Whiteford Lighthouse

By Andrew C. Kidd:

Dimmed lampless and housed upon split shells that anchored
a cast iron mass, bedded to the seabed. Waves rolled across
and based its sailless mast, part-sunken, parting the sea.

Along the gantry, silent cormorants dotted mussel-black.
Their feathery cloaks ruffled gently in the sea-facing wind.
From this angle, it looked like a glassless aviary, iron-wrought,

emptied. On this rocky outcrop, fresh water basined to fill
and veil the rock beds and broken shells, yielding new life
after the lengthening advance and retreat of the diurnal tides.

Through its birdcage structure, the winter sun dipped to shroud
as evening that descended blue-violet, blanketing the day
and birds that disappeared from sight upon this windswept sound.

***

Andrew C. Kidd has had poetry and flash fiction published in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Journal of the American Medical Association and Friday Flash Fiction.

The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here. 

Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram -davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter -@dlewiswriter

The Green of Swimming

By Sally Gander:

You slip into the water from the moss-wet shore, the slanted rocks sometimes sharp sometimes smooth beneath your palms as you edge your way deeper. The opening to the cove is white with surf but here the water is glass still and cold enough to make you gasp once, twice, three times, but then your lungs expand, the shiver over your skin rejuvenating against the humidity of the day. 

Your guide has brought you here from the village, trekking past a farm and through a verdant wooded valley where everything was some shade of green except for the dark earth of the path ahead of you, then up onto the cliff top and along and around and down a natural stairway created by layers of rock that have been folded and fractured into steps and gullies, small waterfalls and archways and the cave you swim towards now, the place known as the Witch’s Cauldron.

You want to swim inside but the gap between water and cave roof is too narrow and you imagine the clash of your head against the jagged rock, the witch hiding in the shadows to laugh at this fragile thing she has tempted into her lair.  Your guide beckons you closer to see the light beyond where a giant blow-hole resides and the witch keeps watch over the Cauldron itself.  We’ll be patient, your guide tells you, the tide is turning.

While you wait you touch the rock of the cave mouth, the browns and greens and yellows formed millions of years before humans were conceived, the world exploring its capability, playing with the potential chemistry and physics of the materials she was gifted. You run your fingers down a calcified vein that’s thick as a rope, formed by a rivulet of water, you suppose, but it is vein-like enough to be the back of the witch’s hand reaching over the cliff tops, her fingers deep in the water to find the things she needs for the cauldron, the seaweed and crustaceans and shingling pebbles and small silvery fish that bunch together in glittering camaraderie. 

As she works you lie back and float in the cradling stillness, letting your feet hang, only needing the smallest sweep of your hands to remain in place.  It won’t be long before the cold inches its way deeper into your body, numbing your fingers and toes and cooling your organs, but for now you rest on the rhythm of the tide, glimpsing the rocks and grassy cliff tops that frame the pale blue sky. 

Finally, the witch finishes her work and the tide retreats to her bidding. You return to the cave mouth to find your guide has already swum through, his face shadowed with the light beyond him. He reaches his hand out to you, Take your time, he says, take it slowly.

You touch the damp rock above you, kick your legs to move through the water, feeling the distance between the crown of your head and the cool cave roof, mere inches, sometimes less, and you are captivated by this sensation of buoyancy, of being drawn into the light of unknowingness and how quickly the cave opens up again, the roof now vast above your head and you within the glittering emerald green of the Witch’s Cauldron, smiling at the ease with which you can move into such a place.

You stop here and tread water, gazing at the witch’s creation and the power she has in those veined hands, and how, at other times when the volatile brews are composed and the tide is high, this cauldron becomes a broiling spitting turbulent fusion of white and dark, a culmination of everything the witch knows about the world, the actions and reactions, the people she has loved or been persecuted by, the centuries she has lived and endured and held faith regardless of her trials.

