Insufficiently Welsh (12 page)

In World War One, a quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog was used to house artwork from the Tate and the National Galleries, including paintings by Van Gogh. It's even rumoured that the crown jewels were stored there. The tunnel I entered in Aberystwyth was little more than head height. A number of rusty-looking steel doors hung ajar. It was supposed to be sealed, but there was graffiti on the walls. Someone had scrawled “Death” on the civil service issue magnolia paint just inside the entrance.

I lit a torch and stepped cautiously inside. The corridor curved away. I followed it, my beam illuminating badly-drawn skulls. The space continued to curve, unvaryingly, except for another bulkhead. I walked on, perhaps no more than a further 20 paces and found myself back at the entrance. That was it. The great treasure cave amounted to less than 100 feet of close tunnel.

It was a little disappointing. I wondered if it had been to the curators and librarians who commissioned it. The absolutely priceless, the really unique and timeless treasures of Great Britain, including letters from Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, could all be stored in a semi-circular basement no bigger than a couple of containers.

The treasures survived and were disbursed again. I have heard that the Luftwaffe had no strategic interest in the area, though I wasn't aware that the Germans flew such long sorties over west Wales. I have also heard that the RAF used the library as a marker for their own bombers, heading off into the Atlantic, and that had further protected the treasure. This all sounded like embryonic myth-making to me. The embroidery starts. The sheer banality of the cave and its limited dimensions and a few crates and civil service dockets are not enough to satisfy the need for a good myth.

–
NANTEOS
–

I used the bookshops and cafés in Aberystwyth to try to get closer to the Legend of the Grail. My faint recollection was correct. The miraculous cup was, indeed, reputed to have been kept at a house a few miles from Aberystwyth, called Nanteos. I hired a bike and pedalled into the suburbs.

Nanteos sits in the wooded Paith Valley. It is a big, cuboid, Grade I-listed block of Georgian mansion, built by William Powell between 1738 and 1757, with money obtained from marriage to a former Lord Mayor of London. It was only recently sold by the Powell family after centuries of private occupation and has become a country hotel. It has 69 rooms, including a highly decorated music room on the first floor where plaster musical instruments are entwined with plaster representations of the four seasons in a plaster fantasy that looks good enough to eat. The house is so big that during winter the second floor used to be closed off to conserve heat. In the 1920s ten members of staff maintained the exterior of the estate alone. Wagner is reputed to have come to call and, as we all know, Wagner wrote “Parsifal”. Perhaps he took inspiration from the Holy Grail at Nanteos? Already febrile minds are beginning to see connections. Mine certainly was. The cup that Nanteos sheltered did definitely exist. Whether Wagner saw it is doubtful.

I bounced up a long private drive that comes off a secluded by-road beginning at the very roundabout that marks the entrance to Aberystwth. There were a few cars scattered around the large square of gravel in front of the porticoed entrance where I slewed to a halt. Leaving a dove-grey, stone-flagged hall, the manager Mark Rawlings-Lloyd immediately escorted me on a tour, which included my room for the night.

Having settled me in and given me time to try all the televisions in my giant suite, Mark escorted me to the morning room off the entrance hallway where he showed me a portrait hanging above the fireplace of a grey-haired matron in a sensible blue floral dress called Margaret Powell. She owned Nanteos in the thirties.

We stood in front of the picture, like minor characters in a black-and-white movie, while Mark explained that Mrs Powell and her servants had entertained a stream of sick visitors seeking the grail and its healing properties. They were led through a well-attested and carefully rehearsed ritual and Mark demonstrated it all, complete with movements.

The patient was kept waiting, exactly where I stood, and the cup itself, a wooden bowl made of wych elm, was placed on a small table in the next room. There it was filled with water.

At a given signal (Mark ushered me on), Mrs Powell and the visitor came through to the library via the adjoining door. (We did so.) The supplicant was allowed to drink the water out of the bowl on the small table (I looked at a table), heal themselves or whatever, and was then quickly bundled out. (That was through the door where we had just entered.)

