Friends,
It was sunny. This is true. I was there . . .
Last weekend I managed to get away from the rain sodden hills of the borders to a usually even more rain sodden place: Pembrokeshire. There’s a a ridiculously large road sign at the side of the A40 west of St Clears which welcomes you to the county. I have never passed it in anything but torrential rain - except last weekend when it was blue blue blue. And, even better, with virtually no wind. The sea was flat calm. The views were for miles. There were nesting seabirds, yachts floating idyllically in impossibly beautiful coves. I walked, I took notes and hundreds of photographs of one of my favourite places on earth: St David’s Head, a wild strip of moorland on the western edge of Wales, a place of stone, air and water. I’m now sifting through my notes and putting a short series of essays together inspired by the place.
This first piece is about the tiny city of St David’s, more specifically about the very ancient environment surrounding its famous cathedral, which, at the moment, is a cathedral of birds. I hope you enjoy it.
After last week’s successful attempt at an audio version of my story I will now be producing one each week for paid subscribers. If you prefer to listen rather than read you might want to consider upgrading your subscription. If you do it will help me to keep exploring and producing new work. You’ll get access to the whole, now rather extensive, story archive including my Rima series. And I will be forever your friend!
A Cathedral of Sound
Narrow lanes. High stone walls. Silver-white lichen covering every stone. And between the stones, growing from the cracks and around the edges, a multitude of flowers. St David’s is a place I come to often, but perhaps not often enough. I’ve never been here at this time of year, late April. Spring seems more advanced than back home in the borderland.
I’m sitting outside the cathedral in the quiet early morning, beneath a Mediterranean, azure sky. The lawns are manicured, the paths spotless. The little river Alyn flows nearby over manmade waterfalls, beneath beautifully crafted bridges. There is a ford with a cobbled floor which an old man stands beside looking for sea trout, which can come upriver at this time of year. I do the same whenever I cross a clear stream like this. Above us stands the ancient cathedral, founded 1500 years ago, one of the treasures of these islands. Today, in the blue light, its dark stone appears almost purple. It sits in a narrow cleft in the land, beneath and on the edge of the town, almost hidden. From a mile away you can’t see its tower. Within the commercial part of the town you can’t see it at all. There’s a humility to St David’s Cathedral that comes directly from its founding saint. It kneels in the landscape, sheltered from it.
Perhaps prayer is a form of shelter. You need it here, half a mile from the cliffs which are battered almost daily by Atlantic westerlies. Beyond this little comb is a land of stone and thorn. Dwarf trees stand at strange angles, leaning away from the wind. There are lone boulders in fields, heavy as double decker buses, but looking as if the wind has rolled them there like river pebbles. On the edges, next to the sea, turrets of rock are surrounded by their scatterings. Farmhouses squat in what little shelter there is with roofs that are grouted over the slates to keep them from blowing off. Many have blown off and stand in ruins.
A reverend just walked out of the main doors, smiling, welcoming. Though it’s before official opening time, she’s invited me to go inside before any other visitors arrive. It’s the best time to feel the peace of the place, she says. But I prefer the peace of wild things, though perhaps others wouldn’t find this place particularly peaceful at the moment.
All around the grounds there are small ornamental trees and in every one there are at least two rooks’ nests. The birds nest early in the year so their young have hatched and are nearly fully fledged now. As I look up at the expanse of blue there are black shapes sliding down to the trees, coming from every direction. Their young call and call. They’re as noisy as birds get. I’m sure the word raucous was created to describe the calls of rooks. They’re harsh, grating, disturbing as rusty hinges, as fingernails down blackboards. There are also jackdaws here, in equally large numbers, nesting in broken chimneys and under house eaves. Protruding from the slats in the upper windows of the cathedral gatehouse are tangles of sticks wedged precariously. The jackdaws are also noisy, though their calls are almost choral in comparison to the rooks. A few minutes ago an old lady opened her front door and threw a chunk of stale bread onto the path for the birds. In seconds twenty arrived, jackdaws mostly, squabbling and tugging at the food while a couple of rooks, twice their size and with dagger beaks seemed content to follow on the edge of the scrum, cautiously picking at crumbs. After you madam - no, no, I insist - you first. The rooks may be noisy, but they’re as polite as priests.
