‌Five

‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’

‘Wealth and violence seem to sustain us in this life, but after death they avail us nothing.’

Gerald of Wales

Gerald of Wales,
South and Central Wales, March and April 1188

I cross the border that separates England from Wales on a minor road near Presteigne, just north of the A44. It is an early morning in June and a dense mist is rolling down the green hills and seeping through the hedgerows. With visibility squeezed to a few awkward yards, I am driving slowly with the windows down, the car’s engine clattering off the high banks of the narrow lanes and the wipers flapping and squawking at the murk. On either side, the verges are radiating wet new life: hawthorn blossom, red campion, cow parsley, flowering nettles, a twist of woodbine and the last of the native, ‘English’ bluebells. ‘Araf’, says the first sign in Welsh: easy does it.

I stop at New Radnor and the mist seems to lift a little, or turn wetter. A mizzle, let’s say. The English language is awash – drenched – with ways of describing the stuff that falls from the sky. I’m afraid I can’t tell you about Welsh, but it surely won’t be any different. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, set in a post-Arthurian time of invading Saxons and traumatized Britons, much of the land is veiled and muffled by an impenetrable fog. Something unspeakable is being hidden – the truth, perhaps, about what really happened when two peoples met. An ageing Sir Gawain even appears out of the gloom. It is an unsettling book, and it asks impossible questions, in a halting language, about what we choose to remember – and what it may be better we learn to forget – about the worst of crimes. But when did you ever hear of a border being agreed with a smile and a friendly handshake? Someone has always lost something.

I am following in the footsteps of a man called Gerald de Barry, otherwise known as Giraldus Cambrensis – or, in plain English (a language he despised), Gerald of Wales. And this is how he starts his book The Journey Through Wales:

In the year AD 1188, Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, crossed the borders of Herefordshire and entered Wales.

The border would have been in a different place in 1188, deeper into what is now England and closer to Hereford, I imagine, and the transition from one country to the other was more significant than it is today, albeit less abrupt (there’s no avoiding the signs bidding us all ‘Croeso i Gymru’). Archbishop Baldwin was leading an urgent mission into Wales to sign up recruits for a third crusade to the Holy Land. The previous year Jerusalem had fallen to Salah ad-Din (or ‘Saladin, the leader of the Egyptians and of the men of Damascus’, says Gerald), and Baldwin had been ordered by Henry II, ‘the king of the English’, to persuade the ferocious Welsh fighting men, especially their famous archers, to ‘take the Cross’ and travel to the Middle East to help reverse this cataclysmic outrage. Gerald, the Archdeacon of Brecon, whose Norman grandfather had married a Welsh princess, had been brought along for his diplomatic skills and his blood ties to almost every important Welsh family in south Wales. It was not known, until the mission arrived, quite how welcoming some of the Welsh would be.

There was another, and not just incidental, reason for Baldwin’s trip: it would give him a chance to preach in all four Welsh cathedrals and thereby affirm Canterbury’s (and England’s) precedence over the Welsh Church. This second part of the mission was causing Gerald a great deal of angst: it was his fervent wish that one day the Welsh Church, with its spiritual base in St David’s, would become independent of Canterbury and England and report directly to the Pope in Rome. It was the way things had always been, he believed, until the invading Normans had demoted St David’s to a mere bishopric, answering to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There was very little evidence for this (although in his books Gerald manages to manufacture plenty), but it was a cause to which the quarter-Welsh Gerald would devote much of his life. The truth is, Gerald longed to become the next Bishop of St David’s himself (one of his Norman uncles had held the post for many years) – and Gerald, who was ambitious, not to mention acutely aware of his own talents, allowed himself to dream of a moment when the Bishop of St David’s might one day morph into the Archbishop of All Wales.

None of this was ever going to happen, not so long as there was a Norman king on the English throne. If they allowed the Welsh Church to secede, then they might as well allow the whole country to go its own way. Most of Wales was independent at the time of the trip, but the Normans were palpably hungry for more of what they didn’t yet have. Twelve years earlier, in 1176, on the death of his uncle, Gerald had fought a bitter campaign to succeed him as Bishop of St David’s – and had only lost because he was, in the eyes of Henry II, suspiciously and dangerously Welsh. It was Henry, of course, who in 1170 had (perhaps accidentally) ordered the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, for showing too much independence. All of this was recent history to Gerald, but his ambitions were taking him to a dangerous place.

The man who had beaten Gerald to the Bishopric of St David’s, a Norman called Peter de Leia, was also riding with Baldwin, presumably keeping his distance from the acerbic and voluble Gerald. It was here in New Radnor, at the end of a long day’s ride from Hereford, that the archbishop gave his first sermon on the taking of the Cross and as soon as it was over, with the final ‘Amen’ floating away into the surrounding hills, Gerald leaped to his feet and hurled himself at Baldwin’s feet, vowing that he would follow his king and Church on a death-or-glory crusade to the Holy Land, so help him God. He was the first person in Wales to take the Cross, or so he tells us, just as he makes a point of mentioning that the next person was the current Bishop of St David’s, Peter de Leia (too slow, Peter, too slow …).

What we know about Gerald comes almost entirely from his own writings. At the time of the trip he was about forty-two years old, a tall, vigorous man, breathtakingly handsome (as I say, Gerald is his own source), with strikingly shaggy eyebrows and a piercing eye. He had grown up in Manorbier in south Wales in the castle of his Norman father, probably learning Welsh from his mother. He spoke Norman French by default and wrote, he tells us, in ‘the most beautiful Latin’. (Alas, I’m no judge. After spending ten years not learning the language, all I can say for sure is that being able to misquote Latin epigrams does not make you Disraeli.) He compared the speech of the English to the hissing of geese, and saw no need to understand the witterings of a humiliated peasant race. He was brilliant and shrewd and always destined for the Church, and was sent away aged eight to study with the monks at Gloucester Cathedral, before heading to Paris as a teenager to learn philosophy with the best. He was hugely ambitious (the diocese of St David’s might as well have been carved on his heart), witty, questioning, energetic, scheming, combative, loved a good story (the wilder the better), but he became bitter in later years when his dreams of St David’s were thwarted. Baldwin, whom Gerald dismissed as an amiable but ineffectual holy man totally unsuited to the post of archbishop, would have been delighted to have him along for the ride, even though it wasn’t long before he found himself having to read out loud from Gerald’s books every night of the trip.

