Insufficiently Welsh (16 page)

A small squared-off building sat on a mound of land in the middle of the waste of a wide bay. It was glowing in the sunshine. It was called St Cwyfan's. Originally founded in the seventh century, the church I was walking towards had been built in the thirteenth century. It was about a quarter of a mile away. The foreshore I was crossing had once all been land. I was able to appreciate the power and wildness of Anglesey's south coast, which faces down St George's Channel towards the mouth of the Atlantic at the southern end of Ireland, because fields, which once joined this nodule of earth to the rest of Anglesey, had been utterly swept away by successive storms 400 years ago. The island continued to erode until the end of the nineteenth century when an architect called Harold Hughes from Llanfairfechan raised the money to protect it. He made a retaining wall around the remaining cake of island and restored the church.

Now, as I walked up the steps I passed a sign warning me of the danger of being stranded (and, indeed, of stepping backwards to get a good view of the simple building). I was greeted by the volunteers who had gathered to limewash the walls.

Lime is a magical substance to traditional restorers. “A useful, beautiful and benign natural finish”, according to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, it is catnip to a caring builder. You mix the white powder with water. It starts popping and boiling or “going off”, and then it has to be applied to a walled surface. Today it enjoys a fairly sacred status; it wasn't always so. Wordsworth hated the whitewashed cottages in the Lake District.

Personally, I prefer the slightly oatmeal off-white colour that I first encountered on a similar newly-painted chapel in Orkney. I only learned recently that that particular antique look derived from impurities. Today we have to add pigment to get it to that shade. And then we have to slap it on.

The volunteers got me a full coverall, some goggles and a pair of gloves. Lime burns, especially the eyes. Like refugees from CSI on a particularly noxious murder enquiry we paraded out to the side of the church and started applying our milky protection. Limewash hardly adheres to a brush at all. I stuck my frazzled spokes of hair, worn down by previous use, straight into the bucket and lifted out a loose liquid that seemed to pour back as quickly as I transferred it to the wall.

There were two other coats on already. Applying white on white is frustrating. Maybe that's what got Adolf Hitler into a bad mood. The house painter can enjoy the first coat, even relish the second, but lime needs five coats, starting where? Finishing where? Have I done this bit or not? Gradually we worked along the wall, feeling our way more by a sense of dampness then anything else.

Limewash flies in the face of modern convenience. It needs to be replaced every five years, perhaps more quickly if the winds blow in from St George's Channel. If storms can carry away acres of Anglesey they can certainly make short work of a few layers of damp paste. Experts will tell you that lime is best, because it breathes. Sealed-in water does the damage to old buildings. With lime coverings the damp is absorbed – but then evaporates again.

My non-expert eye, however, peering at the wall through dirt-encrusted goggles, valued something else entirely: a living response to the climate. North Wales is sometimes about embracing weather rather than fighting it. The rain and the wind come hurtling in and the side of the chapel of St Cwyfan constantly adapts. It creates a subtle impasto, like the sky in a painting by Boudin. The blank wall becomes a soothing, continually-changing canvas of fading tones.

Can a building aspire to be a living part of the landscape? Yes, if it is constructed out of the rough stones of the cliff and painted with the earth. The old church squatting down in the face of the prevailing weather, hunkered against the storms, felt entirely appropriate to its setting: simple and spiritual, despite its new and gleaming paint job.

Now I was due to continue with the help of a cycling club from Aberffraw. They started me off in gentle cycling country in the dunes of the south coast, and then let me wander across the island on my own.

–
THROUGH THE MILL
–

Halfway to my next destination, I paused in a green lane by a hedge in a road shadowed by trees. A gravelled drive ran off to the south, leading to a hidden large farmhouse. The wind rustled through the leafy tunnel above me and I hiked the bike over to a gate to gaze across a pasture to cattle and a serene, rural idyll. We were a long way from the tourist edges of Anglesey now and in the heart of Ynys Môn. This Welsh Anglesey is also known as Mam Cymru, “the mother of Wales”.

