Marcher lord, Richard de Clare, who in 1135 was ambushed and slaughtered by Morgan ap Owen, of Caerleon, and his men. The stone leans back at about twenty-five degrees, towards the fort, and is crawling with lichen and moss. A buzzard cries overhead.

By the time we’ve reached the final stretch up to the cairn of Garn Wen, the rain has completely subsided and there is sun on our backs. We’ve passed ruined plots and countless sheep; the ghosts are quiet. The terra firma at this end of the walk seems barren, the summer’s dazzling purple heather dormant for now. We sit amongst stacked rock crunching apples, juice dripping down our chins, and tear into silver wraps of expensive dark chocolate. A lifetime of connection awaits us.

Part 1: Autumn
Part 2: Winter
Part 3: Spring
Part 4: Summer