Heritage of Wales
Ancient Monuments and Present Words
After the celebrations of a hundred years of our National Museum and National Library in 2007, this year it is the turn of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales – the third ‘national collection’. By way of recognition in the pages of Planet magazine, a series of responses has been commissioned by writers to images from the National Monuments Record for Wales. Some of the best writers in Wales will engage with their own selections from the wealth of images made or collected over the past hundred years.
The images cared for by the Commission evoke the whole range of Welsh history, from the struggles of Palaeolithic peoples to survive in a harsh environment to the most audacious construction projects of the present day, and from the most primitive earthworks or rock carvings to masterpieces of sculpture, architecture and engineering. They include some of the oldest surviving photographs in Wales, recent aerial reconnaissance images, maps, evocative architectural record photographs of cottages, chapels, collieries and mansions, original architect’s drawings, imaginative reconstructions and three-dimensional digital models. Each of these has the capacity to tell factual stories about the past or to inspire imaginative responses.
The Royal Commission began a connection with literature soon after its foundation, when the First World War poet Edward Thomas became one of its earliest members of staff. Planet now takes that connection into its second century.
The pieces published during 2008 by Planet will be shown on the Royal Commission’s website in a growing gallery. Thousands more images can be searched online through Coflein – follow the link at the top of this page.
Damian Walford Davies
WELSH CALVARY
Unearthed, posed for an altar-
piece, he's poised to shoot
the trench along the stone-
revetted bank, ladders lashed
to a pitch of vantage. Three swells
in slacks triangulate the strain,
one whistling There is a green hill
for reasons not yet exhumed.
Gillian Clarke
AT CASTELL Y BERE
(Llywelyn ap Iorwerth 1173-1240)
Not hard to imagine them,
slipshod and slow on the slope to the summit,
hauling a castle up to the sky
in rain and wind, summer and winter,
stone by stone and timber by timber,
for his masons, carpenters, stone-carvers,
his craftsmen in leather and glass.
In sixty years it was over, surrendered.
Now, seven centuries on,
rain and wind, summer and winter
have scoured it of terror and blood.
All gone to grass. What remains
are Llywelyn's dream and his name,
and the vertebrae of a sheep -
a broken rosary dropped from the sky -
and two kites circling.
Christopher Meredith
THE CHURCHES
We live now in low places
or on mountaintops.
Don't expect us to aspire.
Skyward fingers
are for foreigners.
If we risk a tower
it squats hard
and burrows toes in shale,
lances up the better to know
its downhereness.
No. Down's where to knuckle,
clench mud
and honour stone
with our stoniness.
We fasten in hinterlands
or cling to edges
in the turn of light round cloud
where hill slithers into cliff
where mountain arches into air
where snouts of land
push into sea
that turns to light
and light that liquifies.
But at base all's earth.
It's said what's wired to rock
can draw down thunderbolts.
There are rumours of gods.
Don't trust them.
Expect no communing.
We draw you from people
to bare ledges
to woodclogged hollows
where old lonely life
endures under thorn or carapace,
to far places where
on the good days
pure water seeps
from mud.
Iwan Llwyd
BETHLEHEM TO THE CROSS
We don’t volunteer to go on that journey,
that lonely, unaccompanied road,
our soles and sinews straining
as we drag through the mud and dust that covers it:
we go because something drives us,
to challenge the horizon and the untouched stars,
to leave the bosom of those places
where no heartrending cries are heard:
to venture shaking through open country
and the endless pampa, its water dwindling,
to climb the steep, hard precipices,
through the narrow valleys and canyons, until we find
on the corner of a street, in his manger of hay,
the small man destined for the cross,
who’ll give us words along the way.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
FLAXEN
One foot on the spiral staircase
of the tower, I am stopped by a clock
holding its breath in a box,
hearing it whirr to itself
before its nine chimes tap
the heart of a man on a plough,
combing a field in a lilt of hills,
dishevelled with joy to find
the sun striking a sheaf of corn
like the hair of the woman he
left at dawn before the war
in a fold of linen, unbraided,
opening the dials of her eyes
as he pulled his shirt on one June,
the weathervane pointing
to the trenches.Yes, there was a time.
John Barnie
WHITE CASTLE
Cycling from the town was best
paying at the wooden booth
the colour of wasps' nests,
not come for history's
ground-plan as the castle's shadow
yawned and stretched
and hedgerows where yellowhammers
bred, channelled slow tarmac
streams down lanes; time told
on the cow parsleys' dials
where flies alighted
in a flicker of silence.