It is peaceful here, and still early, high above New Radnor on the Norman earthworks, in the place where Gerald pledged his allegiance to the Holy Cross. There’s no other trace of the castle: its stones were removed long ago to feed the walls of the church and the villagers’ homes. All that remains is a series of stepped, damp, grass-covered mounds and ditches, and a vast ancient ash tree, only just coming into leaf on this first day in June, a solitary hawthorn surrounded by the stumps of other fallen trees, dense clusters of nettles and, on the southern slope, above some advancing elder trees, a mazy rush of golden young buttercups, muted in the drifting fog. An army of moles has been busy enjoying itself in the absence of any human interference; and far below in the village I can just make out a child’s bright yellow trampoline in one of the back gardens. A sheep on a distant hill gives a petulant bleat from out of the mist.

A lot has happened in the 830 years since Gerald, Baldwin, Bishop Peter and their accompanying retinue of clerks, clerics, servants and soldiers gathered around this hill. And yet, really, not so much.

In 1188, Wales was ruled by a chaotic jumble of Welsh princes and Norman knights, the latter taking care to acknowledge the primacy of their king, Henry II. In the south, the most important Welsh leader was the Lord Rhys. He had come to New Radnor to greet Archbishop Baldwin, who had not only brought Gerald with him to keep things civil (Rhys was one of Gerald’s many Welsh cousins), but also Henry II’s most powerful adviser, Ranulph de Glanville, who was here, not so subtly, to make sure that the Lord Rhys wasn’t going to give any trouble. Once that was clear, he headed back to England. It was a time when ‘wealth and violence’, as Gerald put it, were the ultimate answer to anything, with violence usually the more certain route. In 1063, just before the Norman Conquest, Harold, the last Saxon king, ‘had marched up and down and round and about the whole of Wales with such energy that he “left not one that pisseth against a wall”’. According to Gerald it was only because of the destruction wrought by Harold and his English soldiers that the Norman kings had managed to subdue Wales. Now the south of the country, and the border with England, were studded with the castles of Norman lords who had grabbed what they could and held it against Welsh retaliations and sometimes each other. Gerald’s Norman grandfather was one of these lords who’d chosen to blend bloodshed with diplomacy and marry a local Welsh princess.

Baldwin and Gerald were travelling through a violent land, although I doubt they’d have been under any threat. They had their soldiers, after all – and anyway their arrival in a town or village would have been a major thrill to almost everyone. Here was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first ever to visit Wales, and he had the God-given power to forgive sins, heal the sick, cast out the devil and excommunicate the wicked. People would have rushed to come and hear him speak; in Cardigan, Baldwin was almost crushed to death by a frantic surge of would-be crusaders. So although Gerald and Baldwin sometimes grumbled about the state of the roads (there were none to speak of, apart from the remnants of a Roman road along the south coast) and the godawful weather (this is Wales), and Baldwin fretted about the crusade – despite all that, I get the feeling they were both thoroughly enjoying themselves.

From New Radnor the recruiting party made its way west to Castle Crug Eryr, where they signed up the Welsh Prince of Maelienydd, ‘despite the fears and lamentations of his family’. There they turned south, probably past the little church of Glascwm (rebuilt since Gerald’s day, although it’s possible the same yew trees were there to welcome us both). Inside the church there’s a sign marking the ‘safe return’ of five local men from the 1939–45 war; and just next to this, propped against a wall, is a white wooden cross commemorating Oberleutnant G. Brixius of the German Air Force, who died when his plane crashed nearby in 1942. Gerald would have approved, I reckon. Despite his many criticisms of the English, Welsh, Flemish and others, he had a thoroughly medieval understanding of what it means to be human. A race may be punished or rewarded for its behaviour (the Welsh, for example, had been driven to the western edges of Britain because of their well-known and unfortunate predilection for incest and homosexuality), but we are all one family under God.

The route south took Gerald through Hay-on-Wye, once deep into Wales, now a town on the border. The travellers were met by a great crowd of would-be crusaders, running towards the castle, ‘leaving their cloaks in the hands of the wives and friends who had tried to hold them back’. The annual literary festival is in full swing and I sit for a while under the walls of this castle, with the bunting flapping above and a smell of venison burgers and cumin hanging in the air. Despite the use of the Welsh language on almost every poster, street sign and handout, Hay during its festival is thronged with English-speakers, most of them, it seems to me (as my eye drifts down a bewildering list of quinoa and kelp smoothies), from the suburbs and surrounds of England’s wealthier cities. Well, that’s fine, let’s hope (for here I am), and it is undeniably better that these mostly sensitive and eager-to-accommodate (but at times utterly oblivious) foot soldiers of English globalization should be wearing their Hunter boots rather than the chain-mail shirts and iron gauntlets of Baldwin’s day. But let’s not kid ourselves how we got here. As Ithell Colquhoun once wrote about her beloved Cornwall, a part of Britain less secure in its otherness: ‘The Cornish language did not die a natural death; it was executed like a criminal by the oppressing Saxon power.’

The dominant local Norman baron of the day was a man called William de Braose and he ruled over Hay, although his main base was at Brecon Castle, just a short walk from Gerald’s official home in Llanddew. He was an undeniably violent man, fond of stealing Church property and slaughtering the locals, but Gerald is strangely silent on all of this, instead claiming that de Braose was so pious that it became quite boring the number of times he invoked the Lord’s name in everyday conversation and correspondence. Maybe Gerald was trying to get his backing for his St David’s schemes. He also slobbers all over de Braose’s wife, Mildred (‘a prudent and chaste woman’), even though she is better remembered for her terrifying brutality – she ate babies, you know – and was starved to death, with her son, in King John’s dungeons once her husband was safely out of the way. Gerald also has surprisingly little to say about his local town of Brecon, so it’s interesting to go and stare at the bald statements of power – castle and cathedral – and wonder where that power has gone today. Not the cathedral, that’s for sure. It feels sleepily Trollopian, although its elegant east side was only made possible with an infusion of de Braose’s blood-drenched plunder.

