Cadw enrolled

It's been warmer today, but still with a pall of low cloud and mist making the outdoors very un-inviting. Even so, we made an effort to go out after breakfast, walking up the lane close by, and then a little down the road it comes out on, to visit Oxwich Castle, open this weekend and then closed until next April. It's a Cadw property, which was the sixteenth century Elizabethan home of the powerful Mansel family, who also acquired neighbouring Penrice Castle by marriage in the early 15th century.

Once a prestigious mansion house with a staff of fifty, Oxwich was probably too costly to maintain. It had its heyday for about fifty years, then over centuries it fell into ruin, with only part of the property remaining as a dwelling. The family bought the land and buildings of Cistercian Margam Abbey after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and that became the Mansel clan headquarters instead.

The Oxwich ruins were sold to the state after the Second World War, and restoration of what remained of the Elizabethan buildings was a slow burn Ministry of Works project, opened to the public finally in 1994. The few remaining sections of its walls show it had four storeys over a basement, and the huge square tower had six. With wet mist swirling around and through the ruins, it was very atmospheric, like being inside a black and white movie.

A two storey section alongside the ruined main house was for five centuries divided into two cottages and these were occupied until after the war. Replacement homes had to be constructed nearby before restoration could begin. The ground floor has been nicely converted into a gift shop and interpretation centre. The upstairs is sparsely furnished with period pieces, but also has a clothes rail of Elizabethan costumes for kids and youngsters to try on. The whole place is more of an education centre relating to mediaeval Gower than it is a museum or a stately home.

The receptionist-cum-custodian told us about the place, and promoted the virtue of taking out an annual Cadw subscription. Clare enthused about this as a possible Christmas present, so the deed was done. It is valid also for English Heritage properties, and Wales has so many fine castles and other buildings looked after by Cadw that it's worth our while, even if we have been to quite a few of them all over the past fifty years.

We walked down to the village again. Clare fancied fish and chips for lunch. I fancied a curry, so while she waited for hers to be cooked, I went back and cooked my own. She had more chips than she could eat, so I had curry and chips for lunch, a rare event indeed for me.

I rained and was overcast for much of the afternoon, but when it stopped about half past four, we decided to go out for another walk, and went to the beach as the sun was setting, albeit totally hidden by cloud and mist. The whole hour was like a very long twilight. The sea was coming in as we walked along the beach. It didn't start raining again until it was dark enough to merit leaving the beach and heading back to the bungalow. It was quite a mysterious experience like hovering between two worlds. And it produced some interesting photographs also, just like Oxwich Castle.

Castle concern

I walked to St John's Canton to celebrate their midweek Eucharist this morning. Then in the afternoon Clare and I walked together to town, on my part, with no particular aim in mind apart from exercise. When we reached the Castle, Clare proposed that we enter and have a cuppa in the restaurant there. It proved an opportune moment to renew my 'Castle Key' residents' free entrance pass. My original pass was issued free and expired over eighteen months ago. I simply never got around to renewing it. Now it costs a fiver to cover the cost of issuing a new card, which is forty percent of the price of a single visitor entrance ticket. Most reasonable. I was impressed that a fresh plastic photocard could be made for issue within minutes of proving one's residence rights, using a hand-held scanner to take a photo and etch it on a card with name and renewal date.

On our way out Clare chatted with one of the guides/welcomers who look after visitors, someone who had been on the team when she acted as a tour guide there. Recession has reduced the number of visitors, and Council budget cuts have led to a drastic limitation of the conservation budget, so that some of the most visited rooms are suffering from wear and tear and starting to look neglected. This is hardly likely to attract extra visitors. "It's slowly turning into one big function suite."  I heard said. Hiring the place out for receptions and social events helps balance the books. One of Cardiff's iconic tourist venues is in government speak 'Just About Managing'.

What's so sad is that the region boasts many institutions of higher and further education with staff and students undergoing various specialised aspects of training in conservation arts and crafts. There's no reason why a partnership between these institutions and the City Council couldn't help to guarantee a high standard of maintenance and provide a practical training ground at the same time. Admittedly a significant obstacle would be the surveillance CADW exercises on listed buildings and monuments in Wales. It's a quango which sets acceptably high standards, but is dauntingly slow and bureaucratic in exercising its regulatory powers, so getting a functional partnership between educational interests, Council and CADW, even with a shared aim, would not be easy to commend to politicians preferring the glamour of quick wins. 

Wales has so many ancient monuments, more than its fair share of ruins. Across the centuries few prestige building projects realized by wealthy or powerful people have survived the test of time in their intended condition. Sooner or later, places lose their significance as status symbols in the public eye. They become unaffordable to run, and end up in ruins. The hardest thing is to witness the decay of beautiful things and places through neglect, for whatever reason.

After walking around the shops for a while, my knee joint started to become painful. I may just have overdone the exercise lately. Anyway, I caught the bus home, tired and aching, conscious of my own wear and tear. After a short rest, I drove over to St German's for the evening's Lenten Stations of the Cross and eucharistic adoration. At the end, a man who arrived with a friend during the service asked with tears in his eyes, to talk to a priest about his troubles. 

He said his landlord had thrown him out, and that he'd been on the streets for two days and neither eaten nor slept. I'm not sure I believed the story he told, or maybe it wasn't the whole story, as he looked remarkably clean and tidy for someone who'd been out on the streets a couple of days with no support, but there was no way to corroborate his story, He was hungry, but there was no means to give him anything to eat and drink at that time of night with the church day centre closed. I sent him to the homelessness hub in Tresilian Terrace, and told him where he could contact the city centre detached social worker team, and the church gave him some money to buy a meal on his way. It was the best we could do. There are so many ways in which someone can be precipitated on to the streets unprepared and traumatized by the experience. Cardiff has many voluntary and professional people active in caring for the homeless, and the numbers continue to grow.

