Site Tools
You are here: Home 
Content Articles A Welsh Pilgrim i-Cambria 10th Anniversary Issue A Welsh Pilgrim
Content Articles A Welsh Pilgrim i-Cambria 10th Anniversary Issue A Welsh Pilgrim | A Welsh Pilgrim |
|
|
|
|
Every Sunday for almost seventeen years the late Mr Tim Lewis would drive me up from Brechfa to the mountainside church of Llanfihangel Rhos-y-corn. It was a journey that tested the nerves, partly because the road was narrow and winding, but also because Tim was a consummate story-teller and whenever he remembered some particularly exciting or scandalous incident he would let go of the steering wheel and start waving his arms about. Somehow we never quite disappeared down a precipice or over the clawdd, though we came close to it on several occasions. Tim knew every twll a chornel between Brechfa and Llanfihangel. As we went up Rhipyn Seimon, the steep hill that began at Pant-y-coubal Farmyard and ended near what had once been Llanfihangel Vicarage (formerly an ecclesiastical Siberia to which the Bishops of St Davids would banish hapless clerics), he would point out a field known as ‘Cae’r Paderau Bach’ (‘The Field of the Little Prayers’). Trevor Davies, Pwll, who had been a farm-servant at nearby Pant-y-bettws in the 1940s, said that he could remember a flat stone in the middle of the field. The farmer’s wife told him that the marks on it were made by countless pilgrims kneeling to offer up prayers of thanksgiving. Since then the stone has disappeared. Presumably it was broken up or buried, because it presented too much of a hazard to tractor drivers. The pilgrims who once knelt in Cae’r Paderau’r Bach were giving thanks because they had just caught sight of their destination: the little chapel-of-ease built on the site of the cell of the sixth century hermit St Silyn at Gwernogle in the valley below. In the eighteenth century the chapel was turned into a house (birthplace of a radical Unitarian preacher-poet) and later it became the beudy where Tim Lewis used to milk his cows. An echo of the past was preserved by a neighbouring field, ‘Dôl-fferem’ (from ‘Dôl Offeren’ – the Mass Meadow). Folk memory claimed that services had once been held there in the open air, either because the chapel-of-ease was too small to hold the congregation, or because it was too ruinous to be safe. One afternoon Tim guided me to Ffynnon Sant Silyn, the hermit’s holy well on the banks of the rivers Clydach. Clearing the undergrowth away we found a tiny cobbled wall from medieval times and a pool of clear cold water. The pilgrims’ path to the well could still be made out, while it is recorded that the tree that sheltered the ffynnon was still being decorated with votive rags as late as the early nineteenth century. Many of those who made a pilgrimage there in the Middle Ages must have been hoping for healing. The waters of the holy well are reputed to be able to help those with sore or weak eyes. Silyn was almost certainly an Irish hermit (many of the older place-names in the Gwernogle area are of Irish derivation). It would seem that he left his home and extended family to look for somewhere remote and peaceful in the forests of West Wales. There he could settle and lead a life of prayer that would bring him close to God as he lived in harmony with the natural world around him. There are several very beautiful early Irish monastic poems that paint an idyllic picture of this way of life. They were, however, written two or three centuries later than the events they purport to describe, which suggests that they may be portraying a nostalgically imagined ideal rather than describing a reality that may in fact have been quite grim. Britons flocked to the Holy Land as pilgrims. They identified themselves with the greatest Holy Land pilgrim of all: Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. Modern historians may regard her as the daughter of Rumanian innkeeper, but the Britons (who were rapidly turning into the Welsh) claimed her as one of our own: a British princess who bridged the gap between Wales and the Holy Land. Gwernogle’s hermit illustrates a tension that has long existed both in Wales and in other Celtic countries. Much of traditional Welsh culture is rooted in the concept of ‘perthyn’ – which means both ‘belonging’ and ‘being related’. The relationship is to an extended family in a particular place, perhaps also being part of a specific religious community and speaking a dialect with its own special nuances. Tim told me of two families, one in Brechfa and the other in Cwm Cothi, whose Welsh had very distinctive characteristics. He himself had a fund of wonderful idioms and expressions that I’ve never heard anyone else use. Tim’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the history, stories and folklore of his milltir sgwâr – the corner of rural Carmarthenshire in which he had spent almost his entire life – was an expression of this profound relationship with a place and its people. And yet the power of perthyn has always been held in tension with the need which some people feel (whether voluntarily or through force of circumstance) to leave their milltir sgwâr and venture into the wider world. At its most extreme this is shown by the urge to the ‘white martyrdom’ of exile, which drove many early Irish monks (presumably including Silyn) to abandon the places and people that were familiar to them. St Govan left his Irish abbey for the solitude of a cleft in the cliffs of South Pembrokeshire, St Melangell found a remote fastness in the Montgomeryshire hills, a friend of St Columba’s set out to find ‘a desert in the ocean’, while Asser, King Alfred’s Welsh biographer, describes some Irishmen who put out to sea in boats without oars or sails, to see where the tides and the hand of God’s Providence would take them. The result was the religious colonisation and sanctification of places that were often inaccessible and sometimes rather unexpected. A famous poem in Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (‘The Black Book of Carmarthen’), which includes the earliest extant collection of Welsh religious poetry, sums up the way in which places which might once have been thought of as both physically and spiritually desolate were transformed by the ‘white martyrs’ who brought Christ’s Gospel to them: Ym mryn, yn nhyno, ar ynysoedd môr, Ym mhob ffordd yr eler, Rhag Crist gwyn, nid oes ynialedd. (‘On hills, in valleys, on the islands of the sea, wherever you may go, because of holy Christ there is no desert place.’) Patrick Thomas The full version of this article appears in the September-October issue of Cambria                |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Welsh Kitchen Book
Book by Dorothy Davies
Cambria Welsh Kitchen
£6.25 - BUY IT NOW
