Insufficiently Welsh (10 page)

She made the traps too. The cakes looked like those elephant droppings that the artist Chris Ofili uses to prop up his canvases. Each was a smoothly rounded ball of cowpat: a tempting sphere the size of a cricket ball.

Tempting, that is, were you a dung beetle. Sarah had set up an elaborate trap. The beetles were attracted to the dung. They strode towards it, rattling the 30 plates of their shiny armour, and would then fall through the wire and into the top of a pink plastic funnel.

Sarah had cut off the lower pipe of the funnels to enable them to tumble into a black plastic flower pot with some grass in it; not so much grass that they could clamber out, but enough to provide shelter. Sarah had no intention of stressing her beetles.

The whole project seemed a work of art to me, like an installation in the Tate (alongside Mr Ofili, perhaps). In fact its serious purpose was to measure the incidence of dung beetles, and then to put a monetary value to them. “We want to know what financial contribution a dung beetle makes to animal husbandry,” Sarah explained.

Dung beetles do a necessary, natural job – clearing dung, redistributing it and fertilising the soil. Here in this paddock in Pembrokeshire where the mild weather provided abundant growth, where natural systems still dominated, here in organic farmland, she wanted to try and find out the number of beetles per acre and estimate the work they did, and so had set up her delicate hunting machinery.

“Put your hand in and see whether there are any there,” she prompted.

African dung beetles are television celebrities, purposefully rolling balls of camel poo towards their burrows. There is little we like better than a hardworking insect. We would let our daughters marry one. What worthy planetary citizens these tumblebugs or dung chafers are. But the ones I remembered were African: huge, I expect. I stuck my hand into the pot where something was scuttling. There were six beetles in there.

OK. They were pretty big too.

The British dung beetle is not only a physical match for the African but shares its appetite. Dung is all they need. They don't drink. They won't eat anything else. They are poop-mad. They just consume dung and help cows by clearing up the field, by naturally distributing the fertiliser and by removing a source of cow irritation: flies. And, considering their trade, they scrub up well.

How remarkably sparkly, clean and efficiently accoutered these horny beetles seemed: these relatives of the Egyptian scarab. They walked off determinedly, as beetles must when they are disturbed, and I had to keep gently guiding them back into my palm.

Scientists in South Africa and Sweden recently showed that dung beetles use the stars for orientation and navigation, making them the first animal proven to use the Milky Way this way. But glancing round I suddenly realised that, to have so many in just one of these little holes, the field must be seething with their relatives.

“They're strong too,” said Sarah, who was obviously besotted with the creatures. “Clasp your other hand over them.”

I made a cup.

“Can you feel it?” She asked. And I could. The beetles were pushing with their legs, trying to break out, and the force was quite disproportionate to their size. They can pull over one thousand times their body weight. Were they human they would be able to haul six double-decker buses up the street.

Is “Dung Beetle-Man” coming to Marvel Comics soon? Some sort of superhero shit-shoveller is what we need. But here was a strong scientific basis for the maintenance of the continuing natural order in Wales. An indiscriminate use of pesticides was killing off these natural allies. A single cow can produce seven tons of dung a year. Sarah wanted to remind us to put our faith in beetles. I was a convert.

–
HAVERFORDWEST
–

Haverfordwest is worth walking. Some of its inhabitants nurse a sense of growing despair over the future of this hill-straddling, wonderful market town. Evelyn Waugh, stationed nearby during World War Two, admired its simple dignity and elegant buildings, calling it “a town of great beauty”, but the necessary pomposity that once accrued to its local status has been undermined. There are important churches, and a ruined castle and former prison dominate one hill. As I threaded through the back streets, making my way to a church hall near St Mary's on the other, I passed the old courthouse and assembly rooms, now a café. I passed the shuttered grand town villas designed by John Nash, now empty. The commercial centre of the town had shifted to the riverside and a jumble of ill-designed shopping precincts.

