Strata Florida Abbey, the cultural and political heart of medieval Wales
THE ANCIENT BOROUGH of CARDIGAN is a compact maritime town of narrow streets, attractive, jumbling old houses of many colours, and a lovely five-arched bridge across the Teifi, which was built in 1726. It still has the air of a busy port, which it once was, until the river silted up and the railway arrived in the 19th century. There is a Cardigan in Nova Scotia, named by Welsh settlers in memory of the town from which they sailed to the New World.
The name Cardigan is an anglicised pronunciation of Ceredigion, the Welsh name for the county of Cardiganshire. Although Cardigan is close to the Welsh woollen trade, the woollen garment called a cardigan gets its name, not from the town, but from the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade, and wore such a type of sweater beneath his uniform to keep out the cold.
The original Cardigan Castle was built in 1100, in wood, by the Norman knight Gilbert de Clare. In 1136, it was captured by Lord Rhys ap Gruffydd, who rebuilt it in stone. In 1176, Lord Rhys put on THE FIRST-EVER NATIONAL EISTEDDFOD at the castle.
The modern annual ROYAL NATIONAL EISTEDDFOD is the largest competitive music and poetry festival in Europe. It is conducted entirely in Welsh and is a celebration of Welsh language, art and culture. Eisteddfod means ‘a gathering’, and it evolved from ancient tournaments where musicians and poets would compete against each other for a ‘chair’ at a nobleman’s table. Winners could be assured of regular employment from wealthy patrons.
The festival takes place at the beginning of August and lasts for eight days, attracting up to 6,000 competitors and 180,000 visitors. It is held in North or South Wales in alternate years to avoid regional bias.
The most prestigious prizes awarded at the National Eisteddfod are the Chair and the Crown, both for poetry. The Crown is given to the best free-metre poet, while the Chair is won by the best strict-metre poetry written in cynghanedd, which is a system of chiming that involves internal rhyme along with assonance and consonance.
The Eisteddfod at Cardigan Castle in 1176 is the first recorded occasion at which poets and musicians from all over Wales attended. In 1523 an Eisteddfod was held at Caerwys, which laid down some regulations, and in 1819, during an Eisteddfod at the Ivy Bush Hotel in Carmarthen, the first ‘Gorsedd’, or assembly of Druidical bards, took place at a festival. Since then the ritual Gorsedd of Bards has become an established part of the National Eisteddfod.
The first ‘modern’ National Eisteddfod, conducted as we recognise it today, was held in 1861, at Aberdare in Glamorgan. The National Eisteddfod Association was formed in 1880, charged with staging the annual event.
ABERYSTWYTH IS AT the heart of Wales, set right at the centre between North and South, a capital in all but name. It is the largest town on Cardigan Bay, a University town, Book Town and seaside resort. Being cut off from the rest of the world by mountains, Aberystwyth has had to fall back on its own resources and learn to survive by itself. There is a certain bloody-mindedness about Aberystwyth that is quite exhilarating.
The setting is stunning. A backdrop of steep green hills, a wide sweep of bay, stately but paint-peeling Edwardian guesthouses following a gently curving promenade. A walk from south to north along the Promenade and Marine Terrace takes you past some of the many faces of ‘Aber’.
Now a bustling modern marina, this used to be one of Wales’s busiest harbours for fishing and shipbuilding. It is fed by two rivers, the Ystwyth and the Rheidol, the latter acclaimed as THE ‘STEEPEST’ RIVER IN BRITAIN.
Standing above the harbour on a rocky promontory are the scattered remnants of Aberystwyth Castle, begun in 1277 by Edward I to protect and subdue the walled settlement at its feet. It changed hands many times before Owain Glyndwr made it his base in 1404. In 1637, a mint was set up in the great hall to produce coins made with silver from the local mines. These were used to pay Charles I’s soldiers during the Civil War, when Oliver Cromwell had control of the London mint. Cromwell duly slighted the castle in 1649. The mighty west gatehouse is particularly impressive.
Next to the castle is Aberystwyth’s most striking and best-loved building, the Old College. Originally, there was a John Nash villa here called Castle House, built in 1790. When the railway arrived from Shrewsbury in the 1860s, the entrepreneur who had brought it to the town, Thomas Savin, purchased the villa and had it transformed into a grand Victorian Gothic hotel, in anticipation of a tourist boom. In an early example of the package tour, he offered special rates to anyone who booked a return railway ticket at Euston in London. He then sat back and waited for the guests to arrive. Alas, they never did, at least not enough to fill the huge hotel, which went bust, and in 1872 Savin sold up.