She knows the heat of chemistry that shapes the surface of this earth, the gravity that hugs things close, the movement of water and winds, of plants and trees and animals, of the animal humans who push beyond their natural realm.  She knows the power of the sea in which you swim and she has allowed you to be here.  Perhaps her new brew needed your human scent or the stirring kick of your tender legs, but you feel now that this emerald potion is complete and you are its ingredient as well as its recipient, held spellbound in the completeness of the universe — the sky, the rock, the water, the flesh — the witch holds it all in her palm and when she hands it to you the green glows bright, a green that whispers This is all you will ever need…

***

Sally Gander writes fiction and creative nonfiction.  Her work has appeared in Litro, The Real Story, The Blue Nib and A Word in Your Ear, and is forthcoming in Porridge.  She has also performed for Story Fridays in Bath.  For many years she taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and now teaches students from across the world at Advanced Studies in England. She is currently building a collection of personal essays.

Liverpool and Wales: Longing and imagination in city and country

By Kenn Taylor : 

The relationship between Liverpool and Ireland is well documented. The relationship between Liverpool and Wales less so, yet just as deep. At one point, Liverpool had the largest urban settlement of Welsh speakers. From teaching to building to retail, the Welsh were a key part of the region’s fabric. The National Eisteddfod was held several times in Liverpool and Birkenhead. Relations were not always cosy though. In particular when Liverpool Corporation constructed the Llyn Celyn reservoir over the Welsh speaking village of Capel Celyn, helping fuel Welsh nationalism in the 1960s. Liverpudlians too, were also part of Wales. From the earliest opportunities the working class had for holidays, Wales represented open space, clear air, leisure and countryside.

Even now, Liverpool may no longer represent the economic powerhouse for Wales, especially as Cardiff has grown, but it’s still the closest major urban settlement to North Wales. A place to study, to go out, to shop. While, despite the advent of cheap flights, Wales remains popular for holidays and days out. And both still hold a pull to each other, particularly for the young of each place, long after cars replaced paddle steamers as the quickest route between the two. 

Possessing dramatic landscapes and cultures fired with passion and poetry, they are places separate but intertwined. Hills and tall buildings just visible through the distance on brighter days from up high. For populations with experiences so different, how each viewed the other was and is so much about perception, projection, longing. The Welsh idea of Hiraeth, is something many from Merseyside are also familiar with even if they couldn’t put a name to it. A bittersweet longing for homeland, for a lost golden age, even by those who never knew it or never left in the first place. A yearning to return to something which no longer exists, or maybe never did, but is a feeling which always remains.

In urban Merseyside, Wales is a place to escape to. Peace and space and blinding light. The intensity of openness. A bucolic place of nature, of school outward bound adventures, as much about crisps and kissing as mountain climbing and canoeing. Cheap, accessible holidays and golden if chilly beaches. The romantic weirdness of Portmeirion. Steam trains that go from nowhere to nowhere but at least the landscape looks pretty. This though, of course, ignores the vast holiday industry driven by Merseyside, Manchester and Birmingham, the undulating, boxy sea of caravans along the coast. There are the pseuds too who pretend they’re not tourists, that claim they come for the ‘real Wales’. What is real North Wales though? There’s the real of lakes, mountains and beaches, but also the real of intensive agriculture, nuclear power stations, Japanese factories and RAF jet bases. The holiday parks too are just as real.

In North Wales, Liverpool is a place to escape to, especially for the young. Noise and density and blinding lights. The intensity of urbanity. The possibilities are bigger in London of course, but also much further and harder away. Good times, clubs and music, different people and alternative cultures. Freedoms away from small town oppression. Anonymity and maybe even opportunity. A life closer to the edge, even if it’s easier to fall off. But of course, what is the ‘real Liverpool?’ All of this but also, pleasant suburbs, vast parks, technology hubs and polished shopping centres, like so many others. What both places have is a fierce awareness of themselves and their cultural uniqueness, but that sometimes blinds to what is more universal and what is shared. As well as that, living in cultures so strong, can create a drive for some to escape from it. 

