Mucking about in the Fforest Fawr, Llanddewi Brefi, Pontrhydfendigaid, and Other Orthographically Challenged Places
(Car and Driver, 1984)
Author’s note: In late 1983 a party of sixteen Car and Driver staff members, friends, and dependents drove nine off-road vehicles across the pavement-free middle of Wales. Ostensibly, our mission was to test a cross section of American four-wheel-drive products against their British, German, and Japanese counterparts. In fact, what we were doing was illustrating the central idea of all automotive journalism: getting money to do what one would spend money to do if one hadn’t found a way to be paid for doing it.
A Ford Bronco II, a Chevrolet S-10 Blazer, a GMC S-15 Jimmy, a Jeep Cherokee, a Land Rover, two Range Rovers, a Mercedes-Benz Geländewagen, and a Mitsubishi Montero were used on the trip. Since these are now long outdated, I have excised the technical chatter about them. Wales, on the other hand, has not had a major redesign since Owen Glendower got whupped at Harlech Castle in 1409.
You might think off-road driving in the British Isles would be a matter of: “Very good, sir. We’ll have Mrs. Twickham take down her front trellis, and you can motor about in her rose garden, then turn sharp at the rookery, and go right through the privet hedge and into the vicar’s kitchen yard.” But it’s not like that at all. Even though Britain has a population density about double that of Macy’s toy floor at Christmastime, there are still vast tracts of empty moor, fen, bog, wold, and other kinds of wilderness that the Brits have funny names for.
The really tough part, however, is getting out of London. The Limeys just can’t shake their national dyslexia about which side of the road is for tailgating and which is for head-on collisions. And I can’t remember to list to port. But I have, I think, finally come up with the proper mnemonic device; what you have to do is think of yourself as a well-dressed Socialist: “Keep left, look right. Keep left, look right.” See? This makes driving in England a snap as long as you don’t have to pass, change lanes, go through roundabouts, or shift gears.
The English also have a road-numbering system based on the Duke of Wellington’s cribbage scores. Thus it was in a dither of confusion, occasional naked fear, and also rain and jet lag that we made our way fifty miles west up the Thames to the village of Streatley. There, with hoots of relief from the Yanks, we got off the paved road and into some nice safe precipices, cliffs, and escarpments.
A remarkable geological feature called the Ridgeway begins at Streatley. The Ridgeway is a narrow fold of chalk highlands that stretches west for forty miles along the crest of the Berkshire Downs and into northern Wiltshire. The country falls away in perfect symmetry on either side, and the view of England is too wonderful to be fact. If you were the kind of child who created imaginary worlds on your bedspread, this is what you saw from your knees.
The Ridgeway has been in use as a thoroughfare since 3000 BC, and it is still in better shape than most streets in New York. Even so, wet grass, slippery chalk soil, and gale-force winds blowing up off the Salisbury Plain made the going tricky. I had no more than sighed with relief to be out of traffic when I became what’s known as “cross-rutted,” meaning I got the front wheels into a set of ruts that were headed toward Lisbon and the back wheels into a set pointed at Reykjavik. As a result, I spun. I barely dropped anchor in time to avoid committing an act of civil disobedience protesting the General Inclosure Act of 1801. That is, I nearly hit a fence.
At midday we stopped in Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great (AD 849), which like most English villages is possessed of a millennium’s accumulated cuteness. We needed lunch, and we also needed enough petrol for our Afrika Korps–sized expedition. If you’re planning an off-road jaunt in England, or anywhere else, you might try it with fewer people and vehicles. We went through the Midlands and Wales at about the same rate of speed as Geoff Chaucer’s Canterbury package tour. It was fun, though, carrying our own house party with us, and the Wantage pubs appreciated the 2,000 percent increase in custom.
Back on the Ridgeway, we did some serious rooting about in the truffle pit of history. Here, between Wantage and Swindon, is the immense White Horse, a 365-foot-long, 130-foot-wide equine figure carved into the chalk hillside. Alfred the Great supposedly dug the thing himself, as a memorial to the drubbing he gave the pagan Danes at nearby Ashdown. More likely it’s twice as old as that and was the totemic emblem of some gang of Celtic biker types. Anyway, it gives its name to the fine valley below, the Vale of White Horse, and also to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in New York, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953. A fine description of the area (the vale area, not Hudson Street) was left by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. (And the Scotch was left by us in the Land Rover. Oops. It gets awfully cold and windy out in the middle of history.) Actually, the White Horse is not best viewed from the Ridgeway heights. From up there it looks like something you might get yourself into on a golf course and need a chalk wedge to get out of again. There is a nice hill alongside, however, where Saint George slew the dragon. (Unanswered questions: Was it dragon season? Is it sporting to slay them when they aren’t on the wing? Was Saint George careful to extinguish all dragon-breath fires and pick up the spent lance tips and empty mead cans in his dragon blind?) No grass will grow on the place where the dragon’s blood was spilled. This is because people walk around on it all the time, looking for the place where grass won’t grow.