Mark explained that Mrs Powell always slammed the door behind her. This was a cue for her servant to take the real bowl to a secure place and replace it with a fake one; presumably to stop the desperate invalid returning in the middle of the night, with a bag marked “swag”. The real thing was locked away. The fake was there as a lure. This was all very thrilling.

This was all organised because the bowl had accrued miraculous properties and everybody seems to have heard about it. The family had kept records dating from 1850. They showed that, in earlier, less paranoid times, the thing had been loaned out on approval, in return for “something of value”, sometimes for months on end, and then given back when it had done its duty. These notes detailed its universal medical success. It was better than antibiotics, by the sound of it.

Quite how the miraculous crockery of the Lord was supposed to have worked its way to Nanteos required a considerable blending of myth, story, fantasy and conjecture. As sceptics have tended to point out, the cup had no real significance in any biblical account. Jesus seems to have grabbed what was handy and then left it for the washing up. But Joseph of Arimathea was reputed (an important word in this story) to have used that same bowl to gather the blood of Christ in the tomb. (Several gallons of this blood have subsequently been distributed, usually in gold vials, knobbly with precious stones, to important cathedrals and monasteries.)

It is not difficult to see the symbolism. Here are some of the basic tenets of the Catholic Church combined in a cup, blood and communion. It became a significant vessel in legend. And the legend was that Joseph travelled across the known world to Glastonbury, carrying his cup in his personal baggage. Glastonbury was indeed a Roman outpost. (There are always handy connections with reality in any legend.) He seems to have left his cup in the safekeeping of the garrison. In due course it was handed over to some monks who established a monastery there.

We move forward in time. About 1,000 years later, Henry VIII decided to actively disrupt the contemplative life in Britain. Seven Glastonbury monks fled his desecrations and took the relic to Strata Florida: a Cistercian monastery in the “valley of the flowers” in mid Wales; that too was later dissolved by Henry VIII. Some of the monastery became a country house, and this country house was at one point owned by the Powells. Ahah! Here's the final connection. This was the family that built Nanteos. They became the guardians of the mystic mug.

Tortuous and improbable, but definitely worth hearing, and since
I had come so far, I was gullible and excited. “So do you have it now?”
I breathed.

Mark was apologetic. “No, the cup was not sold with the contents of the house, I fear. It stayed with the family.” He reached over and picked up a framed photograph. It was all he could offer me by way of compensation.

I stared at a grainy black-and-white image of a round, moulded, chewed-up lump of dark wood. The original vessel has been estimated to be 12cm round. This looked a bit smaller. It had lost some of its edges and half the bowl too.

Of course, now I was in another film. I was in
The Maltese Falcon
. I had got close to the craved object, but it wasn't the real thing at all. Like Sydney Greenstreet, I would have to get on my bike and head off to Germany or somewhere, to pursue it further in a relentless, never-ending deadly quest.

Since it clearly wasn't the Holy Grail, I couldn't be bothered. There are several other pretenders to holy cupdom, anyway. It has been established that the object I was looking at was most probably a “mazer” cup, from around the thirteenth century: the sort of humble wooden vessel that a monk would have used for lunch.

A significant proportion of the cup had been lost. Some had rotted away, but quite a lot had been broken off deliberately. It was a constant problem with any holy, miraculous relic. If the water drunk from the thing had curative properties, how much more effective might be the thing itself. Well, let's find out. Chomp, chomp, nibble, nibble. Visitors had taken to surreptitiously chewing off a bit of the cup while slurping down its contents. No wonder Margaret Powell had watched over the proceedings so closely.

So I failed in my quest. This was the right area alright. I hadn't touched the Holy Grail. I merely discovered that plenty in the area were convinced that they had. It was another legend that had been sewn into the fabric of this fantasy-weaving region. Gold mines, fairies, sunken bells, lost forests and hidden national treasures; mid Wales was a country that liked stories. It was, thankfully, a lot less prosaic than Middle England, and I was grateful for that.