Baldwin had turned south at Brecon, still keeping close to the border, heading for Abergavenny, Cardiff and the south coast. Gerald keeps us amused, as he must have done Baldwin, with a succession of miraculous tales. There’s one about a woman in the north of England who sat down without thinking on the wooden tomb of Saint Osana and found herself stuck there, unable to move, until the people came and stripped her naked and whipped her for the crime. It was only once she had prayed and wept for forgiveness that her ‘backside’ was unglued. And, as they trotted along, Gerald told Baldwin about Brecknock Mere (we know it as Llangorse Lake), to the east of Brecon, which sometimes turns bright green, or flows with red blood, and at other times is covered with gardens, ornamental buildings and orchards, and harbours the most delicious eels and pike. There was a legend that the rightful ruler of the land could conjure the birds of the lake to sing to him; and once, when the Welsh lord, and Gerald’s great uncle, Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Tewdwr was riding at its side with two Norman knights, in the time of Henry I, all the birds did just that, thronging Gruffydd with song and acclamation, while ignoring his Norman friends, and Gerald must have taken pleasure in telling Baldwin just what Henry I had said when he heard this story:

By the death of Christ, I am not the slightest bit surprised. It is we who hold the power, and so we are free to commit acts of violence and injustice against these people, and yet we know full well that it is they who are the rightful heirs to the land.

Gerald, who was only one-quarter Welsh at birth (whatever that might mean), nonetheless felt Welsh, or he did when writing his book, or riding through the country’s green valleys. Later, when he wrote his The Description of Wales, a companion piece to his Journey, he devoted the second half of the book to describing how to conquer the miserable place, and denouncing its hopelessly divided princes and its greedy, incestuous, drunken inhabitants. And that was after spending the first half praising its people (no longer homosexual, he is happy to report, as they had been ‘in their more prosperous days’, but sober, brave, nimble, hospitable and kinder and more quick-witted than any other Westerners). Like any of us, Gerald was able to incorporate or balance more than one identity at a time. Or perhaps he was just acutely conscious of not offending his powerful, Latin-reading audience.

I am tracking Gerald and his captive listeners down the Coed Grwyne Pass, now home to the Grwyne Fawr reservoir. A couple of miles to the east is Llanthony monastery, which Gerald loved (he takes most of one chapter to tell us how it had grown into the very emblem of noble monastic life, until it was corrupted by the ‘boundless extravagance of the English’), but he seems not to have visited the place on this trip. Time was pressing and as fussy little Archbishop Baldwin no doubt said: ‘Hurry along, now, Saladin’s army isn’t going to defeat itself.’

It was in this wild and wooded pass, so Gerald tells us, that fifty years earlier the Welsh had ambushed and murdered the Norman Lord Richard de Clare, ruler of Cardiganshire. Apparently he had ignored the advice of the local lord, dismissed his heavily armed soldiers, and come prancing down the path accompanied only by a few servants and preceded by a minstrel singing his praises. It sounds very Monty Python (‘I would fayn walk this way alone,’ trilled Lord Richard, before being hacked to death along with all his followers). Gerald is quick to point out how ‘rash and inconsiderate it is to take no heed at all of the advice given by those who are trying to help us’. Perhaps he was smarting from some recent slight. He was a man who bore a grudge for decades, and rewrote passages in his books several times over the years to amend his verdicts on those he felt had betrayed him. The Plantagenet kings, for example, he described in the end as an ‘accursed race’ and said he’d wasted his time dedicating his books to Henry II (‘no interest in literature’, God rot him) and ‘his son and successor in vice, Richard’.

The woods in the pass are still dark and gloomy, especially with the familiar mist drifting through the trees. From where I’m standing, all alone, halfway up the eastern slope, I can hear the Grwyne Fawr river splashing along the valley – and there’s laughter, too, coming from the direction of the reservoir. A cuckoo calls and calls again. Perhaps this was the route Gerald followed, down to the River Usk and on to Abergavenny and the sea. There were no maps, of course – only local guides. There are beech trees here on the edge of the pine woods, and hawthorn, rowan, hazel and ash. Plenty of sycamore, too, although there wouldn’t have been any here in Gerald’s day: the species only arrived from mainland Europe in Tudor times.

It is hard to stand even in this remote place and try to piece together how close any of it might be to what Gerald and Baldwin once knew. For starters, most of the trees are close-packed conifers, arranged into straight rows for harvesting. Britain only has one native pine tree (the Scots pine, or Pinus sylvestris), and I can’t see any of them here. More to the point, in Gerald’s day there were no plantations, just the remnants of the wildwood. On the other side of the valley a huge, surgically neat square of woodland has been carved out, the timber driven away, leaving behind a churn of wheel ruts and splintered bark. Well, they’ll be back again another day to plant more trees (we hope), and this time they may even include a fringe of native species (sustainability and diversity have found their way into the modern foresters’ handbook); but when he came this way Gerald would have ridden through a wild tangle of oak, hazel, thorn and ash, or stopped to rest under an ancient and solitary pine among an outpouring of wildflowers, and the sound of the birds and the insects would have been all-enveloping at this time of year, and so much more than just the bickering of crows in the mutilated woods, and a sudden shriek of alarm from a single blackbird, and the low rumble of distant machinery.

