Xenophilia 2 - Ancestral Voices
by Mihangel
Segment 3
Cwmystradllyn 2001
Saturday threatened uncertain weather. Tad knew how much our excursions together meant to us and, even though we were likely to get soaked, he didn't offer to take us by car. Nor did we ask him to - he had his own agenda in getting the garden put to bed for the winter. The scooter could not go fast, and the journey would take well over an hour. Down the A487 we buzzed, past Caernarfon, past Penygroes. Half a mile beyond Dolbenmaen and its medieval motte we branched off left past the woollen mill, and turned left again onto the narrow and winding cul-de-sac which leads up Cwmystradllyn. A mile or so further on, as I carefully negotiated a blind right turn, I nearly drove into the wall in astonishment.
It was a murky day. Heavy black clouds were rolling in above. Ahead and slightly to left, the rounded mass of Moel Hebog, capped with a precociously early sprinkling of snow, glowed evilly under the leaden sky. And directly in front of us rose Ty Mawr, haloed in glory by a solitary ray of sun which burst like the eye of God through the clouds. Perched on an outcrop rising steep from the stream below, the mill looked for all the world like the ruins of a medieval abbey. So monumentally grand a building was totally unexpected in this landscape where all other human architecture - such few farmhouses and barns as there were - was small-scale and functional. It was easy to see why this was called Ty Mawr, the big house.
We parked the scooter in a widening of the road just short of the bridge below the outcrop, and as we took our helmets off we gazed up at the gable looming high above us. The mill, we knew, had been bought by the National Park twenty years ago, consolidated, and left open for anyone to visit at any time. The entrance was beside the bridge, in the form of a kissing gate. We made it live up to its name, as we always did at any kissing gate, provided we were alone. We scrambled up a rough and slippery path through the waste tips until, on the right, a lofty archway opened in the foot of the mill wall. Inside, we found ourselves on the floor of the deep pit, cut at one end from the solid rock, which had once housed the great waterwheel for driving the machinery.
We emerged and climbed further up to the main level. The stone-built shell of the building was complete, but all the machinery and floors and roof were gone. It had had two storeys plus an attic, and in one quarter a basement dictated by the lie of the land. On the side away from the stream, two curving branches were thrown off the tramway to enter the mill, one on the ground floor, the other, via an embankment with a great retaining wall, on the upper floor. Inside, empty sockets for beams and joists showed where the floors had been, and we disturbed a peregrine that had been sheltering in one of them. The lower floor was split into two by the chasm of the wheel-pit, the wheel having been set entirely below ground level. The whole mill was lit by serried ranks of round-arched windows and doors. It was quite clear that no expense had been spared. The result was a building of immense architectural power, even more impressive, perhaps, as an empty shell than when complete. Awe-inspiring, we decided, was the best description. We saluted James Brunlees the engineer who had designed it, and Evan Jones the local mason who had built it.
Our article told us that roofing slates were split and trimmed in the gwaliau or huts in the quarry - the usual procedure in those days - and that the mill produced only slabs. Raw blocks delivered to the ground floor by tramway from the quarry were sawn and planed into slabs by great machines invented by Edwyn Dixon the manager. The mill's speciality was chimney pieces - mantlepieces and fire surrounds - which were polished and carved by light machinery and by hand on the upper floor.
We spent the morning exploring the site, photocopy in hand, arguing out the details, until we understood its workings. We ate our sandwiches sheltered from the wind behind the embankment. One or two farm tractors and the mail van passed on the road below, but otherwise we saw not a soul all day. We then traced the route of the water supply to its take-off point on the stream. We followed the tramway a short distance in either direction: its engineering was generous, and no expense had been spared here either. But the rain now set in, and drove us to shelter in the tunnel which fed the water to the wheel. Through gaps in the squalls we could make out the quarry at the head of the valley, two miles away, and the hillside where Treforys ought to be, though we could see no sign of it from here. But we chickened out of going further today. Instead, cold and damp but uplifted and happy, we mounted the scooter and made our long way home, to soak in a hot bath rather than in wet clothes.
Next day the weather was similar. This time we sailed past Ynysypandy without stopping and continued for three quarters of a mile, past the old school, to the end of the tarmac at Tyddyn Mawr. This was the furthest house still occupied. After the second world war, we had read, the dam on the lake was enlarged to supply mains water to Llyn, and at the same time the few farms around the lake were bought out and the buildings stripped to avoid pollution to the reservoir. We walked along the tramway above the lake, aiming today for the quarry.
We passed Plasllyn, the house built by the slate company for the manager - not Dixon the over-manager who lived elsewhere, but Thomas Evans the foreman who supervised day-to-day operations. Typical of quarry managers' houses in the mountains, it was surrounded by a small plantation. Its last use was as a youth hostel; but it was reputedly haunted, and after the last warden had run screaming into the night it was demolished, leaving nothing but a mound of rubble, though the stables were still there under their bare rafters.
We sploshed through some wet cuttings before the tramway swung right to enter the quarry. The towering waste tips were held back from spilling on to the track by a great retaining wall. It was an extraordinary sight. About fourteen feet high, it did not stand vertical but curved outwards over our heads to overhang by a good five feet.
"This must be the Wailing Wall," said Huw as we prowled along its length. "That website had a picture of it. Grief, the stones are monstrous. They must be corbelled. Couldn't stay up otherwise. Yes, look." We had reached the far end and could see the thing in cross-section, with its horizontal courses each projecting beyond the one below. "Some of those stones must be nine feet long. But why build it like that?" I had no answer.
Beyond the Wailing Wall lay a flat area with the ruins of a row of buildings. It was quite easy to work out from their design that the end parts had been the smithy, office, and stables. In the middle was a double block of two-storey barracks. Everything was an empty shell or a total ruin. Beyond again, the tramway curved round to the foot of the incline into the quarry.
We stood back and looked up it. Just to the right was the great re-entrant of the quarry workings blasted into the hillside.
"That's four main galleries," I said, counting the stepped floors. "Apart from the one we're on. They must be, what, fifty feet apart, vertically. And look, another two, three, four smaller floors higher up."
Huw was scanning the long waste tips which ran along the contours in both directions from each floor. "Am I crazy?" he asked. "It looks as if there's far more waste in those tips than can possibly have come out of the quarry."
"Well, it's bound to be deceptive. I mean, a cubic yard of solid rock takes up much more than a cubic yard of space when it's broken into bits. Anyway, slate quarrying's always fiendishly wastful. Tad told me once that even at the very best quarries, for every ten tons they got out of the ground, only one ton was sold. The rest ended on the tips. Bad quarries might sell only one ton out of every hundred, or worse. And we know Gorseddau was lousy."
Up we went, to the first floor, and looked over the edge. The floor below seemed a long way down: how often had men fallen over? The gallery itself around the quarry pit was littered with lumps of rock, some as big as cars or even small lorries, either abandoned there when working stopped or fallen since.
"Hey, Elfed, look at these!" Huw had noticed some deep holes in the native rock, most of them split open longitudinally so that they appeared as semicircular grooves.
"Shot-holes for blasting. But they're enormous." They were about four inches in diameter. I had been round a number of quarries and knew roughly what was what, but had never seen the like. "They were usually made by jumper - a sort of long bar with a chisel end, worked by hand. Lift, twist, drop, lift, twist, drop. Yes - there's a typical jumper hole." It was little more than an inch across. "These monsters must have been drilled by machine. Yes, look, you can see the marks from a rotating bit. Wonder what it was powered by."
We could not answer that either, but explored along the waste tips, those on one side of the quarry provided with small gwaliau or dressing huts, those on the other with corbelled blast shelters. Two more floors proved much the same. Then rain driven by a strong north-easterly began to lash down, and drove us back to the tramway where we tried to shelter in the lee of the Wailing Wall. As we cowered, we noticed that some of the softer rocks had graffiti scratched into them, of all dates from the 1850s to the present. I spotted one which was out of the ordinary, and pointed to it with my stick.
"Huw, look."
It read:
RJ © JG 1857
Beside it was
JG © RJ
"Hmmm. Could be our John Griffiths, I suppose." said Huw, seeing what I was getting at. "But could be any other JG, boy or girl. Like Robert Jones declaring his passion for Jane Griffiths, and the other way round. Though I wouldn't have thought Jane would write graffiti."
The voice of reason. None the less, I had a private and obstinate feeling that the graffiti were speaking to us. But we were getting cold, chickened out again, and headed for home. Once more we had not met a single human being all day.
We had showers when we were in a hurry, as on weekday mornings, but for driving out the cold, we agreed, a bath was second to none, and second only to bed for togetherness. This was because our bath was old-fashioned and large, large enough to hold us both at once. In it, we were quite infantile. We had a rotund little blue and yellow rubber shark for squirting water in a thin jet which, we found, was extraordinarily stimulating when played on the pidyn. Stimulation by jet invariably led on to stimulation by other means. So it did that evening. Fulfilled, we sat there face to face, legs interlocked, each with a foot in the other's crotch, while Huw drew patterns in the thick wet hair on my thighs: something I could not do to him because his legs were as smooth as a baby's.
He traced HM © EM on one thigh.
I replied by tracing JG © RJ on the other.
"You've got that on the brain, haven't you?" he asking, grinning at me.
"As well as on the thigh. Yes, I know. I'm a persistent sod. But I have this gut feeling that these two are ... counterparts." I pointed from one thigh to the other. "It won't go away."
He responded by lunging forward to kiss me, and the tidal wave washed the messages away.
After tea, Tad produced another book. "I'd forgotten I'd got this." It was The Slate Quarries of North Wales in 1873, a collection of articles published in the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald. "I know this is rather late for your purposes, but it's got a description of a drilling machine patented by a certain Dixon. Is that the same Dixon who was manager of Gorseddau? He was a bit of an inventor, wasn't he?"
Yes, it was the same. It described a drill of the kind used by miners for developing a quarry. It made big shot-holes like those we had seen today, each holding 25 pounds of gunpowder, and the blast loosened huge blocks of rock. That fitted well, though it was hand-powered: it must have taken an awful lot of men an awful long time to drill a deep hole.
On Monday we returned to Gorseddau for the third time. It had to be Treforys today, and mercifully the weather had improved. Again we followed the tramway from Tyddyn Mawr, but by the ruins of Talyllyn farm we cut up to the left along a track behind Plasllyn. Our map of 1888 showed the village as three streets running above each other along the hillside, dead straight and parallel, and connected by a link road. And there they were, camouflaged, when seen from a distance, by tussocky grass and dying rushes, but obvious when you were on them. 'Streets' now seemed too grandiose a name. They were very rough, very steep where they cut across or through naked outcrops of rock, and barely usable, we imagined, by wheeled vehicles. The drainage had gone to pot and stretches of them were now deep bog.
Along each street, on the downhill side only and equally merging into the landscape, stood semi-detached houses, well separated from their neighbours. According to the map there were eighteen blocks or thirty-six houses in total. Each block proved identical, its two houses being mirror images of each other. They were in the typical Welsh rural long-house style, essentially single-storey, with the door on the side away from the street. Each had three rooms. The main living room was some twelve feet by fifteen, with a sizeable fireplace for a range. Off it led a slightly smaller room with a smaller fireplace. Over the smaller room but not the larger was a croglofft or attic room, entirely in the roof space, reached presumably by ladder. The walls of some houses had collapsed virtually to ground level, while those of others, even the gable walls, were almost complete.
The streets were bounded by a continuous waist-high stone wall on the uphill side, and on the downhill by a similar wall except where it was interrupted by houses and by gaps for access. As we wandered round the back, we noticed ditches, some of them still in water, running straight down to the street below. "Elfed," said Huw, prowling, "each house had a long strip of land, bordered by these ditches. A garden."
"See what you mean. But dunno about a garden. Look at it - just rushes and rocks. It must be a thousand feet up here, and fiendishly exposed - what could you grow here? Potatoes, possibly? And chickens? Or there might have been a family pig - that was common enough - though I can't see any pig sties. Wooden, perhaps. Though you'd have to import wood, while there's all the stone in the world for free."
"Same goes for tai bach - privies. Where did they crap? Into the ditches, which washed it all down to the street below?"
"Or into buckets, which they emptied any old where?" We never solved that problem, but just beyond the far end of the middle street we found a spring, the only obvious water source for the whole village. It was time for lunch, and we sat on the nearest dry perch, the broken-down street wall beside the third house from the spring.
"You know, Huw, the best-preserved houses are the ones nearest to the spring. I wonder if they were the last to be occupied."
"That would add up. When we get to the census, I hope it'll give house numbers, so we can work out who lived in which. But then we don't know which end of which street the numbering would start."
