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Art & Culture

various essays on, well, art and culture

Bookbinding & Conservation

lessons learned from this profession

Humor

ok, I'm not the guy from SNL,
but I still have a sense of humor

'Jim Downey' Stories

mostly true stories from my
adolescence

Personal Essays

more "it's all about me"

Politics

I’m at -7.13/-7.33 on The Political Compass.  Where
are you?

Society

observations on the human condition

Travel

Europe 1994

Wales 1998
      London
      Saturday
      Sunday
      Monday
      Tuesday
      Wednesday
      Thursday
      Final Friday

Wales 2003
Wales 2006
CCGA Vignettes

Monday:  The Cairn of the Grey Lady & Other Adventures


That morning, we awoke early, and decided to explore the castle grounds after meeting the others for breakfast, since we would have a little time before we left for the day.  Ruthin Castle had a fairly typical history for that part of Wales; it was the home of one of the Marcher Lords, Reginald de Grey, following his support of Edward I in the war with Prince Llewellyn.  It stayed in the hands of the de Grey family until the 16th century, reverted to Royal property, was destroyed in the Civil War, sat vacant for the better part of 180 years, with the property finally winding up in the hands of the Myddelton family.  In the early part of the 19th century, one of the Myddelton family members decided to build a home there.  The current 'castle' is this Gothic revival structure, as I mentioned before.  It is nice enough, and makes for a very pleasant hotel.

But what interested us was the ruins of the 13th century castle that was adjacent to the hotel.  We went out behind the dining hall, onto a small courtyard of what once (I think) was the inner ward of the original castle.  That's when we saw the peacocks.

There are peacocks everywhere.  We had heard them, screeching, and knew they were on the grounds.  But to walk out the door and see a number of them all about, sitting on the ruined castle walls, chasing one another around, was a surprise.  Cocks, their bright tails dragging behind them, ends of the feathers worn and ragged.  Hens, almost albino with a light dusting of brown and beige, guarding their little chirping chicks, balls of fuzz moving randomly on little stilt legs.  Of course, you had to watch where you stepped, and not because you were worried about the chicks.

Off to the right was a longish pedestrian bridge, crossing over an area of the outer ward that was some 20 feet lower than the landing where we had been.  On the other side, we walked under a trellis (with peacocks sitting on top of it, surveying their noble ruins), and into the area of the great hall, now a nice little rose garden.  Parts of the walls are still there, including the archways on the left, beside the old outer wall of the castle proper.  At the far end of the great hall was a small gate in the wall, and we slipped outside, stepping down a few steps.  Just outside the wall we saw a little enclosed space, and found the burial cairn of the Grey Lady.

She had been the wife of one of the commanders of the castle in its early days.  She discovered that her husband had been having an affair with one of the locals, so took an axe and killed the woman.  Being discovered, she was sentenced to death, and buried outside the walls (since she could not be buried on the hallowed ground of the church yard).  Purportedly, her spirit has been restless ever since.

But it was a quiet, peaceful little alcove where we found her grave.  In a depression, with ferns and ivy growing on the walls around us, the half-light of a grey morning didn't disrupt the scene.  All that was really visible was a pile of old stone, marked by a couple of pieces of shaped concrete salvaged from another part of the castle.

Back up the steps and inside, we followed our way to the right, along the wall and past the remnants of the main gate.  Just past this we came upon a stairway heading down into the darkness.  Alix and I looked at each other and decided to wait until we had flashlights with us, since we had heard there were multiple rooms down below, including prison cells and a drowning pit.  Then we rambled a bit over picturesque stone walls, walkways with low, crumbling crenellations, spiral stairways that used to exist within towers.  The grey of the morning, the grey of the stone, the deep green of the ivy that crawled everywhere, gave a comfortable intimacy to the history there.  No bright light penetrated, no great historic moment demanded your attention; this was the quiet of a beautiful cemetery found on a country lane, where you could almost read the faded writing on the tombstones and feel a sense of peace and grace.

Back to the hotel, where we gathered up our packs for the day, and bought a copy of the thin "History of Ruthin Castle" along with some postcards to send to friends.  Then out to the coach to see if everyone was ready to leave.

But we were more than a few minutes early, still.  Eddie was there, waiting with the diesel engine running, warming the coach against the dampness of the morning.  We chatted with him a bit, and then the three of us decided to see what was to see from a little rise adjacent to the parking lot.  A path led off, going from the manicured lawn of the hotel grounds to a nearby field where sheep grazed.  And there, past a self-closing gate in the fence, was a circle of standing stones.

We went.  All three of us.  Eddie, native Londoner that he was, had never been in a circle.  Twelve stones, spaced around a raised central slab, stood there.  Each was 4-5 feet tall, of native Welsh stone.  The diameter of the circle was about 50 feet.  We looked.  Alix took slides.  We looked closer, noticed that many of the upright stones had some sort of concrete at the base, as though someone wanted to shore them up.  Eddie commented that he didn't feel anything spooky or magical, no sense of ghosts or blood rites or anything.  I noticed just the quiet whisper of old stone.

We went back to the bus, where other members of our group were starting to gather.  We mentioned the circle to Jan, and she said that the site was a Gorsedd Circle, put in place in 1972.  Seems that the Welsh National Eisteddfod (as opposed to the International Eisteddfod held in Llangollen) is held at a different location each year, and had been held at Ruthin in 1973.  In keeping with tradition, members of the Druid Circle established the Gorsedd Circle a year and a day before the Eisteddfod was held.  The twelve stones represent the twelve old counties of Wales.  Jan said that these modern circles could be found at many locations around the country.

The last members of the party came aboard, and we left for Holywell.  It was a coach ride of only an hour or so, and we were there.  Through the town, down the sweeping, steep hillside past the Well of St. Winifred, the virgin Welsh minor princess who was killed on that spot more than a thousand years ago.  She was beheaded by a jealous suitor when she refused his demands, since he was an ungodly man.  But, the tale goes, her faith was so strong that a well sprang forth from where her head landed, and she was made whole again.

Except for the new, modest visitors center, the site was as we had seen it four years ago, and probably not dramatically different than it has been for the last four hundred years, or longer.  There are some small church buildings, and a wading pool, as you approach the Perpendicular Gothic chapel which houses the well.  Inside the open-front building, the well is immediately there.  It burbles up in the center of a small room, with a low wall worn down smooth and irregular from the hands of generations of worshipers, indentations in the flagstones of the floor from the knees of those who knelt down to touch the holy water.  Like the last time I was there, I laid my palm against the surface of the water, felt it cold and crisp, as I listened to the echos of prayer.  Taking a small flask I purchased in the visitor’s center, I filled it with the water, to bring home for a friend to whom it would mean something special.  Standing, I joined Alix in looking around the chapel, and then we made our way back out and down to the coach.

We chatted with Jan for a few minutes as we waited for the others.  She has been involved in a project to trace and rehabilitate the traditional Welsh wells, places of power and healing, for the last few years.  Holywell is but the best known of these, and many others had been allowed to slip away from local awareness, like so much of the early Welsh culture.  Only recently have there been efforts to identify these sites, to protect the wells, to bring forth water from them again to meet the needs of the local people for fresh, clean, unpolluted water.

And we were on our way to the next stop of the day.  An unscheduled stop, in that it wasn't on the original trip itinerary.  Rather, it was a place that Alix had found on the Castle Wales web site, which was of immediate interest to everyone in the group, when she showed them the printout she had from the site.  We were fortunate; everyone on this tour had an interest in Welsh history, particularly the time of the Princes Llewellyn.  So we agreed to change around the schedule, to drop a visit to a Victorian seaside resort, and follow this recent bit of medieval archeology.  The place is Pen y Bryn, the lost palace of the Llewellyns, on the north coast of Wales, just across the Menai Straights from Beaumaris.

You can read the full story on the Castle Wales website, but here are some quick highlights:  In 1992 Brian and Kathryn Pritchard Gibson bought a 36 acre chicken farm that had a 17th century manor house on it, with an eye toward converting some of the outbuildings (a barn, some storage areas, coops) into holiday units for people wanting to spend a bit of vacation time on the north Welsh coast.  Kathryn was half Welsh, and wanted to be near Bangor to be able to use the archives there to do some genealogical research.  But in the process of starting to do work around the farm, they soon started finding evidence that the place hadn't always been a chicken farm.  The tower on one end of the house was clearly much older than 17th century, and under the floorboards they discovered secret rooms and passages.  After some work to convince history scholars to look at the place, they slowly discovered the truth.  Now it has been listed as one of the most important archeological finds in Wales in the last century, and is scheduled to have major excavations done to find out all that is there.