Back closer to where the whiskey and the cars were is an ancient hill fort called Uffington Castle. Nothing is left of it now except the turf mounds where the ramparts stood. Eerie to think of my blue-painted ancestors squatting here among the watch fires and plotting the same kinds of things my cousins are plotting tonight in some Belfast pub.
A bit farther along the Ridgeway is Wayland’s Smithy, a New Stone Age “long barrow” of prodigious size. Presumably it was a burial chamber, but it may have been used for prehistoric games of nude stoop tag. There is, after all, much we don’t know about the peoples of ancient Britain.
A Saxon legend of later date makes the barrow home to Wayland Smith, a blacksmith. If your horse threw a shoe while you were riding along the Ridgeway, you were supposed to leave a silver coin on a stone, whistle three times, and turn your back; Wayland would then shoe your horse and take the money. However, this does not work with a pound note and a Land Rover. But who wants a horseshoe pounded into his Land Rover’s tire anyway?
By now we were full to the gills with history, and practically empty of Scotch, so it was time to push on to the night’s lodgings. These were in Cowbridge, seventy miles away across the Severn and down the Welsh coast past Cardiff.
We’d planned to get on the M4 at Swindon and speed across the Severn Bridge in time to get really stupid and loud before dinner, but the high winds we’d been fighting all day caused the bridge to be closed. We had to make a massive detour up the Severn estuary, forty miles to Gloucester, then seventy miles back down to Cowbridge.
It was nearly eleven by the time we got there, so we had to settle for getting loud and stupid during dinner instead of before. The people at the Bear Hotel were lovely, though. That is, they didn’t evict us at gunpoint. Caveat gobbler, however, about UK food, especially if you’re tired and have had a few and are in the giggling sort of mood where you order what sounds funny on the menu. I ordered “whitebait,” which turned out to be a plateful of deep-fat-fried guppies. The nearest McDonald’s was 153 miles away, in London.
The sun (and the whitebait) came up the next day, and we pushed west to Port Talbot, where Richard Burton went to high school. Port Talbot bears a striking resemblance to Muncie, Indiana. We then avoided Swansea, where Dylan Thomas failed to drink himself to death because he didn’t get home from New York in time, and motored inland along the river Neath to Aberdulais, where, according to local history, nothing much has ever happened.
In Aberdulais we left the pavement and turned onto the Sarn Helen, the principal Roman road linking north and south Wales. The name comes from Helen, wife of Magnus Maximus, who was Roman emperor for about five minutes in AD 383. Either that, or the name comes from Y Lleng, Welsh for “the legion,” or from elin, which means “angle,” or from anything else you can think of. Although the Sarn Helen is much newer than the Ridgeway, it’s in much worse shape. The Ridgeway has good natural drainage, and it remained in active use until the early 1800s; but maintenance on the Sarn Helen stopped in AD 410, when the emperor Flavius Honorius took time out from being chased around Italy by Alaric the Visigoth to write a letter to the Britons telling them to take care of their own damn roads.
The Romans made a better road than anyone ever has since. For a primary road like the Sarn Helen they dug parallel ditches more than eighty feet apart and excavated the soil between them. Then they laid in a sand-and-quarry-stone foundation bound on either side by tightly fitted curbs of dressed and wedged stone blocks. On top of this foundation they built an embankment four or five feet high and fifty feet wide, constructed of layers of rammed chalk and flint and finished with a screened-gravel crown two feet thick.
Even so, 1,573 years of neglect have taken their toll. The road has worn down and topsoil has accumulated along it, and the Sarn Helen has turned from an embankment into a ditch. There are washouts and mud holes and boulders in the ditch, too. But the Sarn Helen is still there. I doubt we’ll be able to say the same about 1-95 in the year 3556.
Our first problem, however, was the work of man and not nature. Some farmer had dropped a big oak across the right-of-way—one of those very tangly and many-branched oaks. Apparently, it was felled on purpose to keep such trendies as ourselves from lurking about and luring sheep and daughters to chic London nightspots. Fortunately, among our horde of traveling companions was Roger Crathorne, demonstrations manager for Land Rover, Ltd. Roger is one of the most accomplished off-road drivers ever. Also fortunately, Rovers have winches. Roger used the winch on his Range Rover and the winch on the Land Rover to create something that looked like what I flunked in high school trig. Then he deftly set the oak back among its roadside mates, while the rest of us stood around and gaped and drank Bloody Scotches. (A Bloody Scotch is what you drink when you want a Bloody Mary but don’t have any vodka. It’s just like a regular Bloody Mary, but with Scotch instead of vodka, and without tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tobasco, or celery sticks. You drink it right out of the bottle.)