The city in the distance. The hills in the distance. The distance is what matters, near but far. Something to daydream of, to work towards, to long for. A projection in the back of the mind, both real and unreal. The closer you get, the more the longing fades and you begin to think what you saw in the distance was a chimera. The longer you stay, the more you think back to what you have left and realise, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe. Fresh eyes. Hiraeth again. The intangible feeling.

And it is everywhere. Strive to break from hard lives or particular places and we find we always take them with us. When we achieve our escapism, we find it’s just another different reality. What we’re looking for has never existed and it never will. Yet we still always look for it. In the distance, just out of sight. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com  

Memories of Elsewhere: River Ogmore, by Tim Cooke

Photo: Dan Wood

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Tim Cooke:

If I try to think of my hometown objectively, images spring to mind one after another like a series of postcards. I see the old stone bridge, from which the town takes its name; I see the derelict bingo hall, a husk that was once a cinema, now a car park; I see the estate, much maligned but not so long ago an architectural vision of hope; I see the playing fields, the site of my worst childhood nightmares; and the dunes, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I see the castle, the woods, the supermarket, the dual-carriageway, the standing stones, and the recreation centre. 

Of course, I cannot think of these places without making connections, fitting them together and applying my own stories and others I’ve encountered; experience flows through each scene, as does the River Ogmore. 

The water rises at Craig Ogwr, in the Ogmore Valley, and runs down through Blackmill, Brynmenyn, Aberkenfig, Wildmill, Bridgend Town, Merthyr Mawr, Ogmore by Sea, and out into the Bristol Channel – I love the sounds these places make. There are parts I know intimately – from childhood and my teenage years – and those I’ve visited once or twice, like on school trips. There are huge sections I’ve not been anywhere near, which I find somehow exhilarating. The more I think about the river, the more I contemplate journeys I might make in the future, or should have made in the past, when I was there. 

My first experience of the river – in terms of place, not time (it runs from north to south and I track it geographically) – takes me all the way back to its starting point, up in the valley. At primary school, we spent a whole term on local waterways. We studied maps and diagrams, drew pictures and trekked out into the field. I recall a coach journey to the source, near Nant-y-moel, eating sweets and crisps and feeling sick. We stopped at a bend in the road, flanked by scarp and crag. Water poured from the mountaintop and slid away to our left, worksheets killing the mood. I did something wrong and was made to stand metres apart, listening alone to the babble and the noise of rolling pebbles.

*

I’m looking at a gallery online and the first image in the sequence is of that exact same spot. The grass is greener than I remember it, and the water is whiter. My first impression is that the photograph speaks more clearly of Wales than my recollections do. Maybe it’s in the detail, like the damp weather, or the colour of the soil – I’m not so sure. I move on. Next is a woman dressed in a dark-green coat, speckled with rain. Her expression is one of awe and wonder, or perhaps she’s been caught mid-sentence by the camera. Regardless, she’s part of the story now. 

I continue through pictures of two men on a bridge, a Welsh-flag towel pinned to a washing line, rows of almost identical flats, a war grave, a post-it note scribbled with ‘Donald Trump’, a swastika carved into a tree, and a schoolboy leaning on a wall with his arm in a pink cast, names signed in black pen. There’s a car, too, parked between lockups, a convertible BMW I think, that appears to have been pulled from the flow, the white paint covered in what looks like algae – a modern sort of river monster. It makes me think of the team of volunteers who dragged two-hundred tyres, five trollies, umpteen traffic cones and wheelbarrows, a large gas canister and a road barrier from the river one Saturday, plus fifty bags of smaller items – detritus dumped in the drift.

I keep going and, minutes later, stop to linger in a car park overlooking the bus station on the opposite side. The sun is about to disappear behind the hills in the distance. I walked not far from here, once, with the photographer, making a film about creativity in Bridgend; it was my response to the international press coverage of the spate of suicides that dubbed it ‘The Suicide Town’. As a child, I spent successive afternoons smoking cigarettes underneath a bridge just down from here, then hopped along a series of concrete platforms jutting out from the artificial banks. I have countless similar memories – I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one. 