I had met with the Civic Society. In fact, as I recall, I am a member of the Civic Society, and they had pointed out the threats to the fabric of the town. “You know what you need,” I ventured, with foolish authority, “A Townscape Heritage Initiative, to preserve the outside appearance of this high street.” There was silence. Someone deftly tried to change the subject. Eventually, another member gently said, “We have already had one of those.”

But people do still live in the middle of Haverfordwest. I followed an old pedestrian passage that led up to steps that crept, under heavy limes, behind St Thomas's Church to the door of the St Thomas's Church Hall, where I had been told to go. I peered in. There was a short corridor and another open door gave onto a church hall, which was now filled with dozens of dogs.

–
CORGI TOYS
–

The Pembrokeshire Canine Association was gathered for a “ring craft session”. I had rather expected that I would be visiting a rough instruction course for errant family pets: perhaps a few puppies, or people trying to get their own Macsen to behave on walks, but these were serious owners with serious dogs. There were pedigree whippets, retrievers, German Shepherds, poodles, pugs: all clearly of dog show standard.

These were the best of their respective breeds. Their owners were beyond being taught how to get Fido to stay off the sofas. They were encouraging Fidolatrus Hargreaves Rapscallion the Third to walk properly, to turn in a neat circle and to endure the indignity of being stood on a table while a judge poked at his teeth and felt his bone structure.

And there were Corgis here. There were at least six Corgis. I sat to one side with the owner of three, Sue Bale, while other dogs marched around in front of me. Sue told me how her pampered charges were billeted down in their own kennel area. She was breeding to try to achieve a winner, off the back of a purchase made originally in England. Her great hope was young Merlin, not one of the older ones at all, but a puppy, now just reaching the age when he might be taken to show rings.

We stood Merlin on a little table and Eileen demonstrated all his good points. His regular jaw, his strong shoulders, his scissor bite, his flat skull, his slightly rounded ears, his black-rimmed eyes, his perfect proportions.

The Corgi (or “dwarf dog” in Welsh, “ci” meaning dog and “cor” meaning dwarf) is by no means a lap dog. It is short but strong and “robust”, and is said to have come over to Pembrokeshire with the Flemish in the twelfth century, but being a rough working dog, the Corgi didn't get into the actual showroom until 1925. Now it is a recognised breed. Welsh folklore says that Corgis were used by fairies and elves to pull their coaches, or to serve as the steeds for their warriors. A visible “saddle” in the fur on the back is another good point that breeders look for.

Later, I prepared to take Merlin for a walk in the park. This was my moment. This was what I had been asked to do. I had seen the cattle, I had examined their dung, I had met their vets and walked their countryside. Now I had to fit in the final piece of the puzzle and meet a proper Pembrokeshire working dog.

Two of the regular judges from local shows stood to one side in the late evening light. I knew what I had to do. I had to march my faithful companion down to a small stand of trees, turn him and walk him back.

It was important to keep Merlin focused and trotting in a straight line by my side. I had to get him to turn in a nice curve and I had now learned that I had to keep his alert attention by whistling, peeping, calling his name and yapping furiously all the time.

Alas, I quickly ran out of noises that interested him. He wouldn't respond to the ones he had already heard. Merlin got bored with his parade and when I got back to the judges he refused to sit quietly and especially to stare at me in rapt admiration, as he was supposed to.

Merlin was young and I was a novice. But Corgis are simply not that easy to take for a walk, not properly anyway. I liked Merlin. Merlin was indifferent to me.

So, despite finding a real Pembrokeshire Corgi, a potential champion of the breed to boot, despite his charming nature, despite my lessons, despite my bright eyes and fluffy demeanour, the judges were not impressed. I completely failed to walk the dog properly. Honestly, you know what they say. “Never work with…”

–5–
MID WALES
A LEGEND
IN THE MAKING

–
WHERE ARE WE?
–

“Mid Wales” is not much of a name for a region, is it? Who thought that up? It sounds a bit dismissive. “Middle England” is a non-specific backwater of leather pouffes and yappy terriers; mid Wales seems to promise a conventional flatland, riven with cul-de-sacs and rampant with Nigels, but, far from it, mid Wales is gorgeous. It's a mountainous fairyland. No, really. And I started my trip there in a tree house.