Once past the tree blockade, we drove uphill through gullies so narrow that the bigger vehicles were digging mud with their door handles until we achieved a crest from which rustic beauty positively vomited forth—mist upon the heather, scudding clouds above, tree trunks artfully gnarling, all the usual stuff. A ruined stone house commanded the hill. There were arrow slits built into its walls. This farmstead stood fortified against … Saxons? Normans? Roundheads? Pesky neighbors with unruly kids? Probably lots of things. For centuries these hills ran wild with—well, with wild hill runners.
We traveled along heights fenced four hundred years ago by practitioners of the lost art of building dry stone walls, then entered the great pine woods known as the Fforest Fawr, and took a wrong ffork somewhere and got lost in an open-pit coal mine. This was neither interesting nor scenic. But we picked up the Sarn Helen again in a little town called Onllwyn.
Now the going turned dirty. There was nothing in the scenery to warn us, but the Sarn Helen became as bad a road as I’ve ever been down in anything except a metaphor. We were in rolling, pleasant upland. Parts of Beverly Hills look more ferocious. But the track across this peaceful greenery was vicious slop, broken only by chapel-width boulders and ruts where you could lose Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The roadbed bucked and dipped like an amateur prostitute, and the bank angle tipped to the limits of a protractor’s descriptive abilities. All this was spiced with greasy, knife-sharp ledges of shale, oleaginous grass clumps, Olympic-sized mud puddles, and just plain great big holes.
Half an hour in, soldiers began appearing. They sloughed toward us along the road, muddy and exhausted-looking. One of the Brits among us claimed they were candidates for some special commando force. He said they’re put out at the end of the Sarn Helen with one extra pair of dry underpants and a piece of zwieback or suchlike, and, if they find their way back alive, they’re in.
At the end of the Sarn Helen we forded the quick headwaters of a river and found ourselves looking down into what may be the most beautiful valley on earth. It is a wide and gentle-sided dell done up in all the most exquisite shades of green—emerald, hunter, loden, apple, jade, and olive—with tiny farms curling up each slope as though some wonderland were cupped in vast angelic hands.
But enough aesthetic palaver. If we had wanted beauty, we’d have been riding women, not cars and trucks … Ouch! Stop! Ouch! Ouch!! (It’s important, when writing macho-type automotive journalism, to do it where your girlfriend can’t see over your shoulder.)
From the beautiful valley we followed secondary roads northwest to Llandovery, getting caught in a herd of sheep along the way. The sheep were being drovered in the time-honored dog-nipped fashion, except that modern Welsh sheep have big iridescent-orange patches spray-painted on their sides for identification. This would certainly spoil the looks of any Staffordshire pastoral china figurines depicting Daphnis and Chloe his shepherdess love. The sheep looked as if they had been hanging out in the New York subway system.
Llandovery, an old center for Welsh drovers (sheep cowboys), had great charm in a sober Methodist way. All the more sober since we missed pub hours.
From Llandovery we went north up the river Tywi into the Cambrian Mountains. From their peaks we could see Cardigan Bay, twenty-five miles in the distance. The Cambrian Mountains were the hideout of Twm Sion Catti, the Welsh Robin Hood. The difference between the Welsh Robin Hood and the English Robin Hood is that Twm stole from everybody. Also, he had a sense of humor instead of a Maid Marian. According to my guidebook to South Wales, Twm once went into an ironmonger’s shop and asked to buy a cooking pot. The storekeeper showed him one.
“No,” said Twm. “That has a hole in it.”
“I don’t see a hole,” said the storekeeper.
Twm took the pot and jammed it down over the storekeeper’s ears. “If there’s no hole,” said he, “how’d I get your head in it?” Then Twm cleaned out the store.
A teeny but perfectly maintained byway led through the mountains past the Llyn Brianne Reservoir to a small chapel called the Soar y Mynydd. We paused while Car and Driver’s editor David E. Davis had his picture taken in the pulpit and I pondered why some Celts got John Wesley and dirty old coal mines while other Celts got whiskey recipes and popes with swell hats. If you ask me, the Welsh couldn’t spell well enough to find the boat to Dublin.
Outside the chapel was a steep hill, its bottom third a smooth, wet, and naked rock face. The proper driving technique here was to take a fast run at it and stand on the gas and pray. We side-slipped and slithered. It was like trying to stuff a snake up a drainpipe. But we all made it to the top, I with my eyes closed.
Then it was national debt-size ruts and bogs as soft as a politician’s conscience as we descended to Llanddewi Brefi, site of the sixth-century synod where Saint David refuted the Pelagian heresy. By this act he saved all of Western Europe from a religion that sounds like a skin disease.