–6–
SNOWDONIA
A LILY IN THE VALLEY

–
FANTASY PRISON
–

Just like you, I know Portmeirion. I had never been there but I'd seen the pictures. I watched
The Prisoner
and was quite disturbed by an oversized inflated beach ball bouncing harmfully after Patrick McGoohan. (I am that old and I was that young.)

I'm not the only one who feels this way either: every year, hoards of
Prisoner
fans flock to Portmeirion for their own festival called ‘Festival Number 6'. It's become so popular in the last few years that The Manic Street Preachers joined its 2013 line up. But I never felt obliged to visit. Portmeirion was one of those places that I assumed would disappoint, as fantasies often do.

Of course, that assumed knowledge was a fantasy in itself. I had no idea where the architect Clough Williams-Ellis's renowned creation actually was. The sat nav wasn't much help as we approached Penrhyndeudraeth on the estuary of the River Dwyryd, creeping around largely suburban approaches in the twilight. So we got lost three times, cautiously driving down steep roads, past scattered buildings and through highly decorated, manned gates. I barely understood that the houses were divided up and rented out as hotel rooms. Or that some people return again and again. Or that it was genuinely enchanting.

My car was deposited on the hill. Reception was down by the sea. The porter took me to my accommodation in a golf buggy. I passed through a small garden and into the clock tower. My suite was a pair of comfortable garden rooms with a lot of tiny widows with a lot of tiny curtains to pull that never really cut out the morning light. So I woke at dawn.

I recommend you check in and fail to make the curtains work; it's the only chance you will get to really appreciate the appeal of Portmeirion. I climbed steps, descended alleys, traipsed through gardens, crossed under palm trees, along pergolas, round behind cottages, through arches, past capriccios, along every crazy, jumbled adaptation and architectural invention completely on my own, until I found main reception and my breakfast, which was finally served on a table outside my room, anyway.

By nine o'clock the entire village was crammed. Portmeirion is one of Wales's big attractions, drawing in over 250,000 visitors a year. Not unhappily. It absorbs them, like a proper village
en fête
, rather than an over-visited museum. Despite its obvious stagey qualities, it doesn't feel like a Walt Disney creation. It has a bolt-on eccentricity. One rescued building or invented facade followed another between 1925 and 1975. Clough Williams-Ellis carried on tinkering with his mock Italian paradise until his death aged 94. The main aesthetic is one of glorious and thoughtful improvisation. But it is also, essentially, a garden.

I met Gwynedd by the border under the long brick wall. He and his team were spreading chocolate-coloured bark chippings under ivy-green dark-red standard roses.

I was surprised, as some of you might be, that he was called Gwynedd. My mother is called Gwynneth. Um, I thought Gwynedd was a girl's name. This was not something I felt I could suggest to Gwynedd himself, who was genetically about six foot four and built like a prop forward, but I did anyway and he happily explained that it was gender neutral. (The female version tends to be ‘Gwyneth' while the male is ‘Gwynedd'.) Possibly confusing on a North Welsh dating site, but yet another cultural test for me.

Gwynedd told me that the “Snowdon Lily”, my quest for the day, was not an outward-bound soprano, but a hardy little Alpine. I understood that “Alpines” grow in crevices in suburban bungalows in parts of Buckinghamshire, but the Snowdon Lily needs a specific environment. Mountainous terrain makes a speciality of developing microclimates. It is not simply that as you go higher, different temperatures encourage different growth. Let us imagine a deep gully. The sun may shine directly onto one side, but seldom hit the other. It may experience limited rainfall. Ice may take longer to melt. There might be a specific type of acidic rock. All these factors encourage very specific fauna to adapt to microclimates. I could see why I was being challenged to find one. They wanted me to go up that mountain again.

–
SNOWDONOMANIA
–

Snowdon is a magnificent Welsh protruberance and, as we all know, the highest mountain in the whole of the Principality. In consequence, everybody who arrives north of Bala feels obliged to get up it. Perhaps it's because Edmund Hillary used Snowdon as a base camp for training before tackling Everest.

Sitting at the bottom one Saturday morning, some ten years ago, I was struck by the strange magnetism of the word “highest”. A morning rush hour, clad in pastel Gore-Tex, was assembling to “conquer the peak”. They could have taken a train (had they walked around the other side, been lazier and braved the queues). At the top, they would find it was a question of waiting in line to mount the summit, to note the improperly dispersed human ashes (it is a prime spot for a bit of scattering), before lamenting the cloud cover and having a nice cup of tea in the new restaurant. I hear Everest has similar problems, though at Eryri you are less likely to die in base camp.

At that time I had been impressed by how the majority of the Saturday climbers were in sturdy boots and sensible socks. Over 350,000 visitors reach the summit each year. These were not casual trippers like the beer boys and wedding parties on Ben Nevis. They had taken precautions by visiting Blacks. How can you not salute the family that clambers together. Ever since the Romantic poets followed in the pony-tracks of Thomas Pennant, at the end of the eighteenth century, so the public has got itself up onto the roof of Wales. A particularly sharp drop is known as Cwm Hetiau, the “valley of the hats”, because headgear blew off in the train's slipstream and the locals made money ransoming it at the bottom. It is about 2,000 feet up. Snowdon is now part of the history of tourism. Nobody even wears hats any more. And the carriages are now enclosed. The whole experience is as much about tradition as exertion.

All this seemed to tell me that the Snowdon Lily is a remarkable survival. It clings on despite the march of thousands. I would find it on the flank of Yr Wyddfa, the Tomb, the great mountain itself. My challenge meant I had to put aside all thoughts of Tryfan and Glyder Fawr and other, less-trodden hills and join the mob on the universal common-as-muck mountain trek.

In fact the mob was getting a bit much in Portmeirion. It was time to be moving on, but before I did, Gwynedd took me off to show me a little-regarded corner of his kingdom.

There is a U-bend in the approach road to Portmeirion. I had passed it myself the night before. Now we stood and peered over a low wall that stopped buggies falling to their doom.

A little spring emerged from the cliff. It was typical of what really makes Portmeirion intriguing. I realised that here was lush and very careful planting, in a quiet, almost forgotten corner. Gunnera and bog plants and glossy ferns were growing under a canopy of tall beeches. Gwynedd looked after these woodland perennials with as much attention as the parterres in the village centre. And he pointed to what he wanted me to see. It was a Chinese Lily, not yet in flower, but stately and green and rare, poking up through the rocks. It bore the mark of true eccentricity. Portmeirion is not really about display, it is about completeness. Magnificent as it was, however, Gwynedd's five foot green stalk certainly wasn't a weeny Snowdon Lily. That would have to come later.

–
BOATS AND DAMES AND TRAINS
–

Time, as Einstein has pointed out, is relative, particularly to cameramen. It is scientifically curious how a space-time dimension can stretch, but not a filming schedule. Now we were pursued by a tide, and the tide was going out.

The illusion of the little harbour with the quayside and its descending steps and the concrete yacht (possibly the least successful touch in the entire place) was receding. I had been promised a lift in a rowing boat and in a few minutes it would be unable to reach me. So I ran – like a less well-dressed Patrick McGoohan – my red parka tails flapping behind me as I dived across the Italian parterre, down the balustraded steps and jumped into a Celtic longboat.

The women who were carrying me onwards often took part in lengthy rowing races across the Irish Sea or up the Severn. (Shortly after they delivered me, they came first in the Great River Race in London.) Their Celtic longboat held four rowers on fixed seats and a cox in the stern to steer. It was built to cross the high seas and was made of fibreglass. They came from Porthmadog. In fact that's where they were taking me. As we skimmed across the shallow water, just off a green and luscious wooded shore, with the huge expanse of the Dwyryd estuary opening out ahead, I envied them their hobby. This was perfect. Except that I wanted to row. I love rowing. Alas, there wasn't time to put me in the team. I had to crouch in the front, making the boat bow down and difficult to steer. I apologised. But for once I had nothing to do except bask in sun and the beauty.