Living in a post-industrial technical world (in which we are happy to eat avocados from Israel and arrange cut flowers from Kenya) it is sometimes difficult to appreciate how important simple agricultural fertility once was. Humans radically changed their expectations and found ways of controlling their environment less than three hundred years ago. Before that, for the previous six thousand years, Anglesey represented true wealth. There was no sense of it being “a quiet and remote spot”. It was Mam Cymru. It was “the mother” of the nation because of its reputed capacity to feed the whole of Wales. These rich flat fields were like Sicily to Rome – the granary – the supply store of the country. There were once 50 windmills scattered across the elevated plain of the island to serve that harvest. Now only one remains: Melin Llynnon.

I cycled on, turned a corner and quickly spotted it ahead, standing out on a prominent hillock, 30 feet high and whitewashed, with a straight row of square windows leading up to a conical, tiled roof.

I was well ahead of the camera crew now. They wanted to get some shots of me from a distance. The site itself was breezy. There were high washed clouds. I poked my head into the first building I came to, and two women in pinafores looked up from their baking.

“Oh, we are expecting you,” said the older one. “Look. We're just making your lunch.”

Built in 1775, the mill still grinds corn, and the flour is used in the bread and cakes served in the café. Its great sails continued to turn until 1924. A storm damaged the cap in 1918 so that it couldn't turn to the wind, but it was used for a further six years whenever there was a south-west wind. It was bought in 1978 and restored by an enlightened council.

Lloyd, who met me up by the great white pepper pot itself, was preparing to close up. He was going to give me a lift to South Stack, but before he did that, he wanted to secure his machinery. Like a tall sailing ship, the power he routinely employed was immense and unpredictable. The design of the mill, which may seem Heath Robinson to us, was ingenious and precise. It used an exact technical knowledge of the capacities and limits of timber, the strength of the wind, and the capacity of the engine. It is no surprise that millers were at the forefront of industrialisation. But for this operation, he had me to help him.

Lloyd needed to lock down his sails at the right angle to the wind. There was a short piece of wood sticking out of the lower sail near to the centre of the apex. Having determined the wind direction and allowed the sails to back round so that they faced the “wrong” way, he asked me to flick a rope over this wooden protrusion, in order for him to tie the system off. It was 15 feet above my head. I needed to get a wave to travel along the rope and then loop that wave over the stick with a flick of my wrist. Lloyd showed me how to do it, pretty much with his hand behind his back, while talking to me. Then he left me to it.

Sometimes a principle can be totally comprehensible and yet impossible to perform. Years of throwing rope on boats meant that I understood how rope behaves, but the actuality of flicking the bottom of the rope and twisting it to one side, exactly in sequence, so that the slack travelling hump of rope danced to one side as it reached the top became frustrating. Eight times I nearly did it. Nearly is not enough. Lloyd meanwhile ran around his windmill attending to other business and as he passed me on one of his circumnavigations took it out of my hands and did it in one. Then he disentangled it and handed the rope back to me.

I think I did it on twist and flick number 16. And from then on I could do it every time.

Having disengaged the sails we now had to block the machinery. We went into the shell of the building, climbing upwards on narrow stairs past the carefully organised elements of the mill system. The power from the turning sails is translated to the mill wheels. But it is also used to perform all the other heavy functions of the mill. It runs a winch that lifts the sacks of corn to the very top of the building. The force of gravity can be used to separate and control the feed to the wheels. Right up in the attic under the hat of the roof we finally came to a significant and impressive piece of wooden Meccano. Vast cogs translated the horizontal turn of the sail shaft into the vertical turn of a post through the middle of the building.

Lloyd now scampered around this fearsome engine. He jumped over blocks and stepped across an open void. He encouraged me to follow him and we took up station in front of the massive piece of clockwork. The idea was to apply a chock or brake, and the active part of the brake was a long, heavy balk of timber. By jamming this into the mechanism it would prevent it turning. But I was lifting the long heavy piece of timber by one end only. The other end waved hopelessly about.