The beneficiaries were a collection of Welsh patriots who were looking for somewhere with size and prestige to locate Wales’s first university. Savin’s hotel was perfect and became home to THE FIRST UNIVERSITY COLLEGE IN WALES. In 1896, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, visited Aberystwyth to be installed as THE FIRST CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES. The occasion also marked THE LAST EVER PUBLIC APPEARANCE BY FOUR-TIME PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM GLADSTONE.
In 1919, the FIRST DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD was established at the Old College in Aberystwyth.
The University has since moved to a new campus on Penglais Hill to the east of the town, and Old College now serves mainly as a museum and university administration centre.
It is an awe-inspiring building, with its solid porte-cochère entrance and a Tyrolean-style tower forming the southern extremity, complete with mosaic of Archimedes receiving the symbols of Science and Industry. Old College is completely out of character with the rest of the sea front, and yet it adds a glamourous quirkiness that somehow suits the personality of this extraordinary town.
Just past Old College is the pier, which marks the end of the Promenade and the start of Marine Terrace. Built in 1864, the pier used to extend 900 ft (274m) out into the bay, but was swept off its spindly legs by a storm in 1938 and now just paddles at the water’s edge.
The Welsh Language Society, Cymdeithas yr Iaith, has its headquarters on Marine Terrace, which gives credence to the story that it was here that the movement to save the Welsh language really began in 1963. The Society had been set up in that year in response to a radio lecture by Saunders Lewis in 1962, highlighting the disappearance of the Welsh language. A member caught wobbling along the sea front on his bicycle, with his girlfriend on the back, received a summons, which he ignored, as it was written only in English. The subsequent furore sparked further protests, notably at Trefechan Bridge in Aberystwyth on 23 February 1963, with members being imprisoned for non-payment of their fines. This in turn led to a nation-wide campaign which eventually won recognition for Welsh as an official language. Since then, all place-names and official documents must be written in both English and Welsh, and today some 20 per cent of the native population of 2.8 million speak Welsh.
For some reason, it is traditional when taking a bracing stroll along the Promenade to ‘kick the bar’, or railings, at the bottom of Constitution Hill at the north end of Marine Terrace. There are several explanations for this bizarre custom which is noted as far back as 1900. The most plausible theory is that male students, hanging around outside Alexandra Hall, the girls’ hostel, would kick the bar in frustration and impatience while waiting for the girls to emerge. Alexandra Hall, opened by Princess Alexandra in 1896, was deliberately built as far away from the Old College as possible, to prevent unseemly behaviour. The Hall became run down when the university moved, but is now restored.
CONSTITUTION HILL overlooks Aberystwyth from the north and rises to a height of 430 ft (130 m), providing panoramic views of Cardigan Bay. At the summit is THE BIGGEST CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE WORLD, moved here from the castle in 1896 and restored in 1985. You can reach it either by climbing the steep cliff path or, as less active folk have been doing since 1896, via THE LONGEST ELECTRIC CLIFF RAILWAY IN BRITAIN. Sitting in one of the stepped compartments watching mid Wales unfold before you, while the sloping carriage trundles sedately up the 1 in 4 slope, is one of Wales’s most rewarding experiences.
One of the institutions that can be seen from Constitution Hill, halfway up a neighbouring height, is the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES, which opened in 1937. It is one of five copyright libraries in Britain that have the right to receive a free copy of every printed work published in Britain or Ireland. (The others are in London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge.) Amongst the library’s five million or so books are the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Mabinogion (see Pembrokeshire), and THE FIRST BOOK WRITTEN IN Welsh, the Black Book of Carmarthen, dating from the 12th century. Thanks to the library and the university’s own collection of over one million books, Aberystwyth is said to have THE HIGHEST RATIO OF BOOKS TO PEOPLE IN THE WORLD – six million books to 20,000 students and inhabitants.
THE LAST STEAM RAILWAY OPERATED BY BRITISH RAIL, until privatised in 1989, THE VALE OF RHEIDOL RAILWAY runs from the centre of Aberystwyth, along the south side of the Rheidol Valley to Devil’s Bridge, 12 miles (19 km) inland. The journey takes one hour, climbs nearly 600 ft (180 m) and passes through some of the most rugged and dramatic scenery in Wales. The railway was built in 1902 to carry timber and ore from the lead mines down to the harbour at Aberystwyth. It had to be narrow gauge to negotiate the twists and gradients of the terrain, although the carriages are of normal width.