Can a landscape be old and tired and used up? Put it another way: if we wanted to recreate Gerald’s world, right here, in this isolated valley, what would we have to remove? The pylons, poles and wires, of course. Wheel tracks. Tarmac. The RAF Tornado that has just now come screaming overhead. Fencing. That tumbledown, red-brick building. The reservoir. The four parked cars. The cling of diesel. Any last trace of chemical pollutants and pesticides. Crisp packets and plastic bottles. Footprints with tread. Vapour trails in the sky (if we could see them through the fog). All recent arrivals from the animal and plant kingdoms. (Every bit of this is something the makers of historical dramas must be horribly familiar with – as well as the inevitable scrawling letter pointing out that the larch tree was only introduced to the south Wales valleys in 1837.) Perhaps we should just squint, block our ears and noses, and stare at an oak leaf.

But we can’t stop there. We have to think about what we’d put back in. Wolves, for example – they were still here in 1188, deep in the broadleaf forests, although there was a bounty on every pelt. And beavers. They’d been hunted to extinction all over England, but they were hanging on not far from the Grwyne Fawr valley, as well as in a last few refuges in Scotland. The pine marten. Red squirrels. And don’t forget the songbirds, in lost abundance, with their spellbinding songs of rapture. Eagles overhead. Beetles underfoot. The fish that leaped and splashed in the river. Honey bees and storms of butterflies feeding on a glittering mosaic of flowers. The spreading bellflower and the bastard balm. And people. This valley would have had its people, who moved south, not so long ago, into the new mining towns and villages and booming cities.

Would you go back? If you could? I am alone here, on a narrow path, with the pine forest pressing dark and close, and surely it is reassuring to know (the odds at least are against it) that I am not about to be dragged into the woods and murdered by a local cutthroat. And when Gerald rode this way he had much to say about the miraculous gold and silver staff, kept in a local church, that was ‘particularly efficacious in smoothing away and pressing the pus from glandular swellings and gross tumours which grow so often on the human body’. Well, yes indeed. And thank God for antibiotics. ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ works both ways: and most of the time we are oblivious to the advances that sustain us. If I had been lucky enough to be born Gerald’s twin in 1146, and not some powerless peasant, I would have been dead of an exploding appendix long before I was able to make this trip. But I do wonder if there is anything we’ve left behind, do you think, in our centuries-old quest for the perfect picnic spot – the one that is always just around the next corner? Surely we could have called a halt many times and said, ‘This is great, with its gorgeous view. Let’s stop here.’ Couldn’t we? And when was that, do you think? And where? And who exactly would it have all been for?

And here comes Enid again, spreading out her tartan rug for tired limbs in the flower-filled meadow. There is ginger pop, and strawberries. Skylarks are calling and hovering in the cloudless sky. There’s honeysuckle and dog roses in the hedgerows. Harvesters at rest in a field of mown hay. A ruined castle on a green hill. Hot dusty lanes. A distant sparkle on the blue sea. The village shop and the beaming bobby. ‘You young scamps run along.’ Sunlight …

No. We have to press on. But I have allowed myself to drift deep into the pine forest and I am now lost on a faint track, with the mist clinging to the cheerless trees. A dark silence is paring the courage from me. I walk on slowly. The battered remnants of an ancient lime avenue are either side of the path. The trees must be hundreds of years old. There are roots everywhere, huge, exposed, sinuous, weathered, slippery and humped with earth and moss. The path is tenuous and the walking is hard. One of the lime trees has fallen, taking two or three pines with it, but it is still alive, its branches reaching for the light, even as the canopy closes over its fallen body. This is a miserable place. Bereft of humanity and life and yet at the same time suffocated by our ceaseless needs. Or so says Gerald – and he quotes Isaiah: ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’

We have drained the wild from this world, even in the empty places.

I am alone in a dark wood. And I cannot begin to describe the rush of joy when I stumble and slip to the edge of the forest and there are the fields with their cows and the hawthorn in blossom, and the mist has lifted (I would never have known), and the sky is a heart-hugging blue, and down below is the glitter of the river I thought I was following but had lost.

It is an easy walk from here to St Issui’s Church, where local legend holds that Baldwin preached on his journey, although Gerald makes no mention of this. It is a tiny church, rebuilt since Gerald’s time, but still very old, perhaps fifteenth century, and no one is quite sure why Baldwin bothered to make the journey, if indeed he did. But the little place still feels important, carved into the steep hillside, with a tumbling drop to the hazel-fringed river, a long way from the nearest town or village. I stand in the small green churchyard, among the mouldering tombstones, and a woman stifles a cough from inside the church. There are violets, forget-me-nots and countless daisies springing from the grass and a smell of ripe daffodils. There is happiness (and more) in the air. If Gerald were here he would not have wasted the opportunity to set us straight:

Those mountain-heights abound in horses and wild game, those woods are richly stocked with pigs, the shady groves with goats, the pasture-lands with sheep, the meadows with cattle, the farms with ploughs. All the things and creatures which I have mentioned are there in great abundance, and yet we are so insatiable in our wicked desires that each in its turn seems insufficient for our needs.

Nothing has changed.

I speed past Abergavenny, where Baldwin preached and Gerald expends a few more evasive, mealy-mouthed words about the murderous William de Braose, who – he doesn’t tell us – once slaughtered several unarmed Welsh guests in its castle. At Caerleon Gerald stopped among the ruins of the old Roman city and marvelled at what was left (much more than now) of the ‘immense palaces’ and the extraordinary sophistication of the pipework. Gerald believed King Arthur had once held court here; and he has a few salacious tales to tell about a soothsayer called Meilyr, an incubus, some beautiful women and their demons. There is no sign that any of this stuff is any less real to Gerald than his descriptions of the sheep in the fields, because as he says when quoting St Augustine: ‘I will neither put a limit on divine power by denying it, nor strain the bounds of credibility by accepting it.’

Cardiff was not a big town in Gerald’s day – it was a castle and not much else – and indeed even by the year 1800 the population was still no higher than about 2,000. Today, the population is almost 350,000, their forebears brought here by the power of coal and the immense wealth it generated. Gerald saw it coming, as he gazed out on the nearby hills:

Many of nature’s riches still lie hidden from us, undiscovered as yet because we have given no attention to them, but the diligence and careful enquiry of later generations will no doubt reveal them.

