Thursday, August 02, 2007
Llyn CelynAn earth dam holds back the reservoir of Llyn Celyn, the water gleaming in the summer sun. You can tell it’s a reservoir, water has been taken leaving a scummy tide mark around the edge. Beneath it lays the village of Capel Celyn, at the end of the 1950s the battle to save it became a defining moment for Welsh nationalism.
It might not have been on the scale of the Namada Dam in India but it was still keenly felt. Capel Celyn was a small farming community, the people met together to sing and recite poetry, it was steeped in Welsh culture.
Liverpool wanted their water and demanded to have their valley as a reservoir. The spin-doctors of their time painted a picture of thirst ravaged inhabitants in Merseyside and south Lancashire – a blatant untruth the water was for the industrial expansion that never happened. Big-city arrogance triumphed over a tiny inconsequential village.
Driving westward around Llyn Celyn there’s a huge stone boulder with an iron plaque firmly embedded in it. It commemorates the farmstead of Hafod Fadog – during the seventeenth century it was a centre for Quaker worship. The Quakers believed that they could communicate with God without the need for churches, officials or sacraments, a revolutionary viewpoint for the time. In 1679 at Bala, Quakers were tried for refusing to pay tithes to the established church. With their customary tolerance the Court of Great Sessions threatened to burn them, this prompted the thousands of Welsh Quakers to buy land in Pennsylvania.
Further down the road there’s a memorial chapel that commemorates the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel buried beneath the waters. Inside a plaque lists the names of the villagers, sadly it’s now closed due to vandalism. I don’t know who designed it but it looks less like a chapel and more nuclear fall-out shelter with its sloping slate roof and bunker like design only a small cross on the roof betrays its purpose.
Behind the chapel the gravestones stand, removed before the waters engulfed them, they stand proud, slate black in the shade, Welsh names – Roberts, Jones, I’ve a strange uneasy feeling. Can the dead rest when their homes lie in the gloom at the bottom of the lake?
The main parking area is at the western end of the reservoir, you skirt along the busy road, dodging artics before the sanctuary of the footpath beckons. Walking across marshland there’s a small bridge over the Afon Tryweryn.
Coming to the disused railway I take a brief detour to the right to find the quarry, it’s as though a malignant giant has gouged a chunk from the hillside. Closer up you can see the galleries where quarry workers laboured with rope and pick and the occasional stick of gelignite to ease the slate from the hillside.
Following the road that skirts behind the hill a military jet screams overhead, straight as an arrow, piercing the clouds momentarily disturbing the tranquility until it rumbles away thundering into the distance.
Electricity pylons disfigure the landscape, arms splayed out like iron giants, cables twisting across the floor of the valley. House martins arch, swoop and wheel over the heather, gathering on the cables ready for the long journey south as though a quiet insistent voice is instructing them to depart. A buzzard patrols the heather hugging the ground so closely it appears to be running across it.
In the village of Llidiardau there is a perfect example of a Calvinistic Methodist chapel its walls thick and imposing, peering through the window I can see the plain white walls, simple wooden pews, the building shorn of any adornments. The Wesleyans believed that a person could lose their salvation by leading an unfaithful life, Whitefield’s Methodists expressed the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination – “once saved always saved”.
A footpath leads back to Llyn Celyn and there’s the ruined farm of Tan-y-myndd, the house and barn exposed to the elements, the roof tiles stripped away. Roof beams have collapsed and lie splintered at crazy angles like a sculpture from Tate Modern. Inside the house a range - the fire long extinguished, outside the damson trees loaded with fruit – no hand to pick them. Were there no sons to continue? Was life too hard on this hillside, bleak isolation broken only by the call of the sheep?
The footpath peters out and I’m wading through a sea of ferns, blind, stumbling over stones and rocks. Eventually I reach the road back to the dam. The water treatment spire peers out of the lake like the conning tower from an alien submarine. In the car park the graffiti has been painted over – ‘Liverpool Must Suffer for Tryweryn’ and underneath it the symbol of the Free Wales Army.
A path worn by the sheep takes me round the lakeshore. I find the concreted over railway line and watch it disappear into the waters depths. Further on rowan trees laden with red berries line the sides – protection against enchantment and evil spirits.
Would Capel Celyn have survived intact? I can see the minister railing in vain against the corruption of the flesh, sin, fornication and reality TV. The chapels now are bingo halls, cut price stores or converted into homes. Would the village be full of B+Bs, a caravan park (assaulted by RS Thomas’s ‘Elsan culture’), or invaded by the second homes of the despised English? Was this way of life worth saving, the mean spirit of the chapel that Caradoc Evans pilloried in Capel Sion? Dylan Thomas portrayed the Welsh village as inward looking, that suffocating closeness, the youth leaving for the cities.
