The minor road climbs steeply to debouch on a rushy pasture between Mynydd Ednyfed and Bryn Braich y Saint. The views from up here are of startling breadth and loveliness. To the south the land falls away to where Afonnydd Glaslyn and Dwyryd spill into Tremadog Bay.
Over on the southern shore, yews surround the clas (Celtic Christian monastic settlement) of Llanfihangel-y-Traethau.
From there pilgrims, en route to Bardsey, during the “dark ages”, took guides to conduct them across a treacherous and ever-changing swirl of sands to the northern shore – a journey as perilous as doctrinal disputes within the early British church.
Looking down from this “Hill of the Arm of the Saint”, in my mind’s eye I see back into the early seventh century; see the ragged group of survivors – professors of the Pelagian heresy, non-believers in the Pauline doctrine of original sin – who fled to this formerly wild and remote place after the massacre in 613 of the monks at Bangor Iscoed.
By Bede’s testimony, 1,200 monks were slaughtered there, though that early example of political spin the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it as a mere 200.
Either way, this fearful band of 50 – Iscoed’s Abbot Dunawd among them – traversed the sands, wild geese chorusing them across like fateful choirs, and climbed Braich y Saint.
A well, there, bearing Dunawd’s name, is marked on the map. Search assiduously and you’ll find it. There are clues: polished steps in an earth bank, a tiny, fenced-off enclosure behind. If you delved beneath its tangled briars you’d find a stone basin into which a spring rises. In the recent past it was mired by trampling cattle. Thorns now preserve a resurgent purity.
It’s one of those lost chapters in the text that lies everywhere under Welsh turf – quiet, insignificant, more or less forgotten, yet speaking more clearly about the tormented history of this small and jewelled nation than any grander monument I know.
So I come here often, to bear continuing witness to Pelagian truths, and their upholders’ flight from the forces of barbarism.
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Jim Perrin is giving this year’s lecture in honour of Country diarist William Condry, “A Thoreau for Our Time”, tonight at 7.30pm, MoMA/Tabernacle, Machynlleth, Wales. www.thecondrylecture.co.uk