Although in truth Gerald was predicting an outpouring of soothing oils and ‘sweet honey’ from the local rock, not black coal.

After their adventures in the woods, Baldwin stopped at Cardiff Castle, ‘where it stands so nobly on the River Taff’, for yet another of his recruiting sermons (and just think how often the English have turned up in the centuries since, with the same grim purpose in mind). The original castle keep is still here, on its green hill, raised by William, the first Norman king, surrounded by the later medieval walls and towers and Victorian halls, and I go and sit at the very centre, with my back propped against a rough stone wall, and I look up to where the floors would have been, through to a roofless blue sky. The place is busy, with queues forming on the narrow stone steps to reach the very top of the tower. People have arrived here from across the globe – China, Malaysia, India, the US – and I am sitting in the sunshine wondering if any of us actually know anything at all about what we are looking at (I’m not sure I do), when I hear a young black man from Brazil or Portugal absolutely boiling over with enthusiasm for the intricacies of the motte-and-bailey and the crumbling keep. And that makes me happy, because I hate to think that this knowledge might one day evaporate (and ‘ramble, and thin out/like milk spilt on a stone’), and it feels safe in his hands. And then his older friend, or perhaps it’s his father, starts to tell him about the time the Welshman Ifor Bach kidnapped William, the Earl of Gloucester, from inside Cardiff Castle – and this, I realize, because I’m sitting here reading the very same thing, even as he talks, is a story that Gerald tells in The Journey Through Wales. Gerald longed for posthumous fame, especially once he realized that his worldly ambitions were out of reach, and if he’s not now squirming with delight in his grave, or jumping up and down in the celestial heights, then there is no afterlife.

Down below a bass guitar rumbles with bone-squeezing power. There’s a concert just getting started on the great green sweep of the castle grounds and the people of Cardiff have arrived in large numbers, as well as the travellers from distant lands, to listen to Sister Sledge, the Fratellis and the Hackney Colliery Band. Gerald was well travelled for his day, across England, Wales and Ireland, and also France, northern Italy and Rome, but most people never went anywhere, unless they found themselves swept up into a war or – as was the case here – a crusade. When Gerald and Baldwin (the Normans) preached to the Welsh and English, they would speak in French or Latin, and their audience wouldn’t understand a word, although it didn’t stop them from volunteering with hysterical enthusiasm. Later, in Llandaff, as Baldwin spoke, the English stood on one side and the Welsh on the other, ‘and from each nation many took up the Cross’, united by religion and war.

In 1188 the differences between the Welsh, Normans and English were pronounced: ethnic, linguistic, cultural. The English were beaten, their leaders killed or exiled and replaced by Normans. In their turn they were helping the Normans colonize the Welsh. Gerald considers the English ‘bumpkins’, but you only have to read his chapters on how to conquer the Welsh in The Description of Wales to know that Gerald the Norman knew all about divide and rule and every other little trick that the English and Welsh, now operating as the British, would eventually bring to their own colonial expansion.

Also living in south Wales, near Haverfordwest, were a very large number of Flemings, who, Gerald tells us, were ‘hostile to the Welsh’. They had been brought in by Henry I to help keep the locals compliant, behaving ‘vindictively’ and ‘submitting the Welsh to shameful ill-treatment’. Apparently these Flemings, as well as being quick to fight and good with the wool trade, were able to see into the future by reading the right shoulder blade of a ram, once it had been boiled and stripped of its meat. It is a shame this useful knowledge has been lost, but there is now not a trace of any Flemings left in south Wales, although it’s entirely likely that their descendants live on in the town of Haverfordwest and its surrounds.

The simple question that Kazuo Ishiguro is asking in The Buried Giant, it seems to me, is whether it is better for people to forget the past, or face up to it. There could well be different perspectives to this question, but the answer may still be the same. Also, to be more specific, should different peoples (tribes, ethnicities, nations), who have at one time slaughtered and enslaved each other (and the traffic may have been one way or both ways), and who have been participants, willing or unwilling, in atrocities, even genocide – is it better or even possible that they live in a cloud of forgetfulness, or should events be disinterred and scrutinized? This question will not go away, but the answer, or at least the first step, is surely obvious: we need to clear away the fog, and listen, hard, to the survivors.

I wonder what the psychic Flemings would have said about all this. I remember sitting with Anna in the bar of a hotel in Beijing, on New Year’s Eve 1988, with the protests of Tiananmen Square already brewing, having travelled by train and boat from London across Sweden, the Soviet Union and Mongolia, and we were talking to a Québécois and a Welshman who were only just back from visiting Tibet (what a world, Gerald, what a world!). We were the only four people in the bar and we wanted to hear about Tibet, still so strange in those days, but the man from Quebec had nothing good to say: it was ‘boring’; Tibetan culture was doomed, the Chinese would see to that; there’s no point in complaining or resisting … every nuance and difference in the world will one day be ironed out, and that is a good thing; an end to conflict and wars. The boredom will save us. ‘Yes’, agreed the man from Wales, himself, I would have thought, like the man from Quebec, just another member of yet another minority trying to keep its shape in a homogenizing world – ‘yes, it will all go one day, soon, and I won’t miss any of it.’ I could have noticed that there was desperation in his eyes, not acquiescence; but it wasn’t until many years later that I came across R. S. Thomas’s brutal, anguished dismissal of the Welsh and their culture:

An impotent people,

Sick with inbreeding,

Worrying the carcase of an old song.

Anyway, I got drunk. And I can safely say it was the worst New Year’s Eve I have ever spent, and I speak as someone who has mingled with the crowds in Trafalgar Square, and heard the chimes at midnight, and seen the vomit floating in oily clumps in the churning fountains. Some of it mine.