Geographically, mid Wales lies below Snowdonia, on that long, long curving bay that separates the craggy bits of the north and the indented bits of the west. It isn't the furthest to the west and it isn't the hilliest of country, but it is a long way from a direct motorway link. Swathed in forest and splintered by valleys, mid Wales is a place of legend and folklore. This is the Cymru outback – remote Britain (if one slightly colonised by Brummies). It is a separate country. Many claim that Machynlleth is the ancient capital of Wales. It was the seat of Owain Glyndwr's first Welsh parliament in 1404.

An Anglesey resident told me that he once decided to try to get down south by the direct route along the coast. He was frustrated by the distances he had to cover and the lifetime that it had taken him. Nothing speeds your way around mid Wales except recklessness. But when I had finished my assignment here, I turned to drive to Manchester myself, taking a road from Machynlleth up the Dyfi. It was a long tortuous route but as I snaked through the valleys, between the glowing hills, towards Welshpool and Oswestry, I kept wanting to stop and absorb this place: imprint it. I never wanted to relinquish the moment and the landscape.

But that was all to come. For the moment I was standing here wondering why exiles made their way to this coast. What were they looking for? A slower and leafier environment? Something quirky? Perhaps something like the impressive tree house, where I began my quest?

It was high up amongst the trees of west Wales, growing in a steep wood. The huts in the branches were reached by a genuine escalier – a wooden, clambering ladder to the stars. The platform or deck, on which my tubular sleeping pod perched, was 20 to 30 feet up in the canopy. I really needed some excited small kids to enjoy it. We didn't have any, so we played at being kids ourselves.

I needed to get hold of my Mid-Welsh challenge. I wanted romance. I decided on a Robin Hood postal delivery. It would be cool if it twanged into the pine tree next to me; a message tied to an arrow. The team was worried. The arrow would skewer me. They brought a pulchritudinous Hunger Games archer. (This is not a fantasy-fantasy. She was Diana in a Parka, though called Emily.) She stood just by the camera, pulled back her bow and prepared to fire the arrow straight into the trunk next to me from four feet away. I would cower in the hut, deftly emerge and yank off the message, just like Robin Hood – or Keith Allen anyway.

Tudor set up the camera. He pressed a button and retired. Emily, the huntress, pulled back her aluminium bow and, with a “twong”, not a “twang” (it is a base note), the arrow flew at the pine tree and bounced straight back out. There was a pained, metallic clank and it banged around the place before falling to the floor, broken in two.

We concluded that this was highly dangerous. So we tried again. It still didn't skewer the tree, so we ended up writing the challenge on loo paper and I read it off the toilet roll. It wasn't quite the same romantic scenario, but was better from the risk assessment point of view.

My challenge was “to find the Holy Grail”.

–
HOLY GRAILS!
–

Is there anything particularly Welsh about that fabulous relic, the Holy Grail? As an object, it sounds a little idolatrous. We were in good chapel country here. No room for magic rituals or Papist superstition please, but King Arthur was definitely Welsh and he took this fabulous relic extremely seriously.

There are chauvinistic English claims to the Lord of Camelot. Tintagel tends to feature. There are French King Arthurs too. Probably Breton. (My granny used to say that the Bretons arrived on bicycles in the valleys to sell onions, and they and the Welsh ladies would chatter away to each other. My father used to say they chattered away, but none of them understood a word the other was saying.) The French, however, had a meeting of all their Arthurian historians in Rennes in 2008 and they decided that King Arthur, if he existed at all, was probably Welsh. The first references to him emerge in Welsh myth and poetry in the seventh century and from the eleventh century the stories of his chivalry and valour start to spread across Europe.