At DEVIL’S BRIDGE the waters of the River Mynach cascade down 400 ft (120 m) through a deep gorge to join the River Rheidol, creating a series of lively waterfalls. At one point the gorge is spanned by no fewer than three bridges, one on top of another. The highest is an iron bridge of 1901, below that a stone bridge from 1753 and, at the bottom, the original Pont-y-gwr-Drwg or Devil’s Bridge, also of stone, which legend says was put there by the Devil himself to lure souls across the water. In fact it was probably built by the monks of the abbey at Strata Florida, possibly as early as the 11th century.
The wild beauty of Devil’s Bridge is somewhat diluted by the fact that this is now one of Wales’s most popular tourist spots, and the narrow pathway past the bridges and the waterfalls can resemble a mob scene at busy times. You also have to pay. But none of this detracts from the essential magic of the dancing water and the beautiful woodland setting.
The main beneficiary of all this tourist attention is the Hafod Arms Hotel, built in the 1830s by the 4th Duke of Newcastle when he bought the Hafod estate.
HAFOD HOUSE, WHICH once stood at the centre of the Hafod estate, a few miles to the south near Pontrhydygroes, was the first house to be built in Wales solely for the purposes of beauty and pleasure. THOMAS JOHNES (1748–1816) inherited the estate on the death of his father in 1780. He was a passionate follower of the new ‘Picturesque’ movement sweeping the country whose adherents, rather than seeing nature as threatening and barbaric, believed that man could tame the wilderness by planting trees and flowers, creating gardens and vistas to enhance and frame the natural setting.
In 1786 Johnes commissioned Thomas Baldwin of Bath to build a neo-Gothic country house in this remote valley of the Ystwyth, around which he designed a magnificent park, planting thousands of trees and creating lakes, monuments, hidden gardens and grottoes. A line of illustrious visitors came to see this paradise. Turner painted the house against the mountain backdrop in 1811, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so taken with the place that apparently it was the ‘stately pleasure dome’ of Hafod that featured in the opium-induced dream which inspired him to write ‘Kubla Khan’.
Thomas Johnes and his family were hit by a series of misfortunes in the early 19th century. In 1807 the house burned down and had to be rebuilt, possibly with the help of the leading architect of the Picturesque, John Nash. In 1811, Thomas’s beloved daughter Mariamne, spirited and intelligent despite having a deformity of the spine, died at the age of 27, leaving her parents bereft. Eventually, the sheer cost of Hafod broke Thomas and he died in 1816.
Sir Francis Chantrey’s moving sculpture of Mariamne in Hafod church was badly damaged when the church suffered a major fire in 1932. Hafod House passed through a number of owners before becoming vacant in 1946 and finally being declared unsafe and demolished in 1958.
It seems a tragic way for such a lovely place to end, but the glorious setting can never pale and the gardens and woods remain, slowly being restored to their former glory.
FOURTEEN MILES (23 KM) west of Aberystwyth, in the wild and lonely hills, are the ruins of the greatest abbey in Wales, Strata Florida, Ystrad Fflur, the Valley of Flowers.
Flowers still abound here, everywhere you look, sprouting from the remaining stones and monuments and mosaic tiled floors. There is very little left of the magnificent church, once bigger than St David’s Cathedral, except the peaceful atmosphere and the wondrous arch of the west door, which seems to frame the whole of Wales with its shapely bands of rich and delicate stonework.
The arch has become an iconic image of Wales, and is a remarkable survivor from the Cistercian abbey founded here in 1184. Under the patronage of Lord Rhys ap Gryffudd, Strata Florida became not just a religious centre but the cultural and political heart of medieval Wales. Welsh princes were buried here and Welsh rulers assembled here on important ‘state’ occasions, such as in 1238 when they were summoned by Llywelyn the Great to swear allegiance to his son Dafydd. In 1294, the ‘Westminster Abbey of Wales’ was burned on the orders of Edward I, and suffered several further blows before Henry VIII finally had it destroyed in 1539.
In the abbey graveyard, buried beneath an ancient yew tree, is one of the greatest medieval Welsh poets, DAFYDD AP GWILYM. Considered on a par with Chaucer, Dafydd wrote with great humour of love and of his failed pursuit of women, in language that was both beautiful and bawdy.
Nearby is a modest headstone inscribed: ‘The left leg and part of the thigh of Henry Hughes, cooper, cut off and interr’d here June 18th 1756’. Hughes lost his leg in a farming accident and then, despite having one foot in the grave, emigrated to America, where the rest of him is buried.
Perhaps most poignant of all is the grave of an unknown soldier from the Afghan wars, whose frozen body was found beside the mysterious Teifi pools, near the source of the River Teifi, in the hills north of the abbey in 1929. All he had in his pocket was a photograph of a young girl and a copy of Old Moore’s Almanack. The local people buried him here and wrote on his gravestone,
He died upon the hillside drear
Alone, where snow was deep.
By strangers he was carried here
Where princes also sleep.
Dafydd ap Gwilym would have been proud.
THE QUEST FOR the Holy Grail is over! It was in Wales all the time. At Nanteos, deep in the hills south-east of Aberystwyth.
The Holy Grail was the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, and was thought to have miraculous healing qualities. According to Sir Thomas Malory in his Le Morte d’Arthur, written in the 15th century, Joseph of Arimathea brought the cup to Glastonbury, where he built a church in which to house it. Guardianship of the Grail passed on to the monks of the subsequent abbey founded at Glastonbury in the 6th century by St David.
When Glastonbury was threatened with Dissolution at the time of Henry VIII, a group of the monks left with the Grail for the comparative safety of the Cistercian abbey at Strata Florida, hidden away in the wild folds of Wales. However, the King’s commissioners soon caught up with them, and the monks had to flee again, this time west across the hills to the secluded valley of the nightingales, Nanteos, where the Lord of the Manor gave them sanctuary. The monks remained at Nanteos for the remaining years of their lives, and as the last monk lay dying, he placed the Grail into the hands of his host, bidding him to keep it safe at Nanteos, until such time as the church came to reclaim it. And there it remained. Pilgrims came from afar to sample its healing properties and miracles apparently occurred that enhanced the legend of the Grail.
The Nanteos of today, one of Wales’s most handsome Georgian houses, was built in 1739 for Thomas Powell. His descendant, George Paul Powell, put the cup on show and opened up the house for people to come and look at it. Quite small, just 3 inches (7.5 cm) deep and 5 inches (13 cm) round, there was not much left to see because, across the years, over-enthusiastic pilgrims had bitten chunks out of it. George Powell befriended the composer Richard Wagner in London and invited him to stay at Nanteos. Inspired by the Nanteos Cup, as it was called, Wagner is said to have begun composing Parsifal, his opera based on the story of the Holy Grail, in the music room at Nanteos.
The last of the Powells sold Nanteos in the 1980s, and when she left she took the cup with her. It is now said to be sitting in a bank vault somewhere in Herefordshire, but no one quite knows, so maybe the Quest for the Holy Grail is not quite over.
Whether any of this is true or not, Nanteos, tucked away in the hills at the end of its long drive, is a wonderfully romantic house, not spoiled at all by becoming a hotel. It certainly feels as though there could be monks buried beneath the house, or tunnels from the basement leading to Aberystwyth Castle …
Close together on the high lonely moorlands of PLYNLIMMON, which have traditionally separated North and South Wales, are the sources of two of Britain’s mightiest rivers, the Severn and the Wye. The River Severn is BRITAIN’S LONGEST RIVER. On its 217-mile (349 km) journey to the sea from Plynlimmon, it is crossed by 100 bridges, 40 of them in Wales. The River Wye is 152 miles (245 km) long and is regarded as Britain’s most scenic river.
The coastline of Cardiganshire is never less than ravishing, but there are some places along the way that can even be inspirational. One such spot is the windswept headland of LOCHTYN, above the quaint fishing village of Llangranog, north-west of Cardigan. The composer Sir EDWARD ELGAR stayed near here in 1902 and loved to wander along the cliffs and enjoy the stunning views over Cardigan Bay. On one such occasion he heard some Welsh folk singing on the beach below, and their songs inspired him to write one of his most popular compositions, Introduction and Allegro for Strings.
The churchyard in the little village of ABERATH, a little way north of Aberaeron, is the proud possessor of the ashes of SIR GERAINT EVANS (1922–92), one of the world’s greatest opera singers, who made the roles of Figaro and Verdi’s Falstaff his own. Having performed at all the leading opera houses in the world, he began semi-retirement at his holiday home in Aberaeron in 1982, where he acted as a lifeguard. He died of a heart attack, and his ashes were laid to rest at Aberath, close to those of his brother-in-law, the talented Welsh rugby outside half-back Glyn Davies, winner of ten caps. Sir Geraint Evans was a co-founder of Harlech Television Wales in 1967.
