On The Border
I was very fortunate this summer to spend some time with my extended family on the Welsh border with England. My wife and son, my mother and my sister and her family. In the photograph above you can see a farmhouse in the mid-foreground, slightly to the right and just above the bracken bushes. That’s where we were for a week.
Behind me as I took that photograph lay the mountain road and a ridge of the Black Mountains, the mark of the border and carrying Offa’s Dyke Path on its summit.
It’s a steep climb to the top of the ridge, a wall of green that seems to loom over the English countryside like a giant wave. Rising but never cresting — fortunately. Nonetheless, it’s easy to imagine Welsh warriors charging down that slope to pillage the peaceful villages below. Offa’s Dyke — a Dark Ages Hadrian’s Wall-was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent such incursions. As is the fate of all such walls.
Once on the top, the landscape change completely. Gone are the little asymmetrical hedgerow bounded fields. Instead, you are on wild moorland, not empty, for there is the reassuring presence of sheep and ponies — but nonetheless an altogether more inhospitable view.
Gazing from this height towards England is disorientating. It’s rare to come across a border that delineates so effectively and completely two different lands. Wales, here, seems altogether wild and somehow out of time. England, by contrast, seems tamed and innocuously pastoral.
It was colder here, too, and grey clouds hovered threateningly over the mountains stretching back towards the Brecon Beacons. In truth, these are not that formidable, mere foothills in relation to any of the great mountain ranges of the world but, as is so often the case in Britain, what might seem diminished in a larger land assumes greater weight. I was reminded again of this later on while driving alongside the River Severn. Briefly, and only for the space of a few miles, the river seemed to rival the great rivers of the United States
But in the case of the Severn, its width and volume owe little to the land; it’s the sea that gives it its grandeur.
That’s the thing about Britain; everything is compressed. You only have a travel a few miles for a complete change of scene, of accent, of identity, even of nationality and each foot you tread seems to disturb a well of deep history. In America, certainly in the interior, there’s an expansiveness, a sense, even today, of land that has seen relatively little of humankind. There’s an altogether more remote wildness in these areas. One that I find wholly attractive. England, after a while, seems crowded. Not just with the living but the dead too.
Still you can get close to something of that same sense of isolation. The farmhouse on the Welsh border was one of the quietest places I’ve been. I’ve only experienced similar silence in the American west, high on the Bighorn Mountains, for example — an altogether more formidable ridge!
To find such quiet in England was frankly astonishing. There are roads everywhere. Aircraft too. Somehow here, though, the roads petered out into tiny little farm tracks, no wider than a car, and the flight paths seemed to have directed far away from us. What you heard instead were the sheep and the birds, the wind and sometimes the rain.
It was gloriously peaceful. How, in truth, I imagine heaven (if there is such as place) to feel. At night, a stillness settled in as the wind dropped and the animals quietened down. Paradise indeed.