Speaking of which, Cardiff city centre on a sunny Saturday lunchtime in June is a lovely place to be. The streets are wide and bright. The shops and the covered markets are busy with a merry crowd. The drinkers are out of the pubs and on the pavements, easing into the long day. I pass a hugely energized gang of young men in black-and-white polo shirts with the words ‘Ben Jackson’s Stag Night’ on their breasts and lager slopping from their glasses. Round the next corner I find myself pushing past a man looking like Sherlock Holmes, and several women dressed as babies and bears. Close to the St David’s/Dewi Sant Shopping Centre there’s a large bronze statue of John Batchelor who, I can tell you now, was a local Liberal Victorian politician, businessman, anti-slavery campaigner and ‘friend of freedom’. If Gerald found himself standing here today, in front of this imposing statue, he would probably assume that Batchelor was a pivotal hero to the people of Cardiff and Wales. Although he’d more likely be distracted by the man in a romper suit drinking beer from a baby’s bottle.

What else would Gerald think? His was not a literate culture, so he’d surely be impressed and overwhelmed by all the writing everywhere, on the shopfronts, in the newspapers, bookshops and on the magazines carried so casually. There’s lighting overhead – the electricity! – and a neon blaze from the shops. And the music. It’s everywhere, thumping from speakers and howling from the mouths of buskers. And although Gerald knew the Welsh as a musical people and very fond of the harp, he would not have been prepared for this incessant rhythm. Shops, shops, shops, all of them laden with goods and bounty from every corner of the globe, not that Gerald would know, but he would marvel at the mounded fish from the seven seas spread on the icy counters (the ice!), the sweets in every store, the sugar and the spices. So radiant and shiny. The colours! Our palette has stretched and it now glitters and throbs with gold and silver and hot pinks. And of course there’s glass in the windows, so much of it, and in our hands. And even on our noses. There are the paving stones underfoot, with no dirt or rivers of shit to negotiate, and the cars, trucks, motorbikes and even a unicyclist with a top hat. There’s a smell of sun cream in the air (coconut – what’s that?) and car fumes and cigarettes and vanilla-flavoured vape oils. Gerald said that no one ever had to beg in Wales, the people are so hospitable, but there’s a man here asking for spare change and a smoke, although Gerald would probably sign him on the spot to join his crusade. The people are no taller than in Gerald’s day, but their skin and hair and teeth must seem impossibly glossy and (I’m only guessing here) they are – to Gerald’s eyes – protein-packed and buoyant with muscle and fat. The clothing is startling: so colourful, and so many layers. The huge spongey shoes, with their laces. The zippers and buttons. The gold chains and hoops and precious jewels on display. The wealth. When Gerald was here in 1188 the people wore the same thin cloak and a tunic, all day and in bed at night; they had no deodorants. If he closes his eyes, all Gerald will hear is the animated ‘hissing of geese’ – the excitable and incomprehensible yak of the English – although that would also surprise him, because he knew the English as a silent race, ‘their outward fairness of complexion and their inward coldness of disposition’, whereas the Welsh were warm, voluble and dark. But, with his eyes closed, the Welsh also seem to have disappeared and so, he now realizes, have the Normans.

From Cardiff to Margam Abbey, now an exciting adventure parkland on a hill overlooking the industrial south and the sea, then onwards to Neath and Swansea. Gerald keeps up a flow of stories about fairyland, and the slaughter of the English by the Welsh and vice versa. In Carmarthen, having crossed the River Tywi by boat, Baldwin recruits more crusaders, while Gerald informs us that Carmarthen’s name means ‘Town of Merlin’, because Merlin was discovered here ‘as the offspring of an incubus’ (that is, his human mother had become pregnant after sex with a male demon, which was unsurprisingly common in those days, but as Gerald always says, who are we to doubt these miracles?). In fact, rather dully, Carmarthen means a sea town with some walls, but that hasn’t stopped the locals from erecting a startlingly ugly wooden statue of the Welsh wizard on their high street, complete with pet dragon, staff, peaked hat, cascading beard, snake, wand, horn, owl and what may well be a flask of mead.

I get a pleasant jolt when a man saunters past talking Welsh to his two young sons. There is no reason for my surprise, other than inexcusable London-centricity. As Wyn Griffith says in The Welsh:

to the ordinary Englishman, the greatest of all strangenesses is a strange language in a familiar country. After crossing the Channel to France, he expects to hear French spoken, for he is in another country. But it is always a shock to him, in his own island as he would call it, to find his railway carriage – that familiar carriage in which he left London a few hours ago – invaded by people who speak a strange language among themselves, apparently from choice …

There are probably more Welsh speakers alive today than there were in Gerald’s time, thanks to population growth and some vigorous recent campaigning, even if the proportion of Welsh speakers in Wales is much lower. When Wyn Griffith tries to define who the Welsh are, and God knows he’s not the only one, he falls back on the language. Without it, there’d be no real difference between them and their neighbours, he says, especially because he cannot, unlike Gerald, find a way to define the Welsh ‘race’. And yet this is how Gerald finishes his Description of Wales:

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.

I follow the man and his sons because I want to bathe, briefly, in the sound of their conversation. It is both familiar and incomprehensible. I feel a thrilling connection to an older land (even though this is happening, now) and back to Gerald, who we are fairly sure spoke Welsh but did not, unusually for him, like to boast about it. I hope I am not lurking in a sinister fashion, but anyway the man and his boys turn in to a barber shop and I carry on to take in the rest of the town. I am looking for a café, but there are surprisingly few. This is nothing like London, where every other place can sell you a jolt of caffeine and every other person is suckling a tub of sweet milky coffee, like a parade of hungry babies, unable to let go of their teats.

It transpires that almost every shop in Carmarthen is a barber. And almost every man and boy, and mother with a boy on her lap, is inside getting a haircut. Gerald is very clear about this:

Both the men and the women cut their hair short and shape it round their ears and eyes … The men shave their beards, leaving only their moustaches… You can find it in the book which Julius Caesar wrote … ‘the Britons shave their whole body except their upper lip.’ Sometimes they shave their heads, too, so that they can move more freely.