In Tregaron that night, at the Talbot Inn, a wedding breakfast was being held in the bar. It had been going on for ten hours. Welshmen like Mr. Davis put great stock in Welsh singing, but to my Irish ears it sounds like men jumping off chairs into a bathtub full of frogs. As soon as dinner was over, Philip Llewellin, who was serving as our chief of reconnaissance and native gillie on this trip, decided to prove to the wedding party that, although he is only half Welsh, that half is from the throat to the liver. Of course the rest of us had to help. Our tab outran the wedding’s within an hour, and by midnight we were as drunk as any leek-wearing Taffy you could find in a day’s ride by sheepback. Pubs in the UK, it’s true, close their doors at 11:30, but what does it matter as long as you’re on the inside of them when they do? The landlord waxed fond with our spending abilities and slapped down two bottles of whiskey, gratis, on our table. (The landlord’s wife slipped in and prudently took one bottle back.) This whiskey was, I swear to you, named “Old Sheep Dip” right on the label, which proves once again that Protestants will drink anything. (Methodists serve grape juice at communion, you know.)
We finally put a stop to Philip’s singing, so he began to tell stories. Llewellin is a marvel at this. “The rise and fall of empires, the passing of ages and eons, ‘tis but the wink of the eye, a cloud across the sun, a breeze playing in the summer wheat …” He was quoting Shelley’s “Ozymandias” when I left him at 3:00 a.m.
As I tucked myself into bed, the wedding party was beginning a giant brawl in the street below. I dozed off to the merry sounds of police whistles and breaking crockery. (How do you tell the bride at a Welsh wedding ceremony? It’s important, because she’s the one you’re not supposed to punch in the face.) In the morning Llewellin looked as though he’d been on the losing side, but he couldn’t remember whether he’d gotten into the fight or just finished the bottle of Old Sheep Dip.
We refueled in Pontrhydfendigaid (pronounced “huh?”) and took a gravel road back east into the huge stretch of grazing lands known as the Great Welsh Desert. Not many people live here, and I’m not so sure about those who do. Every time I got out of a car to relieve myself, the sheep would start backing toward me, looking over their shoulders expectantly.
About noon we left a rough gravel drovers’ road and attempted to strike out across the great moor on the divide of the Cambrian Mountains. Llewellin, in the Cherokee, was in the lead at the top of a hill when, squish, Cherokee and Philip all but disappeared. Now, how can the top of the hill, where we were, be wetter than the bottom of the hill, whence we came? It is the miracle of the peat bog. (Peat, by the way, is found only in Celtic countries because God realized the Celts were the only people on earth who drank so much that they would try to burn mud.) Our hill had once been a basin where constant flooding encouraged the growth of ferns and their ilk. Dead fern bodies accumulated in a waterlogged mass that finally even other ferns couldn’t grow in. Sphagnum moss took over. This can grow in the vilest muck. Layer after layer of sphagnum was laid down until the bog began to rise above the level of the surrounding land. By all rights this mound should have begun to drain and turn itself into a nice dry hummock or knoll, but instead the collected sphagnum acted as a giant sponge and swelled prodigiously with rainwater so that after seven thousand or eight thousand years we had a convex swamp thirty feet high at its peak. We also had a stuck Llewellin. Crathorne charged to the rescue with his Range Rover and went down too. Then I put the Blazer in, because three is a lucky number. We spent an hour and a half winching one another out.
The only way across such mire is to use an actual boat anchor on the end of your winch line and pull yourself across, but it would have been irresponsible and dangerous for us to have tried something like that, plus we might have missed lunch. So we gave up four-wheeling. We took a drive around the Elan Valley reservoirs instead and paused to view the great Edwardian edifice of the Claerwen Dam. It looks like Hadrian’s Wall never did but should have. The reservoirs are a sore point with the Welsh, however. Their water goes to Birmingham, England, where water rates are much lower than they are in Wales. Also, the reservoirs cover a cottage where Shelley lived in 1812, and the Welsh don’t hold with throwing cold water into the windows of poets’ houses.
And that was it for us. Sunday afternoon was waning, and we were all due back in London that night. From the Elan Valley we continued east via normal roads. On our way to the English frontier we stopped at Rhayader for a delicious lunch. There we were set upon by punk rockers and thrashed nearly to death.
Actually, that last sentence is a lie. I just put it in to keep readers from being jealous. I mean, we’re out wallowing in fun all the time, while you have to stay home and buy magazines. So I thought if I told you we all got beat up, you wouldn’t get mad at us and go buy Motor Trend or anything.
Besides, I’m an honorary Welshman now. And as Gerald the twelfth-century archdeacon of Brecon said in Descriptio Cambriae (“The Description of Wales”): “A formal oath never binds them. They have no respect for their plighted word, and the truth means nothing to them … To a people so cunning and crafty this seems no great burden, for they take it all very lightly.”