The Edge of Cymru

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Pete Evans certainly seems to feel this way. For many years he has lived in a village called Hope close to the banks of the lower Alun. He too refers to the meandering of the Alun and its seemingly ubiquitous presence in this part of the world. But it was not until I read his Resurrection River that I realised there were two branches of the Alun, one the natural course of the river and the other, man-made, heading off in a totally different direction. It was not just a case of the Alun seeming to be in two places at once, it really was its own watery doppelganger. The result is a fascinating alternative travelogue, which merges topography, history, environmentalism and observation of nature, to produce the 'long view' of Wales, discovering the roots of the present in the past, sometimes the distant past. The official launch was held in Machynlleth in November 2022. Oedd y lawnsiad swyddogol yn y Senedd-dy, Machynlleth, Mis Tachwedd 2022. I fe weld eto / to see it again…

The Edge of Cymru is an absorbingly interesting hybrid, a cross between the conventional travelogue, eco-concern and Welsh history textbook, all made eminently readable by the jauntiness and clarity of the prose and the honesty of the book’s author as she walks the land’s edge. As a biologist, a nature writer and a kayaker Amy-Jane Beer has spent much of her life in and around water. But it was the tragic death of her friend, Kate, in a kayaking accident on the River Rawthey in Cumbria on New Year’s Day 2012 that proved to be the eventual catalyst for her to write The Flow. But prior to all of this, the 1960s, 70s and 80s were a grim time for Wales. King bookends the 60s with two tragedies : the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley in North Wales to provide water for Liverpool and the destruction of a primary school in Aberfan by the collapse of an unwisely placed coal tip. Tryweryn is still notorious for the arrogance of Westminster in insisting the Welsh-speaking community of Capel Celyn should be flooded, despite the opposition of 125 Welsh local authorities and 27 of Wales’s 36 MPs. In Aberfan 144 people were killed, including 116 children at Pantglas Junior School, when a spoil heap slipped down a hillside and engulfed the school. Local people and the National Union of Mineworkers had warned the National Coal Board about the danger of Tip Number 7 and the fact it was built on a stream, but they were ignored.The Alun is a river of tranquillity, of droughts, floods and trade; fortunes made and lost. At times it doesn’t exist at all and yet at the same time it is two rivers! The most extensive industrial intervention on the Alun is the Victorian-era Milwr Tunnel. This runs some 10 miles from the upper Alun at Cadole to join the Dee estuary at Bagillt. It was built to help drain Flintshire’s lead and zinc mines and still discharges an average 23 million gallons of water a day. Suddenly I understood that Cymreig rural society was shy. That people were unwilling to speak out of turn, were unhurried and thoughtful in a way I appreciated. Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt was born in Chester in 1910. A prolific writer, he specialised in biographies of some of the major figures in British civil engineering, most notably Brunel and Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways, and was an enthusiast for vintage cars and heritage railways. He played a pioneering role in both the canal and railway preservation movements. Rolt died in Gloucestershire in 1974. To research Resurrection River Pete Evans followed the course of the Alun on foot from its source in the hills above Llandegla in Denbighshire toits confluence with the Dee near Farndon where Wales meets Cheshire. He also took a diversion across Flintshire to trace the major underground man-made branch of the river to where it joins the Dee estuary near Flint.

Peter Finch has been a ubiquitous figure on the Welsh literary scene for over forty years. As a writer he is best known for the Real Cardiff series of books but has also written about music, produces walking guides and is a published poet. I found myself drawn to L.T.C. Rolt’s Narrow Boat because, while researching something I am currently writing about Chester, I read in several places that Rolt is regarded as one of the city’s most famous sons. Narrow Boat is a classic memoir of a journey he and Angela Rolt took along the canals of England during 1939 and 1940. The book was first published in 1944, at a time when the canals were becoming neglected and forgotten due to competition for trade by road and rail transport. The Edge of Cymru is the result of that lengthy walk, and a fantastic travelogue it is too. Funny, moving, idiosyncratic and occasionally dark, it’s a wonderful portrait of contemporary Wales and for those reasons alone it makes for a pleasurable and insightful read. The Central section covers the county town, Dorchester, and the ancient settlements of Blandford and Wimborne. Peaceful as they are today, Woolcott reveals a past of conflict and rebellion in these towns. He also walks the chalk uplands of this area and considers the origins of the chalk giant at Cerne Abbas.So it seemed to me that Dorset is ripe for a sort of psychogeography – a literary tradition that in essence is a sensitivity to the meeting point of place and history, finding meaning in the everyday and making connections across time.

Throughout the eighties and that period of Datblygu, Y Cyrff, Fflaps and Anhrefn recording Peel sessions, we all felt strongly that it was important that we sang in Welsh on those sessions. (Rhys Mwyn)There’s a shimmering lode of poetry in these descriptions, sometimes extruded in a line that recalls the strange beauty Les Murray’s verse: