Llwyn-y-betws is the sort of house you might find in a welsh village, or perhaps at the end of a bumpy farm track. A house of fair proportions, a two up, two down. But Llwyn-y-betws sits in the middle of a moorland hill, with no road running to it or near it. It's as if one night it had decided it'd had enough of man and his noisy roads and had, like Baba Yaga's house stood up on two strong legs and marched itself up into the hills to sit quietly amongst the reeds and the sheep and slowly rot away. Perhaps the fabulous view of the majestic hills reflected in it's windows gave the house a sense of deep satisfaction. It could settle here. It'd had brought Hawthorn Tree with with it, they had been friends forever, and they would murmur to each other in low voices of their past life in the village and how this was what they had always dreamed of for their retirement together and wasn't it fine!
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Stone walls and slate fences. Even in the wildest of landscapes there are walls. Jigsaws of rock and slate, running for miles, through bog, over boulders, weaving around the contours, marking the boundaries, keeping in or out the stock and flock. Clothed in moss, splashed in lichen, a home for ferns and mice and wrens. Imagine, each rock, lifted, examined chosen for it's shape and size, placed with care and concentration. The farmer, the prisoner of war, the quarryman. Hard hands, hard lives. The walls... monuments of their toil. The crooked teeth of the traditional slate fence make for a great foreground to a photograph. Beautifully decorated with lichens, each tooth has its own shape and pattern. They stand shoulder to shoulder, feet buried soundly, heads bound by wire, a thin palisade of metamorphic wafers.
The mystery of the menhirs. Menhir - 'Maen hir' in welsh which means 'long stone', usually 'standing stone', sometimes orthostat, or lith.
A menhir is a large man-made upright stone, typically dating from the Bronze Age. Some stand alone. They stand, often at a tilt and radiate a deep ancient magic. Why am I here? I used to know, I'm sure... but time and weather and more time has washed the reason, or reasons away. And now I just stand and wait to fall. I'm patient, I have plenty of time. Some stand in groups, megalithic monuments of magic. Arrangements of mass that meant something amazing to somebody at sometime. We'll never know, but we can have fun guessing! |
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