Gerald also says that the Welsh care for their teeth better than he has seen in any other country, brushing with green hazel shoots and then burnishing them with woollen cloths ‘until they shine like ivory’. They also ‘daub their faces with shiny warpaint’.

Wales, you see, has always been the home of the tattoo, short haircut, fresh shave, clean teeth and all-over body wax (but always sparing the moustache). I decide it would be wrong not to join them and in no time (there’s so much choice) find my scalp being kneaded and delicately teased by an early middle-aged, handsomely coiffed blond man from Neath who is fascinated by the fact that I’ve come from London and yet even so have entrusted him to look after my hair. I ask for the electric trimmers (No. four; my needs are simple) but he insists on hand-cutting each individual hair with a tiny pair of silver scissors (‘I’ll bet they don’t do this for you in London’), and wants to know how much a similar service would normally cost. When I tell him £13 he subsides like a ruptured bouncy castle. He’d been harbouring a dream to move to London and make his fortune, and although I backpedal, and try to explain that I get my hair cut in Tooting, but in the centre of town he could make much, much more, he’s just not listening and a restless unhappiness settles on us both, while he snips and trims through the long afternoon with his sad little scissors. ‘Do tell them where you got your haircut’, he finishes at last, brightening just a bit, ‘when you get back to London.’ Ah yes, London. I’ll make sure I let them know.

It really is a very fine haircut. And I feel proud to take it to Manorbier Castle, which is where Gerald was born and spent a happy childhood. Gerald doesn’t in fact go to Manorbier on his trip with Baldwin, so I shouldn’t really be here, but he writes so evocatively about his family home, and it’s really not so far off the trail (how he must have pleaded), that I make a quick detour. And what a place to grow up! The great grey castle is still standing on its hill, somewhat decayed and altered since Gerald’s day, but I think he would recognize at least one of the towers, and the river still rolls past the walls and down to the beach, where Gerald used to build sand-cathedrals (not castles, he tells us) so that his family knew, even when he was very young, that he would be a good man for the Church.

He most certainly stood on this empty grey beach and watched the seagulls and skimmed these flat, red and black stones over the shallow waves. It is raining of course, a slight, drifting, soft rain, but that is what has saved this beach – this country – from ruinous tourism and other, earlier invaders. A man walks by slowly with his large dog, both of them sheltering underneath an even larger red umbrella. The only others here (and this is an afternoon in June) are one happy family, the three young children building dams in the river. It reminds me of my own family’s only Welsh holiday, when my brother and I spent a week, perhaps two, merrily pushing mud around in the rain while my parents sheltered in the lee of the camper van and wondered whether to go home early. Mostly (Henry I being an example Gerald would know) the English have packed up and headed for their dry beds rather than linger in this land of clouds. How much more vital and satisfying to invade Bordeaux, they must have felt, with its golden dunes and incomparable wines.

The travellers reached St David’s at last, with Gerald chaffing at the presence of the current Bishop, Peter de Leia. He manages, somehow, to call him ‘a most friendly and hospitable man’. Or maybe he really did like him, although in the course of a long exposition on why St David’s always was and still should be at the head of an independent Welsh Church, Gerald does give Peter a backhanded slap when he says that every bishop sent from England to Wales just wanted to get back to the easy life of an English bishopric. What the place needs, says Gerald, is a Welsh bishop.

He then vents some of his spleen by telling us the true story of a man ‘in our own days’ who ‘lying ill in bed’ was visited by every toad for miles around. His friends fought the toads with stick and sword, killing them in vast numbers, but in the end they had to put the man in a bag and hoist him to the top of a tall tree, with all the branches removed. Even that didn’t help. The toads crawled up the trunk and devoured every last scrap of their victim, until only his skeleton remained.

The Bishop’s Palace in St David’s has risen and fallen to ruins since Gerald’s time, and the cathedral would be unrecognizable. There’s a choir practising for a concert tonight, so I sit at the back with a crowd of other sightseers and listen as the small choir, and an eight-person wind section, fills the nave with heavenly sound. I’m thinking of Gerald, of course, who yearned to be bishop here. He had the support of the local clerics and parishioners, but the English establishment was against him, from the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury down.

In 1198, ten years after this trip with Baldwin, Bishop Peter de Leia died and Gerald saw one last chance to get his hands on the prize. He was even elected bishop by the local chapter – and they sent him to Rome to try and persuade Pope Innocent III to confirm the appointment, bypassing the English Church. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, now Hubert Walter, fought Gerald implacably, and King John could not be persuaded to make a decision (well, he told Gerald when he saw him that he was ‘right behind him’, and told the archbishop the same thing not long after); and after four long years of fight (he was even thrown into prison in France by the archbishop’s men, who had been told to look out for a tall man with voluminous eyebrows), he finally gave up. He lived for another twenty years, settling scores in his many books, and died in Lincoln or maybe Hereford aged over eighty.

I leave St David’s for Cardigan, on the trail of the still vigorous Gerald, via tiny Nevern Church. The mist lifts a little and I sit on an ancient stone tomb in the shadow of a weeping yew and allow myself to be drugged by waves of wild garlic, until I remember the fate of the northern woman who defiled Saint Osana and I jump down in a hurry. In Cardigan, Baldwin preached in a green field just by the bridge and you can stand in the same spot, only slightly diminished by the passing cars, and contemplate the many miracles that were performed here after his visit, although as Gerald says, ‘I have no time to tell you about them.’

The sun is out and I find myself wondering what, today, would persuade the men of Cardigan to gather in excited reverence and then sign up to fight a ferocious enemy in a faraway land. Well, there’s the plunder, of course. The forgiveness of all sins. Eternal life. The chance of a bit of sunshine, for Christ’s sake. But they must have known that one likely outcome was death or disfigurement. Gerald’s book is full of tales of women who try to prevent their men from joining the crusade – and here in Cardigan he tells us about a woman who seized her husband by the cloak and belt and ‘brazenly prevented him from taking the Cross’. Three nights later God punishes her by causing her to roll over and suffocate her young boy in her sleep, and she herself ‘sewed the sign of the Cross on her husband’s shoulder with her own hands’.