Capel Celyn never got a chance, they marched through Liverpool’s streets, and 27 out of 36 Welsh MPs voted in vain against the reservoir. Just before the dam was opened in 1963 an electricity transformer was blown up. That October the Tryweryn Dam was opened by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the Free Wales Army made their appearance, there was stone throwing, shouting and fireworks. The sound of Welsh voices drifted in the air, it sounded like a hymn and the corporation officials listened in silence. It was an old hymn and the words were repeated over again – “Tull dîn pob Sais” – “Arseholes to all Englishmen.”
Liverpool Council apology
The valley drowned in pictures
Archive film
Labels: Walks
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Hunter’s Hill ParboldYesterday a large yellow object appeared in the sky, yeah, it was the Sun. What a washout of a Bank Holiday, camping trip cancelled. You always spend a fortune when it’s wet.
With a break in the clouds I ventured out. Sometimes you discover places closer to home. I drove out to Parbold just off the M6. It hovers indeterminably between large village and small town, there are shops, pubs, a village hall and a library to break the rural isolation. You also see plenty of families, it isn’t just a retirement home for the well-to-do.
Parbold’s livelihood was based on mining, milling and quarrying. When the Leeds Liverpool Canal opened at the end of the eighteenth century these industries were given a temporary boost. With the coming of the railways it became a commuter stop for Liverpool and Manchester. The local landowners clung on to the Catholic faith and this has left its mark with the church and school.
I walked down Stony Lane towards Hunter’s Hill Quarry. Looking at a 2D map you don’t really appreciate the topography. From the quarry there’s a panoramic view of the plain and you can see across to the Wirral’s sandstone ridge, on a clear day you can see the Lake District.
I skirted round the quarry and came back down another narrow lane and into Hill Dale, then Parbold, just in time for the rain…
Labels: Walks
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Yarrow ValleyThis is another country park reclaimed from industry. Birkacre on the outskirts of Coppull was home to a bleach works and mine until the 1930s.
In 1777 Richard Arkwright the ‘father of the industrial revolution’ leased a cotton mill and installed his latest spinning machinery. The activities of ‘machine breakers’ forced him to relinquish the lease in 1779.
You can follow the River Yarrow beyond the country park, the bluebells were carpeting the woods today.
Labels: Walks
Monday, April 09, 2007
Astley Green Mining MuseumDriving down the East Lancs Road looking at the redundant mills and spoil heaps you get an indication of how ‘King Cotton’ and mining were the twin pillars of Lancashire’s prosperity.
The last mining museum in the northwest is at Astley Green (opened 1908 – closed 1970) near Leigh. The Lancashire Mining Museum at Buile Hill, Salford was closed in 2000 due to cuts in council spending. Astley Green is run by volunteers from the Red Rose Steam Society so opening times are limited.
You can’t miss the museum because the winding tower stands gaunt, skeletal, black against the flat landscape – the last survivor. There’s an excellent exhibition on mining and the life of the pit. In 1840 due to an Act of Parliament the mine owners had to record accidents at work, some of the first recorded are the deaths of children aged 10 and 11 working as trappers, they opened doors in the mine to circulate air. The worst pit disaster in Lancashire was at the Pretoria Pit, West Houghton in 1910, 344 miners died in an explosion. There are also photographs of the ‘Pit Brow Lasses’, I found this excellent web site by Dave Lane (you will need broadband and be patient because it takes a minute or two to download).
The engine hall is carefully preserved, the giant machines lying idle now. Astley Green was a deep pit and they needed powerful machinery to lift the cages up.
Nearby the Bridgewater Canal winds it way up to Manchester. I wouldn’t recommend the walk the scenery is stark, bare, almost post-apocalyptical. There’s a huge open cast mining site with giant earth moving trucks, fenced off with frequent warning notices.
I can still remember when there was a quarter of a million miners, in one generation the industry has been wiped out. It was dirty, brutal work but most miners would still go back to it.
Astley Green has a collection of railway engines and trucks from all over the country but sadly most of it is under plastic covers. There seems to be millions for stately homes and the National Trust (good luck to them) but very little for our industrial heritage.
English National Mining Museum
Welsh National Mining Museum
Scottish National Mining Museum
Labels: Walks
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Are You Local?We went to Hadfield yesterday, it’s on the edge of Greater Manchester and the Peak District and is a.k.a. Royston Vasey – “You’ll Never Leave!” – the setting of ‘The League of Gentlemen’. Unlike Avoca in Ireland, where ‘Ballykissangel’ was filmed, there aren’t coach loads of tourists everywhere and apart from a few posters in the shops there aren’t any obvious signs that the series was based there. Still if the fictional account showed your town populated by grotesques, weirdoes and freaks, maybe you wouldn’t want to publicise the fact.
