Welsh Italianate

The next morning I woke to the boom of thunder, the flash of lightning and the pelting of hailstones. The storm lasted intermittently for several hours. I stayed snoozing in my sleeping bag. Mid-morning I reluctantly made an undignified, backward exit from the tent. Hailstones were banked up around it several inches deep. I decided to head for the southern coast of the Lleyn Peninsula which is the northern arm of Cardigan Bay. If it's bad weather in the mountains, it's often sunny there. And so it was.

The Lleyn Peninsula juts out into the Irish Sea for about 30 miles and is one of the most atmospheric and ancient parts of Wales. The Peninsula was trod for centuries by pilgrims en route to the sacred site of Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli in Welsh) about which I've written before. On the way there I stopped for a couple of hours at Portmeirion. This is a fantasy village in the Mediterranean style (it's said to have been inspired by Portofino on the Italian Riviera) created by the Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1973 (1st pic). The estate is now a registered charity and is managed by his grandson.

Clough Williams-Ellis was a passionate conservationist and wanted to develop this naturally beautiful site (a peninsula in the estuary of the River Dwyryd) without spoiling it (2nd pic). In this he largely succeeded, though the place is open every day of the year and attracts a huge number of visitors especially at holiday times and during the summer months, when it's best avoided. The village looks like a filmset - indeed, it has been used extensively by film and TV companies, most famously in the 1966-1967 cult classic TV series The Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan as ex-secret agent Number Six. How I used to love this series in my early teens. 2 lines of Number Six have passed into TV film legend: I am not a number; I am a free man! and I will not be pushed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own.

You can wander through 70 acres of sub-tropical garden and woodland at Portmeirion - which I did. I came across this Japanese bridge and gazebo (3rd pic) and this exotic-looking yellow flower (4th pic) - I think it's the Yellow Arum aka Skunk Cabbage - all of which provided a bright contrast to the surrounding muted greens and greys. I had my picnic in this temple overlooking a tranquil pond (5th pic). Could there be a more delightful spot for lunch? Someone had left behind 2 carmine flower heads in the centre of the circular stone table.

Pilgrimages

There is an island there is no going

to but in a small boat the way

the saints went, travelling the gallery

of the frightened faces of

the long-drowned, munching the gravel

of its beaches. So I have gone

up the salt lane to the building

with the stone altar and the candles

gone out, and kneeled and lifted

my eyes to the furious gargoyle

of the owl that is like a god

gone small and resentful. There

is no body in the stained window

of the sky now. Am I too late?

Were they too late also, those

first pilgrims? He is such a fast

God, always before us and

leaving as we arrive.

There are those here

not given to prayer, whose office

is the blank sea that they say daily.

What they listen to is not

hymns but the slow chemistry of the soil

that turns saints' bones to dust,

dust to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.

The swinging pendulum of the tide

has no clock: the events

are dateless. These people are not

late or soon: they are just

here with only the one question

to ask, which life answers

by being in them. It is I

who ask. Was the pilgrimage

I made to come to my own

self, to learn that in times

like these and for one like me

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

R. S. THOMAS (1913-2000)

R. S. Thomas was a Welsh priest-poet, in my opinion one of the finest poets of the 20th century writing in English. His early poems dealt with the bleak existence of Welsh hill farmers. His later more metaphysical work explored questions of God, belief and the nature of human existence. Thomas was a passionate Welsh republican who spoke out on political issues such as holiday homes, the Welsh language and nuclear disarmament.

The island location of this poem Pilgrimages is Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli) which is one and a half miles long, less than half a mile wide and lies off the tip of the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales. I have been there in the "small boat" Thomas mentions and seen the "stone altar" he describes. It is hauntingly beautiful. It has been a place of pilgrimage since Christianity's early days.