King Arthur was an ancient Briton; one of the original race left after the Romans departed, banished to the west by the arrival of the Saxons. He sleeps in a cave in Snowdonia (in case you were wondering) surrounded by heaps of gold, some of which an adventurous local farmer stole until, as always happens in these stories, he became too greedy and got turned into a toad. Arthur lies there still surrounded by his knights, gently napping until called upon to defend the cause of Wales.

This much I knew already. I also knew that many brave knights and fair lords had tried to get the Holy Grail and, er, perished. Lancelot himself had been a little too raunchy to be allowed to have it, Sir Gawain a little too forgetful. (He neglected to pack it in his bags while leaving the thicket.) You needed to be pure of heart to get hold of the Grail. Would I conform? I think so. You may have formed your own opinion, of course.

King Arthur's cave, however, was hidden somewhere up north on the slopes of Snowdon, I was much further down the coast. I would have to look for other grail stories and new Arthurian legends in mid Wales.

–
GOLD FINGERS AND THUMBS
–

Gold has a strong association with the region. They have been digging for precious metals in this area of Britain since 1000 BC and the Romans made their way here partly in order to establish a proper mining business. I joined Ben, who drove me to the Clogau site in Bontddu, which in its time had been the most productive of seams in the Dolgellau region, in his Porsche. It had been a very proper mining affair. They had mined for copper and a little lead, and had discovered gold there in 1852, initiating a mini gold rush and extracting about two and a half tons of the yellow stuff before the 1920s. At its peak it was Britain's largest and richest gold mine. But, as Ben told me ruefully, a gold mine is not really “a gold mine”. In 2007 it was decided that every scrap of gold that could be extracted had been extracted. They even filtered the road we were walking along.

We were making a steady climb through mature forest along the sides of a rushing river. As we slopped past thundering waterfalls and under massive beeches, Ben explained that there was still a huge worldwide demand for Welsh gold. The Japanese like to get married with a ring made of the slightly tawny metal. It was red because of the amount of copper naturally mixed in to it. The Royal Family wore Welsh gold, not merely for patriotic reasons but because a canny, previous owner of the mines, had delivered a large free nugget into their safe keeping. Their Majesties have about a kilo left, to provide the family with matching gold keepsakes into the foreseeable future. Welsh gold has been worn by their royal highnesses, from Diana, Princess of Wales, to the Queen herself. Kate Middleton's wedding ring was made from the precious metal. Because Welsh gold is so rare, only a bit of the metal is used in high street products which is why legally they have to describe the rings as a “touch of rare Welsh gold” and not “Welsh gold”.

Meanwhile I got excited about the shapes I was seeing in the woods. At first, I thought it was an illusion. Perhaps that vast stone wall was just a cliff? But the forest to either side was indeed dotted with grey, lichened ruins: the former engine sheds, furnaces or sleeping quarters of ancient workings.

Ore is dug out and then washed to get at the metal. So the river was important to the process. Trees had naturalised some of the oldest workings. It was as if we were passing a Mayan outpost in the jungle. Suddenly, however, we found ourselves coming to more modern detritus: big blue corrugated iron sheds, rusting containers and rolls of cable. And away, in an insignificant corner, Ben showed me the entrance to the mine itself: a modest four foot high burrow in a low cliff, with a barred metal gate blocking the way forward. We could only peer a few yards into the tunnel, but Ben told me there were a further eight miles of shafts and levels under the mountain.

But the gold was finished. There was no more. Ironically, the ore had been usefully productive. It delivered about thirty troy ounces per long ton. This compares well with South African mines, which can only manage a quarter of a troy ounce per ton. But the South African mines are far more extensive. The comparatively small Welsh seams appear to be all worked out.