First we wander down the main street looking out for ‘Burger Me’, the infamous charity shop with the harridans who had a fixation about plastic bags, the dole office where Pauline, with her fetish about biros, ruled the ‘dole scum’ with a rod of iron and finally there’s the war memorial where Chubby Brown’s foul mouthed mayor held his press conferences (trivia point Royston Vasey is his real name).
The four writers were all brought up during the 1980s in economically depressed northern towns and this combined with a love of gothic horror movies was the inspiration for ‘The League of Gentlemen’.
Hadfield is also the starting point for the Longdendale Trail – part of the Trans Pennine Trail that stretches from Liverpool to Hull. It runs along an old railway line opened in 1845, salt from Cheshire one way and coal from Yorkshire to power the Lancashire cotton mills the other.
It was a beautiful clear, crisp day, the buds of spring on the trees, lambs with spindly legs in the fields, peacock butterflies a splash of colour and robins in full voice staking out their territory. Planes from Manchester Airport soaring into the sky, motorbikes roaring away in the distance.
The reservoirs snake through the valley but somehow they can never replicate the natural beauty of lakes. When we get to Torside it’s been drained and is like an open, gaping wound, the boats from the sailing club stranded above it forlorn and useless.
The Woodhead Reservoir is full, shimmering in the sunshine; the chapel sits above it in lonely isolation. In the graveyard there are the unmarked graves of the navvies who died in the 1849 cholera plague, many more died building the Woodhead Tunnel. The line eventually closed in 1981.
We hurry back to catch the end of the Chelsea .v. Spurs game in the friendly Palatine Pub.
Labels: Walks
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Anderton Boat LiftIt was a beautiful day despite the cold wind, it felt like spring in the sunshine. Not that we’re throwing off the shackles of winter any more – the seasons almost merge together now.
I went to look at the Anderton Boat Lift near Northwich, ‘The Cathedral of the Canals’, built in 1875 it lifts boats from the Weaver Navigation up to the Trent and Mersey Canal. Closed in 1983 it was restored and reopened in 2002.
Walking down the towpath I passed some massive marinas chock full of narrow boats. I wonder what it’s like in the summer? You buy a boat to get some peace and quiet and then there’s ‘lock rage’ as boats try to beat the queues.
I went through Marbury Country Park, which has beautiful views across Budworth Mere (part of Northwich Community Woodlands). The Barry family built a mock French Chateau in the 1840s, but they decided to live in one of their other mansions – as you do. It was auctioned off in the 1930s, requisitioned during the war and demolished in 1968.
In the open fields a skylark shot upwards and hovered with its insistent call. Even a townie like me could recognise it.
By the time I got back the Anderton Boat Lift was open, there’s an excellent exhibition which is only £2 for adults. I was just waiting to see it in operation but no deal.
Northwich was founded on the salt industry they pumped brine out of the ground and then allowed the water to evaporate. Later this caused subsidence and buildings began to sink, nothing daunted they shored the foundations up or just moved the houses.
Driving away the chemical works are still smoking away in the background, once part of ICI they’ve renamed them Brunner-Mond (now owned by Tata of India). Brunner and Mond were Victorian philanthropists, who introduced holidays with pay, a pension fund and encouraged trade unionism, wonder what it’s like today?
Labels: Walks
Sunday, February 18, 2007
A view from the pier...We set out for the massive car boot sale on farm land just north of Burscough, but they were still on winter break so we headed across to Southport. There are lots of memorials in memory of different disasters where lifeboat crew lost their lives. The RNLI took the lifeboat away from the town in 1925 but in the 1980s local people raised money for an independent lifeboat station.
The pier was reopened in 2002 after extensive restoration work. It's nothing like its former glory but they've done a great job and rather than have sad shops and amusement arcades dotted all along there's just one cafe, arcade and visitor centre at the end. You could see out to Blackpool today.
What has really spoilt it though is when you look back from the start of the pier they've built ugly retail sheds. So rather than gaze at the splendour of the Victorian frontage all you can see is JJB, Premier Bowl, Matalan, McDonald's and Pizza Hut. What is it with town planners? An empty space and 'let's throw up a retail park.' The proverbial blot on the landscape.
Labels: Walks
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Woolston EyesWent for a walk yesterday round Woolston Eyes which is between the M6 Thelwall viaduct and the Manchester Ship Canal. It's now a nature reserve, place you wouldn't really know is there, with all the traffic thundering away in the distance. Well worth a visit.
Labels: Walks