I enter the cathedral and immediately a hush descends, the thick stone walls blocking most of the birds’ calls, which are now just a quiet purr. I’m inside the shelter of prayer. There’s such a weight of history in this place, more so, it seems to me, than in any other cathedral in these islands, but that’s because my love of Wales is deeper than elsewhere. St David’s name is synonymous with Wales, his character and teachings are part of the culture. The cathedral sits on a little peninsula at the western edge of Wales, a little country at the western edge of Eurasia. Look around any town or village in Wales and you’ll find churches, chapels, holy wells and springs. Go out into the hills and mountains and you’ll find the same, at the side of quiet lanes, in the middle of fields, teetering on the edges of cliffs. They’re places of stone quiet, cubes of silence. All have a weight you can feel, a weight that most of us, these days, don’t want to carry.
This morning a report was published by the Green Finance Institute which estimated that the ongoing environmental destruction of these islands could cut 12% from our annual GDP by 2030, more than the pandemic and the 2008 financial crash. You’d think that the hard headed people in charge of our country would take note of this science-based forecast, but I doubt it. What we’ve learned in recent years is that facts can be shaped to fit ideologies and that failures are blunted, erased even, when they can be blamed on others. My sense for a long time has been that we’re not going to think our way out of the multiple environmental crises we’re embroiled in. It requires soul work. Perhaps we need to rediscover a sense of the sacred. Perhaps the best starting points are in the places which are deeply embedded in our culture, places like this.
I walk through the nave, craning my neck to see the carved ceilings, then move to the aisles, peering at the broken stone tombs of the many bishops who served here for 15 centuries and the Celtic crosses over a thousand years old. Light pours in through huge stained glass windows, and casts diagonal shadows across the floors and walls.
I have no affiliation to any religion but works of religious art and architecture deeply move me. In the south transept of the cathedral a painting is mounted on the wall which I find mesmerising. It depicts the prophet Elijah in a Byzantine pictorial style complete with saintly halo and ornamental background decorated in shimmering gold. The main image in the painting is of the banished prophet sheltering in a thick walled cave surrounded by trees. He is being fed by ravens. It’s a well known biblical story, but what moves me is the painting’s ability to echo the situation of the cathedral itself, its huge stone walls surrounded by trees, its grounds filled with corvids feeding a new generation of life. The image shows us not only a man’s banishment from society, but also his reintegration into the wild.
The 500 year old painting, by an unknown, probably local artist, is visually and metaphorically luminescent. There’s a sense of the sacred in it which requires no religious belief. I stare at it for a long time, feeling the chill that runs along the spine when you’re in the presence of a special work of art. But the wild is calling, the rooks are waiting and I don’t like to spend too much time in places where they’re banished, even buildings as special as this.
The exit is through an arched doorway in the north aisle. It sits within another arch, and another and another, a demonstration of the widening circles of community and habitat. Light streams through the door and I blink hard as I approach. The rooks’ calls are faint on this side of the cathedral where the little river runs close to the walls. Overhanging the surrounding buildings are the huge forms of horse chestnut trees, just in leaf, luminous, flower spikes protruding from every twig with an eroticism that almost makes me blush, here, in this holiest of places. And now I can hear the choral song of a blackbird clear against the drone of the rooks further up the hill. But I can’t see the bird, it’s hidden by the leaves of the tree it’s perched in. It reminds me of the well known verse about Elijah, about how the hurricanes, earthquakes, and lightning he encountered in the wilderness were not proof of the sacred, but instead the “still, small voice” that he heard afterwards. It could have been birdsong.
Found Things
If you’ve read a few of my posts then by now you probably know that dogs hold a very special place in my heart. I’ve almost never been without one. My dog Indy, is almost 14, and though she’s healthy and still running around the woods I know the time is approaching where we’ll have to say goodbye. I’m dreading it but I know there’s beauty in it too. This little film Denali is a visual poem to a dog who shared in the joy and suffering of a young man who came through cancer. It’s beautiful.
Until next week,
J
I’ve copied these words for my notes. “My sense for a long time has been that we’re not going to think our way out of the multiple environmental crises we’re embroiled in. It requires soul work. Perhaps we need to rediscover a sense of the sacred.” I’m about to publish a piece on Earth’s soul changing me.
Your essays transport me, each time, to the places you write about. So, so beautiful. And that video! I’m crying into my tea. Thank you for sharing it.