Ben wanted to show me how it all began. He was carrying a plastic pan the size of a dinner plate. We could search for gold in the stream. Officially, we needed a permit to do such a thing. You can't just start panning for gold like some grizzled forty-niner, you need a licence to do it. But he offered to show me how, as long as we threw any precious and hugely valuable nuggets back.

We crouched by the water's edge and scooped up some black grit. My pan was corrugated, descending in inverted ziggurat levels, so that as I washed the dirt away the heavier gold could gradually tumble to the bottom. As if. We washed and sifted and jiggled the stuff a bit so the camera might get some idea of the method.

“And what is that?” I asked, casually pointing to a bright fleck in the bottom of the pan.

“Oh that is the gold,” said Ben.

“How do you mean?” I asked. “Is that stuff you put in there?” Ben was carrying a little tube of gold flakes, and I thought he might well have set up the pan for the camera.

“No, no,” Ben laughed. “The river is full of gold.” It was impossible for the process to capture everything, so quite a lot got washed down in the river with the ore.

I looked again more closely. I had imagined we might find something after a long period of sifting, but here was a fleck the first time out. I had swept away the vast majority of the muck I had picked up and, hardly concentrating, because we were chatting for the benefit of the camera, I had reduced my grit to a mere smear in the bottom of my pan.

Now I bent down and looked at the yellow dot as closely as I could. It was minute. It stood out because it shone. Even that miniscule fragment of gold had a distinct lustre in the water at the bottom of my plastic bucket. Suddenly the lure of gold fever gripped me. I could imagine what it was like for a prospector. There was something distinctive about the teeny flake. It seemed to glow. If I stuck my little finger in, I could just about get it to adhere to the tip, but then I could see what a useless amount it was. I leant down, like a proper unlicensed experimenter, stuck my pan in the water and let my gold speck wash away.

If the price goes up any more, I may be back.

–
A MAGIC LANTERN
–

I wanted to meet the modern wizard of Aberdyfi: the contemporary myth-maker Geoff Roustabout. This man (formerly Geoff Hill) had recently stepped up to keep Aberdyfi in its seaside wet afternoon entertainment by buying the Magic Lantern Cinema.

Geoff was not much of film buff himself. “Before I owned this place I only went to the cinema four times over ten years,” he told me.

Now it took up 30 hours of his time a week. He hated to see “a cultural service” die and he had refurbished the little Welsh seaside resort with its own Greatest Show on Earth: a stylish foyer and a grand auditorium, decorated with impressive murals of the masters of cinema. I hadn't expected to find an art house in the far west. But then when you are remote you have to make your own entertainment.

“We had the full version of ‘Lawrence of Arabia' including the interval just the other night,” Geoff said proudly, as we settled into his plush tip-up seats. He also showed first-run Hollywood blockbusters and linked up to a network of simulcasts of theatre and opera events.

Geoff was not a local. “I have a tent business,” he told me as we watched a film of the local area together. “We make tents for festivals and you'll find our marquees at all the major outdoor events. In fact, my boys are bringing some of the big ones back from Glastonbury even as we speak.”

I sensed that Geoff was a proud showman of the old school. He had been in the events business for thirty years and owned his own company for twenty. The same spirit that said “of course we can have a festival for twenty thousand people in these fields” had started to add little extras to Aberdyfi life.

He told me that he had thought about the cinema for a whole weekend. Viewed it on the Friday and bought it on the Tuesday. He had also been influential in the rented tree house holiday villas I had just left.

“Absurdly fantastic things,” I ventured.

“All the better for that.” Geoff extolled the virtue of enterprise out here in the sticks. People worked harder for less money. They were prepared to try out new ideas. There was little competition.

Geoff had also bought a disused boat yard. “It wasn't expensive,” he told me. He had built a clubhouse on his boatyard site by dragging an old fishing boat up on the hard and cutting a door in it. He was currently heavily involved in the attempt to hold onto the Shed of the Year award. He won in 2012 by erecting a shed on a floating pontoon and mooring it just offshore.