Disembarking, I bought a ticket for the Blaenau Ffestiniog Railway that links the sea to the sky. Porthmadog itself was an artificial creation: a port large enough to carry slates away to roof Hamburg Cathedral and the floors of Boston airport. It was created to serve the monster industry in the hills.

The railway seems to start in the middle of the town: an open display of steam and hissing engines, surrounded by houses and shops. It is 150 years since the first steam locomotives were installed. Two of the original locomotives are still working and now these petite engines and their small-scale carriages with their perfect Victorian interiors are a tourist attraction. They are not miniature, they are narrow gauge, just a bit more dinky than the average train. They were pioneering locomotives as well. The technology first developed on these lines was exported around the world and showed the doubters that steam locomotives could be cost-effective.

The guard arrived to lock me in, still considered a necessity on this steep track. We chugged off, temporarily crossing flat land by the mole that created the harbour and then, almost immediately, climbing upwards. Originally, the trains of slate coming down had worked entirely by gravity. Brakemen rode on the wagons, jumping from car to car and adjusting levers to control the descent. There were knotted strings dangling from branches to alert them to tunnels.

Boiling 300 gallons of water an hour on the really steep bits, we chuffed up towards the little enclave of industrialisation that Blaenau had once been and which had excluded it, as a doughnut of unsightliness, from the National Park that surrounded it. Except that it was far from unsightly. My eyes were riveted.

The hillsides around the old slate-mining town, once the second largest town in North Wales with a population of 12,000, were a chaos of frenzied pixels of slate. There were slate fences (the plates of the fence anchored to each other by wire), there were slate walls (magnificent irregular black-bricked cross-weaves of slate), there were slate paviours underfoot and slate tiles on the roofs, but the real sight was the wasted slate. It seemed as if the side of every mountain round about had been ripped apart. No doubt tons had been cloven, chipped, smoothed and carried away, but the stuff left behind, the jagged residue, the blocks, shards and wedges of black or grey stone, are piled up in mountainous heaps like frozen black fountains. A slate-working area is a unique industrial landscape, more worthy of a visit than a sheep-shorn hillside. I had an urge to return with a lorry and make sculptures like Richard Long's with some of this residue. Except that these shards are often sculptures in themselves. Collectively they represent a dreadful scarring but a magnificent one. Gradually, so they say, all the waste is being gathered up and ground down to make beds for roads.

As if to make up for its exclusion from the paradise of the National Park, the town had now had its own tourist friendly makeover. Walking up from the station I passed over an ovoid intersection of the road and some stainless steel monoliths erected in memory of the slate workers with a seemingly random 1980s' craft fair aesthetic.

“Do you know how much that costs?” my guide asked me.

I shook my head.

“Four and a half million, ” he said.

Now he shook his head.

–
Zip Wires
–

A zip wire is not a new idea at the quarry in Penrhyn. There was one in action when it was a fully operational big hole. (“The biggest manmade hole in the world until 1953,” according to my guide.) At that time, it ran across the slate quarry to carry the large blocks of highly compressed mud, which is what slate effectively is, down to the splitters, whose particular skill was to extract a number of slivers of stone out of a single quarried piece.

I've tried it. It requires a knack. I stuck my chisel across the slab, tapped and a tile fell away. Had you roofed your lowly cottage with my slates, though, the rafters would have collapsed. My tile was the width of a chocolate bar. A good splitter could create a dozen, wafer-thin eighteen-inch-square after-dinner mints out of one bit. He bid for the piece he was to work and failure to get his tiles out of it cost him his “profit” (or wages, as his money might more properly have been described). It was a particularly demanding form of piecework.

The slate-quarrying industry seems to have been an exemplar of ruthless industrial exploitation. In Penrhyn, the workers, dying from lung disease and helpless to influence their wages, even after a three-year strike (the longest in British industrial history) at the beginning of the twentieth century, were Welsh and the owners were English. (Or happened to be so. In the equally notorious Lake District, of course, everybody was English.)