The road out of Cardigan is marked as something called the ‘Saints and Stones Tour’, but I am not to be thrown off the scent of Gerald, who is now making his way along the beautiful banks of the River Teifi. I stop in Cenarth, because it was here, or hereabouts, that Gerald claimed to have seen some of the last beavers still living in Wales. The rest had been hunted to oblivion long before, as had all the beavers of England south of the River Humber, although Gerald had heard that there was also one stream in Scotland where the beavers still lolloped and gnawed and splashed and dammed and got on with their lives far from the hunters and their dogs.

The last beavers of Britain were exterminated by humanity not long after Gerald’s tour, as indeed, at one time, were the wolf, the bear, the boar, the ox, the lynx, the walrus, the grey whale, the crane, the osprey, the pelican, the elk and the woolly mammoth, and so on and on and on … but now they, and some of the other lucky species, if they still exist elsewhere, are making a tentative return. Not here on the River Teifi, as yet, but in Devon on the River Otter and in two sites in Scotland. It all seems very grudging. The Scottish government has had to rush through a law confirming them as a ‘native’ species in order to protect them from gun-toting landowners. And the Angling Trust seems to imagine that the fish are going to be disturbed by the presence of these large herbivores, with whom, we shouldn’t really have to point out, they once co-evolved. Britain’s landscape was shaped by beavers. They were here long before us, and they bring abundance in their wake, an explosion of life in the ponds and dams and purified, meandering streams. They even help mitigate flooding. It is a catastrophic failure of imagination to think that we cannot once again share our land with these wondrous beings.

The beavers of Gerald’s day had a sure-fire way of evading human hunters. They would castrate themselves. It is how they got their Latin name, Castor, Gerald assures us, even though it actually comes from the Greek word for ‘musk’. But it is well known that humans lust after a beaver’s testicles. Not in a sexual way, I think, although Gerald is not quite clear about this. When the hounds are hot on its heels the beaver will whip off its own balls and shake them from a safe distance at the pursuing hunters – and they will immediately call off the hunt. And sometimes when an already self-castrated beaver is being pursued, all he has to do is ‘rush to the top of a hillock, cock up one of his hind legs and show the hunter that the organs which he is really after have already been cut off’.

Sadly, there are no longer any beavers getting busy on the banks of the bountiful River Teifi on which to test this theory, but one day, perhaps, they will return. And how much more beautiful everything would be if the beavers were here, with their shaggy dams spread across the river, close to where it now sparkles in the falls. The salmon would still flail and leap in their season. Dragonflies and frogspawn would dart and roll in the reeds. But even now, the path along the bank, although narrow and awkwardly speared with alder roots, is a magical place, impossible not to follow, slipping in the mud, entranced by the shimmer of midges in the faint, falling light on this long summer’s evening. The woods on either side are growing muted, darker, but still gentle with a greening of young ash and sycamore. A wood pigeon gives a throaty purr. And there, just around the next bend in the path, there is a huge greyhound waiting, watching my stumbling approach. There are no humans to be seen. The dog looks as if it has stepped out of the pages of Gerald’s book, wilder, more alert … undeniably medieval. I walk on – perhaps I shouldn’t – and the hound, long-haired, I now see, grey, close-packed, rangy, as tall as a wolf, bows from the front and dips its head and wags its tail and then, without warning, leaps up and thrusts its long hard nose into my groin. I just have time to notice that it has no collar – Oh dear God, it’s feral! – before I stumble back, shouting and sprawling into a juniper bush, flinging up my arms to protect my throat. And my groin. Sweet Jesus! Do we really want the beavers back? And the wolves? Why ever did I think it was a good idea? I have been transported into a Roald Dahl story. The man who wanted to see a rewilding of the world – our dreary, desiccated world – and who mocked Gerald’s faulty Latin and silly ideas about self-mutilating beavers, is now alone in the woods, far from help, about to be castrated by a wild dog. And torn apart by toads.

The dog gives a happy bark and skips away, looking to see if I want to play some more. I really don’t. I get out of the bush and turn for home and the dog trots with me, sometimes at my heel, sometimes far behind, or pushing past and loping ahead with eager intent. He has a white-tipped tail and he smiles as he runs, his mouth open, his teeth large and hard and sharp. He’s a beautiful dog – and at one point he disappears and although I continue to fret about ambushes, it turns out he has vanished for good. I miss him.

Gerald spent several nights not far from here in the Abbey of Strata Florida. He must have been impressed, because ten years later, when he was fighting to become Bishop of St David’s and travelling to and from Rome, he entrusted his precious collection of books to the monks and not long after that they sold them and kept the money. Gerald’s life was full of frustrations and thwarted ambition.

There’s not much left of the abbey now, but it remains remote and far from the concerns of our hectic world. The carved stone western doorway still stands and low ruined walls trace an outline of the grass-covered great hall. There’s an old farm next to the outer wall (although it looks deserted), and a couple of empty houses, with spiders’ webs in the windows and swifts calling in the eaves. It is nearly dark now. There’s mist in the woods on the surrounding hills and bats in the air. A car crawls past on the tiny dirt road and the driver peers out through the murk. I listen to the sound of his engine as it fades to nothing down the valley. Just to one side of the ruined abbey, next to a dying ash tree, there’s a small country church; and next to that, vanishing into the gloom, is a vast graveyard, still very much in use, many of the tombstones freshly carved, but others of immense age, scoured and featureless lumps of stone drowsing in lichen and moss. Gerald stood here once, although that was long before even one of these ancient stones was planted. He would have been talking to Baldwin, or the abbot, or walking alone, and making his plans, or composing his book, and scheming and plotting and turning over the options on St David’s, or maybe just taking the air and listening to these swifts and thinking about dinner and inhaling the extraordinary freshness of the wild Welsh night and

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blue-eyed boy

Mister Death