The neat thing was meeting these people.  We showed up, unscheduled, and yet they were about as nice as you could hope for.  Brian was a retired engineer, who clearly loved this informal second career as a historian and bit of antagonist to the academics who refused to believe their find until dragged kicking and screaming to the site and shown the evidence.  He's very down-to-earth, very much the engineer, wanting to solve a problem he’s found.  Kathryn was even more the crusader, taking on the entrenched beliefs of the professors, forcing them to have some respect for the local legends about the place, since it has always been called by the locals "Twr Llewellyn" (Llewellyn's Tower). They talked about how when they first moved in (before they knew what they had) they had brought in a small backhoe to redirect where the driveway went, and wound up digging up bronze age artifacts.  How in cleaning out the barn in preparation for turning it into rental units they realized there were covered-over windows with arrow slits.  How in clearing out brush from an embankment they found that the embankment was actually part of a thick perimeter wall protecting the buildings.  How in doing some work on the ceiling of the home it was evident that the original construction had been in the design of a medieval longhouse, with a truly massive (say 8' wide, 5' tall, 4' deep) fireplace at one end would have provided heat for the entire structure.

Well, now they have fallen into one of those situations that only a bureaucrat could love.  Because the site has been given historic landmark certification, they can't do anything to the place.  They are prohibited from digging deeper than one spadeful in the ground, can't do anything to the structure or buildings without getting formal approval first, and can't even sell parts of the site until it has been thoroughly excavated and documented.  So much for their retirement plans.  But they seem happy with where they have wound up, in spite of the financial loss.

Wishing them well, we left to find some lunch, stopping in the city of Caernarfon, just a few miles down the coast.  It was a market day there, and Eddie dropped us off in the square just outside the castle (Caernarfon is one of the most incredible of the Edwardian castles, though it wasn't a place we would visit on this trip.  But having been there the last time, I can tell you that it very much deserves the U.N. classification as a World Heritage Site.), and we broke up to enjoy a bit of shopping and lunch.

Then it was south to Porthmadog, and the fantasy village of Portmeirion.  Most folks know Portmeirion only from the name of the high-class china which originates there.  A few more know it as the location where a cult BBC television series from 1966-67 was shot.  And a very few more know it as the life's work of architect/designer/dreamer/eccentric Clough Williams-Ellis.

This odd chap had inherited the small peninsula where Portmeirion now is along with his family fortune.  He wanted to create an entire village as a work of art, and scouted all over Europe for buildings, walls, art & artifacts that would fit in with his vision.  In many cases he saved old buildings about to be destroyed, or unearthed half-forgotten ruins and made them whole again, transporting them to his village.  The effect is Mediterranean in feeling, though with odd bits of other cultures tossed in here and there for good measure.  You can't turn around without discovering some other little nook or cranny holding a piece of sculpture, bas relief, or architectural detail.  From about any position, each and every view affords layer upon layer of color and design, archways and flowers, columns and fountains, balconies for sitting or reviewing.  There are reflecting pools, village greens, sidewalks, stairs, covered loggia, ranks of small cottages, and a first-quality hotel on the bay, all of it crammed into a postage-stamp-sized area that almost makes you feel clausterphobic, even though it is all open and integrated with the almost tropical flora (the bay has a micro-climate that pretty much ignores winter, thanks to the Gulf-stream).  It is a wonderland, one man's palette in three dimensions.

And yes, being a bit of a fan of "The Prisoner," I stopped in to the shop dedicated to that show, and picked up a couple of items for friends who enjoy it even more than I.

We got ice cream, and some other souvenirs, and went back to the bus.  The trip back through Snowdonia from this direction was a little more barren, and along the way we passed several slate-mining towns.  Whole hillsides, entire mountains covered in slate debris, broken slabs of the stuff tumbling down until stopped by retaining walls and fences; mountains turned inside out, their meat and bones brought up and out of the earth, dumped on the ground.  Abandoned mountain-top towns, left to stand empty when the slate from the mountain was exhausted.

We arrived at Ruthin about dark, to another marvelous meal.  In the course of dinner, Alix and I told our party about our discoveries of the castle grounds that morning, and offered to secure flashlights from the hotel desk to take people on a tour of the crypts and the burial site of the Grey Lady.  But as it was starting to rain, we had no takers.  Funny thing, Eddie even decided that he'd retire early, and not go off to play a bit of snooker in the wing of the castle most often frequented by the ghost.  But we promised to show everyone around the next morning, after breakfast.
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