*

Back in 1999, this stretch of river was central to a high-profile police investigation, into the murder of a young woman, who enjoyed writing songs and poetry. It was said there was no forensic evidence available, as the fast-flowing water had washed it away, but a hammer was discovered in a clump of trees a hundred yards from the cash and carry. Mud found in the boot of a car was thought to match that of the riverbank. 

*

I follow the river’s course through town, below the subway where, at fifteen, I spent a freezing cold night in a sleeping bag, and along the dirt track I’d take home after too many pints in the pub. I pass the recreation centre, where I played five-aside football and hung out with my first proper girlfriend. I can still smell the chlorine leaking from the vents that warmed our backs on winter evenings. There are no photos of these locations; in their place are images of redbrick housing, a man I vaguely know and a pile of chopped wood below broken glass – all effective in their way. I stop to linger on the sand at the bend in the river, referred to locally as just that, where I caught countless eels and my brother a sewin that tasted like shit. I lost a salmon once, I swear; that flash of iridescent silver.  

Across the rugby pitch, beyond the standing stones, I can see the steps. I was sixteen or so when three hooded figures asked for a fight. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice, as he paced back and forth. We ran and they chased us along the path by the playground, shrieking: Let’s drown them in the river. I was terrified, but they gave up pretty soon. That was the year I started bunking off school, spending hours in the strip of woodland that slopes down to the water’s edge. To get there you had to cross the huge metal pipe like a bridge, a post-apocalyptic leviathan, coated in graffiti and rust. I read a while back that a medieval pilgrimage route cut through this landscape. 

When I was twelve, my older brother and some friends made a raft out of tyres, which they strapped together with rolls of duct tape. I was the only one light enough not to sink and so sailed alone. I was basking in the glory of it, enjoying the scenery, until one of the boys began to hurl rocks from a thin bay of shingle. He had a crazed look in his eye. Dodging the missiles, I pleaded with him to stop. It was only when one struck my knee that I was given the time to disembark and sprint home.

*

One of the last pictures in the sequence is of a repeated curve not far from the estuary. The clouds are low above the ridge, and the river is a murky grey. There are thousands of shades of green and plenty of textures to explore. I see myself in a blue raincoat skimming stones, or trudging along the sand with friends after a beach party in the middle of the night. I’m jogging at the foot of the dunes. I twist my ankle and have to walk miles back to the car.

I’ve written about this place before, in a work of weird fiction based on real events. A child is fishing with his father. He’s being taught to hook ragworm, but is disturbed by their form, the writhe and slither. Shivering, he picks the least obscene specimen he can find from the parcel of paper, wrapped like a bag of chips, and holds it out in front of him, watching it curl around his thumb, turning itself inside out. Following his father’s instructions, he pinches it taut and presses the steel tip down until the skin punctures, or pops. At this point, the creature screams. The boy looks up to see a woman thrashing in the mist on the banking opposite. She’s a version of Jenny Greenteeth, or Wicked Jenny, a river hag from folktales who drags children to their deaths.

There’s a girl crouching on the shore, replaced in the following image by a large splash. There’s a coach parked by a bench on the cliff, and a person stares out to sea.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

Dan Wood is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Bridgend. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has featured in a wide range of publications. His books Suicide Machine and Gap in the Hedge are available with Another Place Press. He is currently working on a new book about the River Ogmore and was kind enough to share his current edit for this piece.

Memories of Elsewhere: Heartbreak Beach, by Emma Venables

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Emma Venables:

Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else, is in North Wales where I lived and studied for eight years. I’d never really explored anywhere beyond my university’s city, Bangor, until I met my best friend when working in retail. At a particularly difficult time in both our lives, she had just learned to drive and so we drove down those winding roads, the Welsh countryside wrapping around us like a comforter, in search of breathing space. I’d play DJ, feet on the dash (before I realised how dangerous it was), and we’d sing our blues away to Katy Perry, P!nk, and Lady Gaga. 