“Go on, you've got it,” said Lloyd.

I didn't think I had, but I pushed it forward and it seemed to lodge in the gap.

“That's great,” said Lloyd and led me outside onto a small balcony.

We gazed out over the sweep of Anglesey. Lloyd pointed to the hilly west where I was heading, up a steady slope, to get to the high cliffs of South Stack. We turned to look north, where the very technology that we had just settled for the night was entering a new phase. The bay was littered with wind turbines. Not many were turning.

You might have expected Lloyd, a miller, and a man who learned his trade anew in order to run the only working mill in Wales, to be an advocate of wind power and he was, for his purposes. He ground corn when the wind blew. Windmills once dominated the fens in the East of England. Similarly, they pumped when the wind blew. Both these local sources of power were used intermittently. They provided their locally required power in bursts of energy as it was needed.

Lloyd shook his head. Wind suits the needs of any system that can wait and work as required. Over a period of time the wind will blow enough to pump the fens dry and enough to deal with a harvest. But we cannot currently store electricity in any meaningful way. He wondered whether those wind machines we were looking at could ever be more than a partial solution to our current power needs.

Meanwhile we had to get on. South Stack was some miles to the west and as Lloyd pointed out, we hadn't had lunch yet.

–
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
–

At some point we transferred from one island to another: Holy Island. I must have missed the bridge on the roadway. We were suddenly simply there, at South Stack.

I stood on a high cliff looking out over the sea. I was high up again. The top of the lighthouse was way below me. The bare outcrops of the cliff tops were covered with wild flowers and seabirds circled beneath my feet.

A beautiful staircase led downwards, wheeling in slithering bends, so I took it for 400 steps through smooth-walled ramparts to a rugged, bolted metal-truss bridge, which crossed a sea gorge and deposited me on my ultimate Welsh island in the west: Ynys Lawd. The cover photo for Roxy Music's
Siren
album was taken directly below the bridge to South Stack – Bryan Ferry's idea, apparently.

This place had been home to keepers as recently as 1984. Now the light is fully automated. The keepers had left the terraced row of whitewashed houses next to the light tower earlier, because the location was considered unsafe for children, but the steep walled rock remained a self-sufficient village, as much as a sea-mark. High walls protected fields once used for crops, and even now they were thick with what looked like overgrown cabbages: a surreal organic element, like a 1940s painting.

Amongst these burgeoning vegetables and down in the tufts of coarse grass by the approach paths, hundreds of gulls were nesting, within metres of tourists like me. They lay still and beady-eyed. Their mates jumped on the walls and croaked open-mouthed aggression. Like my fish-trap island, the wild and the occupied coexisted here. Men were mere intruders, and just about tolerated.

Glancing in amongst the glaucous, forgotten house vegetables, I could see the yellow-rimmed eyes and the red-darted heads swivelling to watch me. Close up, the birds were more arrogantly perfect than they appear when they soar in flocks, or bomb rubbish tips. Herring gulls may be scavengers, there may be thousands of them, but they repay close attention. They are wind-tunnel designed: lean, jet-blasted creatures decked out in dazzling white and startling flecks of colour like a painter's contrasting highlights. I was satisfied already. This was the Galapagos of the Welsh coast. Any puffin was going to be a bonus.

More steps up the tower, this time on a regular spiral mount to the very top. You don't get any particular vantage point. The cliff top is higher and the island is closer to the rookeries. But the tower has a magnificence of its own. Built in 1808, following the Act of Union, when a Captain Hugh Evans finally persuaded Trinity House that the increased traffic with Ireland required some sort of protection, the light was secured by preparing detailed maps of all the shipwrecks along the coast. (Archaeological evidence shows that people have been sailing from Holyhead to Ireland for the past 4,000 years.) The tower rises 28 metres and is, again, a dazzling white, like the cottages that surround it, like a gull's back, like a breaker on the shore: shining with a clean and fresh seaside brilliance.