"Most logical, I'd have thought, if No. 1 was at the west end of the lower street. Nearest to Porthmadog. If that's right we're now at" - I counted on the map - "No. 20."
When we had finished, as I stood up, I dislodged the slab I had been sitting on, which had formed part of the coping of the wall.
"Hang on," said Huw. "Isn't there writing on that?" It was a rectangular slab of sawn slate, about fifteen inches by twelve by four. I picked it up, put it flat on the wall, and brushed loose dirt off. Yes, there was writing on it. The first line, quite deeply cut in fairly neat capitals, read
MAE ROWLAND JONES YN CARU JOHN GRIFFITHS
Beneath it was a large heart. Under the heart was the date,
CHWEFROR 14EG 1858
On either side of the heart, rather cruder lettering read
A MAE JOHN GRIFFITHS YN CARU ROWLAND JONES
Rowland Jones loves John Griffiths, and vice versa, 14th February 1858. We looked at each other open-mouthed. No way could I utter a word. Huw had to say it for me.
"You were right, Elfed. They're the same people as on the Wailing Wall. They were gay. Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. Gay. In a macho society like this. And if this is your John, then your great-great-grandfather was gay."
"Not a joke, then?" I asked, finding my voice.
"It's not the sort of thing you'd do as a joke, is it? Look at the date - it's a ffolant. A valentine. Surely they wrote it themselves. They must have brought the slab up from Ty Mawr - it's sawn. There's hardly any other sawn stuff round here. And look at the lichen on it, only on these three edges. It must have sat like this." He fitted it against the surviving stretch of coping, where the stones stood on edge, at right angles to the line of the wall. "When the coping was complete, nobody would ever see the writing. Not till the slab was knocked down by a sheep, or a man. It was hidden, deliberately. And don't you think they put it here because it was nearest to where one of them lived? No. 20?"
I couldn't argue with his reasoning. I knew in my bones that it was sound. I couldn't prove it, not yet, but none the less I knew for sure that my ancestor four generations back had been here, on this exact spot, with his lover. Had they been in the little bedroom barely six feet away? Could they there have ... ? I suddenly got rampant.
Huw knew exactly what was going on in my mind, and in my pants. "Elfed, cariad, come inside." There he hugged me, hard against hard, and kissed me. The floor was thick with sheep shit, but we didn't have to lie down. He squatted, undid my belt and zip, and loved me. Then I loved him. Precisely where, surely, they had loved each other, nearly a hundred and forty four years before.
When it was over, I found myself caught in a complex mix of emotions, and tears rolled down my cheeks. Love, yes of course; love for Huw, as ever. But much more than that. Again Huw read my mind, and again hugged me close.
"It's relief of a sort, isn't it, Elfed?" he murmured. "However understanding people are, people like Tad, we always feel odd men out, don't we? In our own little world, in Llandygái, at school, we're odd men out, as far as we know. Iawn, we know we're not freaks. We know we're far from being alone, in the big wide world, nowadays. Which helps.
"And now you know that you're not alone in time. That must help. To know that you're not alone in your family tree. That you're not the first Griffiths to be gay. That even among the Griffithses you're not a freak. Is that right?"
"Yn llygad ei le, Huw. That exactly right. I know in my guts that this is my John. I've found a Griffiths I can identify with. In a way I can't even with Tad." The relief, the comfort, was immense. I felt myself reaching out to John across the years, and approving his love for Rowland. I felt John reaching out to me, and approving my love for Huw.
"Thank you, Huw. For being you. And for being here. With me." I breathed a deep sigh, and came back to the present. "Look, shall we clean the place up a bit and take some photos?"
We pulled up grass and nettles from the floor as best we could, and scraped the worst of the sheep shit away, and removed some of the tumbled stones, until the internal layout of the house was reasonably clear. We took many pictures, inside and out, including ourselves, and including the ffolant.
"What do we do with it, Elfed? If we leave it here, someone may find it and add rude remarks. Or just laugh at it. We don't want that. Oughtn't we to take it home and look after it properly?"
Yes, it was the right thing to do. We wrapped it carefully in a spare sweater and slid it into Huw's rucksack. It was heavy, but he had carried much heavier burdens before.
Any more investigation could only prove an anticlimax. "Gadaw i ni fynd," I said. Let's go. We squelched down towards the tramway. "And who was Rowland Jones, Huw? That's what we've got to find out too."
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