On Heartbreak Beach, we stood. Our wellies soaked by the sea. Hair frizzing in the wind. Cheeks stinging. We looked out at the Llŷn Peninsula, at the tip of Anglesey, at the weak sun hitting the Irish Sea. Breathing deep, taking it all in. Together, but alone in our thoughts. The view and atmosphere bestowing a definite calm on our addled minds which we carried with us into the car and back to our everyday lives. 

A few months later I took my dad and our dogs, Bobbi and Charlie, to Dinas Dinlle. My parents had just split up and whenever I think of this time, I’m reminded of a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road: ‘They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.’ I see us, walking on the sand, up and along the pebble banks, united in our heartbreak and confusion, with our two terriers running in and out, making our load a bit more bearable.

It was a gloomy day, clouds touching the cliffs. We were well wrapped up against the breeze that nipped at us with its puppy teeth. I had my digital camera with me, determined to document these special moments with dad and dogs. As I raised my camera, pressed the button to capture Charlie running at full pelt along the beach, my dad said there wasn’t any chance of the photograph coming out – Charlie was going so fast, he’d just be a white and brown-eared blur against a dull, yellow, background.

But the photograph did come out. It’s one of the best pictures I have of Charlie. All four paws off the ground, ears up, a smile seemingly on his face. Pure joy. A dog’s life. That photograph hangs on my wall now, Charlie’s collar and lead draped over it. He’s been gone for nearly three years, and that image brings as much sadness as it does joy, but I wouldn’t be without it. 

I haven’t been to Heartbreak Beach for such a long time, but when I sat down to write this piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, much to my surprise. There they were, memories of that beach in North Wales alongside sitting in a rowing boat on Lake Bled underneath a cloudless sky and walking through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a late summer evening with foxes and rabbits skittering here and there. Perhaps my mind keeps returning to Heartbreak Beach now because, for me, the times I’ve spent there encapsulate periods in my life where I felt confused and scared, concerned for what would happen next. I went there in search of breathing space, of head space, of more-to-life-than-this space, with the people closest to my heart and came away feeling a little bit lifted, a little more hopeful. 

When the lockdown comes to an end, I’ll return to Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else. I’ll take my dad, my stepmum, and their rescue dog, meet my best friend there. We’ll clear the chaos from our heads, find ourselves again in the sea air, the sand, the glare of the sun hitting the Irish Sea.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

The 'Ghost of Tryfan'

by Rob Piercy

By Phil Scraton:

Moments can catch us unaware. Initially seeming simple, unspectacular, they transform to live in memory. It had been a long, warm early Autumn day climbing on Bochlwyd Buttress. Tired from exertion, joyous from achievement, discovering muscles rarely used, the group headed down to the renowned Ogwen Tea Shack. Excited chatter, punctuated by snatches of song and much laughter, echoed around the cwm. Eventually it faded, giving way to the mountain’s voice. The tumbling stream draining from Llyn Bochlwyd flowing on through its fissured moraine to Llyn Ogwen. A solitary raven en route to its cliff eyrie.

Perched on a low boulder, my back to the descending path, I coiled the final rope. I didn’t hear his slow approach. Suddenly he was there, breathing hard but regular, leaning on two sticks. Seeing my startled reaction, he apologised. He was old, unsteady on his feet. Surely he hadn’t traversed the summits? No, he had walked from the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel over the Bwlch Tryfan col. His starting-point holds a special place in mountaineers’ collective consciousness. It was the base where Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay planned their infamous 1953 ascent of Everest. My new companion’s destination was the tea shack from where he would hitch back to the Pen-y-Gwyrd.

I found myself concentrating on his lined, weather-beaten, kindly face. ‘You must have seen some changes in these mountains, especially since the new wave of popularity in hill-walking’. He was surprised by my presumption. ‘I’m a beginner. I started walking in the mountains in my late seventies’. I apologised. His strong accent and slight hesitation revealed Welsh was his first language. ‘I began walking in the mountains when my knees couldn’t take pedalling up steep hills’. I tried to disguise my astonishment.