Standing proudly on a rise at RHYDOWEN, south of New Quay, is a splendid Palladian chapel opened in 1733 as THE FIRST ARMINIAN CHAPEL IN WALES. In 1876, the chapel’s minister, Dylan Thomas’s great-uncle, William Thomas, was evicted by the landlord, who objected to his liberal sermons. A member of the congregation evicted with him was Anna Lloyd Jones, mother of the American architect FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT. Before they emigrated to America from New Quay in 1844, the Joneses had farmed at nearby Blaenalltddu, where there is a plaque on the farmhouse wall announcing the birthplace of Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who became a Unitarian preacher in Chicago. One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s best early works was the Unity Temple in Chicago, built in 1905.
For fans of the architect John Nash, a visit to LLANERCHAERON, just south of Aberaeron, is a must. This exquisite house, built in 1796 and bequeathed to the National Trust in 1989, is the finest and most complete of Nash’s early works in Wales. It forms the centrepiece of a rare, unspoilt example of an 18th-century Welsh gentleman’s estate.
South of Rhydowen is the ROCK MILL WOOLLEN MILL, THE LAST WORKING WATER-POWERED WOOLLEN MILL IN WALES. It was built in 1890 by John Morgan, and his descendants still weave there today, in the traditional way. The Teifi valley was the centre of the Welsh woollen industry, based on Tregaron, where sheep drovers would assemble their flocks before driving them to markets in England.
Standing on the banks of the River Camddwr beside the lonely road from Tregaron to Llyn Brianne is SOAR-Y-MYNYDD chapel, THE MOST REMOTE CHAPEL IN WALES. It was built in 1820 by Ebeneezer Richards, the minister from Tregaron.
The eerily beautiful CORS CARON bog, north of Tregaron, is THE LARGEST AREA OF PEAT BOG IN ENGLAND AND WALES. Working the peat ended in 1960, and much of the bog is now a National Nature Reserve. It is home to otters, polecats and water voles and has been at the forefront of the restoration of the red kite, once extremely rare but now often seen in the skies above Cors Caron. It is THE ONLY HABITAT OF THE BRITISH BLACK ADDER.
Soar-y-Mynydd
Buried in the churchyard at LLANDYFRIOG, 2 miles (3.2 km) east of Newcastle Emlyn, is THOMAS HESLOP (1780–1814), victim of THE LAST FATAL DUEL TO BE FOUGHT IN WALES. Heslop gallantly challenged a rascal called John Benyon to a duel, after Benyon had made ungentlemanly remarks about the barmaid at the Salutation Inn in Newcastle Emlyn. The duel took place in what are now the Old Cilgwyn Gardens a little to the north, and Heslop was shot dead. ‘Alas, poor Heslop,’ it says on the slate covering his grave. Benyon was run out of town and emigrated to America.
Buried in the churchyard at SILIAN near Lampeter, is JULIAN CAYO-EVANS (1937‒95), leader of the Free Wales Army in the 1960s. He was one of several members rounded up and imprisoned for public order offences before the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1969.
THE FIRST GAME OF RUGBY PLAYED IN WALES took place at ST DAVID’S COLLEGE, Lampeter, in 1850. St David’s College was a founder member of the Welsh Rugby Union, established in the Castle Hotel, Neath, in 1881. The college is THE OLDEST INSTITUTION IN WALES and THE OLDEST IN ENGLAND AND WALES TO AWARD DEGREES, after Oxford and Cambridge.
THE FIRST PERMANENT PRINTING PRESS IN WALES was established in 1718 by Isaac Carter in the village of ADPAR, across the River Teifi from Newcastle Emlyn.
The sturdy 13th-century church of St David’s at LLANDDEWI BREFI stands on a high mound of special significance. Sometime in the middle of the 6th century, a Synod was held here, attended by St David. The crowds were so huge that when St David stood up to preach no one except those at the front could see or hear him. As he began speaking, however, the ground rose beneath him until he stood in full view of everyone and his voice was carried on the wind so that he could be heard by all. Today, Llanddewi Brefi has found new fame as the home of Dafydd, ‘the only gay in the village’ from the television comedy series Little Britain.