Memory hold the door! My last spring outing before lockdown, I drove steep lanes from Llangollen to the Finger Farm on an eastern ridge of Y Berwyn, from which you look south and west along hill-enfolded Glyn Ceiriog. I’d come to walk the Ceiriog Valley tramway – an old favourite of mine.
A dipper, creamy bib gleaming among ambient greys, gave its chinking flight-call as it sped upriver. Water ouzel is the old name for these tubby, hyperactive birds. It fits somehow, though they’re no relation to the ring ouzel, a rare thrush that frequents high streams of the Berwyn moorland where the Afon Ceiriog rises.
Little, frilled daffodils of Wales were in flower by the old railway bridge at Pandy. I glanced across to the inn. George Borrow and his guide, John Jones, called there on the walking tour described in Wild Wales (1862) – one of the great classics of British travel writing. They pondered the case of a man who chose to walk an extra mile from home for inferior ale rather than the excellent brew provided here. In the pub parlour a drunken stonemason held forth to them – proof that the widespread quarrying in this valley was already under way in 1854. He recited poems by Huw Morys (aka Eos Ceiriog, “the Ceiriog Nightingale”, 1622-1709), who lived at nearby Pont y Meibion, his Welsh verse radically innovative, influential in its relaxed musicality.
Pub closed, I carried on along the tramway, peering left into the huge chasm of Hendre quarry. In the 1960s I’d climbed there, the ledges on its 120-metre wall of granitic rock littered with precarious blocks – “deployments of falsity … sufficient almost to prop up a fascist”, as John Menlove Edwards, tragic pioneer and finest of climbing essayists, wrote in the 1930s about another appallingly loose Welsh cliff. I remember shoving mighty specimens off their resting places, hearing the ensuing thunder between the walls, the cordite smell of their splintering drifting up. We were glad to get out of there, and never returned. Now climbing and quarrying are both finished, leaving behind peregrines, jackdaws, kestrels, and y llonydd gorffenedig – the accomplished silence of all such abandoned places.