Looking down from the lip of Cwm Bochlwyd a thin mist had settled in the valley below. I finished coiling the ropes, draping them over my rucksack and across my shoulders. He said I should head down as he would be slow. Not wanting to patronise him I replied that I had plenty of time, that it would be enjoyable to share a yarn. From this point the descent is steep, over smooth and occasionally unstable boulders. We set off, initially in silence, concentrating on placing our feet, his wooden sticks clacking against the rocks. At that time, it was beyond imagination that light weight ‘anti-shock’, ‘carbon’ poles would become part of a multi-million Euro walking industry.

Slowly descending close to the tumbling water, he recounted cycling adventures. He had never been to ‘the Continent’ but had explored the remotest parts of England, Wales and Scotland, often cycling long distances - crude, home-made panniers carrying all necessities for the trip. His stories of time and place were wonderful. Sleeping on the white sands of Scotland’s beaches, under stars in the Pennine Hills, in draughty Welsh mountain huts. Absorbed in his vivid story-telling, I didn’t want our walk to end. Too soon we arrived at the footbridge where Llyn Idwal’s tributary tumbles towards Llyn Ogwen.

My habit is to pause on the bridge, lost in the dance of the water, while bidding a temporary adieu to the high buttresses of mountains I know and love. We parted and I remained awhile imagining that I too might live such a wonderful, full and active life. Eventually I turned my back on one of Snowdonia’s most beautiful views and walked the short distance to the now closed tea shop. The group was sitting patiently on the wall at the end of the path. ‘So sorry I’ve been so long but I came down with the old man’. ‘What man?’ they chorused, their voices in harmony. ‘No-one has come down the path, only you’. I looked beyond the car park to the road. There was no trace.

by Rob Piercy

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Bochlwyd Buttress is 1,500 feet above sea level, due west of its parent mountain, Tryfan or Tri-faen in Welsh meaning ‘three rocks’ acknowledging three distinct points comprising its summit. Part of the Glyder range it completes the magnificent four mountain horseshoe of Y Garn, Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach. Carved out by glacial movement, the north-facing cwms or corries are marked by vast expanses of shattered rock, majestic buttresses and deep gullies. Its predominant rock-type is rhyolite with occasional flashes of quartz. Unlike its sibling mountains, Tryfan has no softer, non-glacial mountainside. Rising from the Ogwen valley like a shattered tooth it has an imposing presence in all weathers, most majestic in snow and ice fronting a clear blue winter sky.

It stands alone, linked to Glyder Fach by Bwlch Tryfan the col from where my companion had emerged. Ascending the south-west ridge, scrambling over boulders and high scree, below to the west Llyn Bochlwyd nestles in the cwm. There has been a protracted dispute about the mountain’s height. Initially set at 3,010 feet, it was revised in the 1980s to 3,002 feet. Using global positioning, however, its lost eight feet have been reinstated. Height matters, for Tryfan is one of the 14 peaks over 3,000 feet (there is a contested claim for a fifteenth ‘peak’). As so often happens in the great outdoors their traverse within 24 hours has become a classic challenge to mountaineers and fell-runners alike.

The distance is 30 miles with an approximate ascent 13,000 feet – and what goes up must come down! The fine mountaineer and prolific writer, Frank Showell Styles, recalled his successful record attempt. Head down, he had moved at speed, with scant awareness of the stunning views or the rare Arctic plants and wild blueberries skirting the worn, stony paths. Reflecting on his remarkable achievement he felt that moving at speed, inattentive to surroundings he knew intimately, he regretted betraying his deep love of the mountains. A sense of guilt committed him to making the slowest traverse of the peaks, camping on each summit. Fourteen peaks, fourteen days, thirteen nights.

I completed the traverse twice, in 1977 and 1987. Tryfan lies at the heart of the fourteen peaks. Following its descent, so much ground already has passed beneath tired feet, incorporating undulations between summits and two returns to the valleys. For me a stark image, revisited many times on lesser walks, is to pause the rhythm of the strenuous ascent of Pen yr Ole Wen, taking in the completed summits of the Glyder range and, now in the distance, Yr Wyddfa. With six summits remaining, the just-completed Tryfan summit appears to point forward willing you on. Seemingly at touching distance is the blessed trinity of lakes, Bochlwyd, Idwal and Ogwen - where I met my aging companion - now calm in the afternoon sun. It is an overwhelming reflective emotion captured perfectly in Rob Piercy’s wonderful Welsh mountain paintings. Rob, a friend, fellow mountaineer and seer of place. 

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Tryfan inspires memory and calm. Winter ascent, in firm snow and ice, of Glyder Fach’s Main Gully. On to Tryfan and a challenging descent down its North Ridge. The classic Cneifion Arete along Y Gribin Ridge, Bristly Ridge and down via the mountain’s Heather Terrace. Each place, each experience, unique in the moment and the companionship of others. I have rarely climbed or walked alone. Bivouacking at Llyn Bochlwyd, I shared my shelter with the international guide and wonderful mountaineer John Cunningham. In our sleeping bags we talked long after dark, not about mountains, but the decline of ship-building and the history of socialism in Glasgow, his home town, and Liverpool.

My most memorable moment was a warm, clear, mid-summer’s day with Sean and Jessica, young cousins born a month apart. We set out for the North Ridge, recommended by the fine guidebook writer WA Poucher as ‘one of the most interesting and entertaining scrambles in all Wales’. It is a demanding route from an immediate steep ascent in a wide gully to the ridge. From here the climb is unrelenting, demanding careful foot placement and a quick search for good hand-holds. Sean and Jessica scrambled up the steep rock sections with ease matched by enthusiasm. Momentarily we paused to help others in difficulty on an exposed outcrop. 

We raced on, along the occasionally exposed rocky ridge that sharply defines Tryfan in the minds of mountaineers and sight-seers alike. Passing the ‘cannon’, a remarkable rock cantilever on which many dance, the path arrives at a cliff face. Then a brief but energetic climb to the northernmost summit. Now revealed were the ‘twin peaks’ of Tryfan, two huge rectangular boulders – ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. They provide the mountain with a crown visible from distant peaks and from the valley below, enticing those who summit Tryfan to jump the gap that separates them. Many do. Not us.

As an outlier from the Ogwen horseshoe, yet central to the 14 peaks, Tryfan gives back to its summiteers the ultimate reward. Mountain climbers are asked constantly, ‘Why?’ On that memorable day, the answer was obvious. We sat, leaning against the warm rock that might have been Adam but could well have been Eve. A spectacular view across Anglesey to Holy Island, from where we had travelled that morning, foregrounding the blue of the Irish Sea. Across to the Glyders, the Carneddau, the lowlands beyond Capel Curig – the diverse greens of the forests, the grey mounds of Bethesda’s slate quarries and distant ploughed fields cut through by rivers. So much to take in, so obvious an answer to ‘Why?’ We finished our lunch, took on more water and scrambled down towards Bwlch Tryfan. 

Singing and laughing, Jessica and Sean ran ahead. I paused at the col. It was from here that the old man had appeared as I coiled ropes. I thought of him while we swam in the Llyn. Silently I acknowledged the bivouac site where I had shared one of my last conversations with John before his untimely death. Rejuvenated, we scrambled down in fine voice. Soon, we reached the easy path to the bridge where I had parted company with my ‘ghost of Tryfan’. This time the tea shack was open.

***

Phil Scraton is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Belfast. Author and editor of numerous books including Power, Conflict and Criminalisation (2007), The Incarceration of Women (2014) and Hillsborough: The Truth (2016).  Mountaineering, kayaking and, these days, hillwalking underpin the spirit of his work – freedom. p.scraton@qub.ac.uk 

Previously Welsh Artist of the Year, Rob Piercy is a well-known landscape artist. His Gallery is in Porthmadog, Gwynedd. A mountaineer and member of the Alpine Club, he has published The Snowdonia Collection (2009) and Portmeirion (2012). https://www.robpiercy.com/