Clynnog Fawr

Today we drove into Caernarfon, about half an hour away from Nefyn. We visited the Castle and had lunch in Jake's Cafe, just inside the old town walls. Before heading for home we crossed the river Arfon and walked along the shore, just after the high tide turned. I caught sight of a curlew landing to feed just thirty feet from the promenade, and was delighted to catch a few photos at relatively close range. It made my day.

On the return journey we stopped in the hamlet of Clynnog Fawr, which has an unusually large Parish Church, for this region, dating from 15-16th century. A spacious monastic collegiate church before the reformation, important for pilgrims because of its association with St Beuno, a founding father of Christian life in Gwynedd. In the sixth century he established a 'Clas' here, a small group of monks living and learning together, welcoming and teaching others. 

There's a separate chapel to the southwest of the church said to have once been a shrine and possibly Beuno's burial place, although other places like Pistill's ancient church also claim this honour. Several churches and associated hostels flourished along the route, in the mediaeval heyday of pilgrimages from Holywell on the eastern border of North Wales to Ynys Enlli, Bardsea island. 

These churches are in a fight for survival in our times of decline in traditional Christian faith, yet this route is still walked by latter day pilgrims and spiritual truth seekers, looking into the past of this beautiful numinous region to find inspiration and guidance for the future, whether they are committed church members or not.

Ynys Mon on Ascension Day

We got up early this morning to breakfast in time to be out of the house by nine, and on our way to Bangor to attend the 10.30am Eucharist for Ascension Day. The Cathedral website said there was a service and I emailed a request to confirm this, as the home page was still advertising Easter services, evidently not having been updated since then, so there was no knowing whether the usual weekday routine service continued or was supplanted on this special occasion. The response to my request arrived, telling us about a 5.30pm service, but only after we'd decided to take it on trust that there would be a 10.30am service, 

We arrived in good time, but the officiating priest didn't show up. The Sacristan rang around and found a substitute before coming out to apologise to the nine of us who were waiting. We all sat quietly and patiently for a quarter of an hour until he came. The anticipation was most enjoyable, as was the bi-lingual service, offered in a gentle and relaxed prayerful manner. It was a happy occasion, despite embarrassing mishaps. There's no doubt about it, the church is under pressure to live up to its own aspiration to offer the best it can to those who seek its ministrations. Patience is not just a virtue but a necessity.

We had coffee in a High Street bakery shop before leaving town and heading for the Menai Bridge, to cross over into Anglesey, Ynys Mon - Mam Cymru, to visit Plas Newydd, a huge chateau-like National Trust property with extensive gardens and an arboretum, bordering on the Menai Straights. It was in the national news recently for completing a £600,000 project to install a marine source heat pump to drive its central heating, oil powered until then. The house was shut, but the gardens were open. It was dry but overcast with a chill wind, so it needed a certain resolve to keep going. We found the spot where the heat pump's water source was located just above the shore, freshly lansdscaped, the grass not yet grown back. 

After lunch in the site cafe and a second walk around the gardens, we drove further along the A4080 road, and discovered a CADW signposted turning up a side road to Bryn Celli Ddu, a neolithic burial mound in a field at the end of a new and well constructed half mile path through fields. The site is thought to have begun as a henge, a twenty metre diameter stone circle, a rarity in Wales. Later occupants of the territory plundered the stones to construct a communal burial chamber at the centre of an earth mound. The site was excavated and reconstruction was based on this theory. Anglesey has many such neolithic sites. So much to see! 

We drove on past Brynsiencyn down to the road to the shore leading to the Sea Zoo, and to a dead end at water's edge, where there's an old ferryman's house and a small harbour. It's dead opposite Caernarvon on the mainland. Whether there's still a regular ferry service, I doubt, although there were several boats beached by low tide in this vicinity, which could be used to transport goods across and avoid traffic jams on the bridges. Another similar ferryman's house stands in the village of Porthaethwy in the lee of Menai Bridge, but that's well above the shore. The need for a ferry so close to Telford's bridge has long gone, but Cambrian House as it's called, is one of the oldest there.

On our way back from the shore to the A4080 for the home run, quite by chance we happened upon a small roadside cottage serving home made cream teas, under the banner 'Giddy Aunt's Tea Room', run by a couple from Yorkshire, with a delightful story to tell of how they'd purchased a small plot of land with rights for a caravan dwelling, and a ruined agricultural building in one corner. Over several years they obtained planning permission and re-built the ruin as a smallish cottage, and eventually to use its facilities to run their delightfully situated little tea room. The wife was a great raconteur, who'd successfully appeared on the "Who wants to be a miilionaire?" TV game show, and paid off their mortgage on building work with the proceeds of her win. An unexpected bonus to our first visit to 'Mam Cymru', as Ynys Mon is also known.

Final holiday weekend

Another damp miserable day yesterday. I stayed home while the girls went out to Roath Park in the morning, then traipsed into the office to work on generating the first batch of 2014 invoices ready for issuing next week. Last year I did them in November before going to Sicily. It's not a difficult task. The difficulty, when I only get to do it once a year, is remembering how to produce a decent data-set from the RadioNet client database, then getting Word's mail-merge to make use of it.

I did most of the work in the office, but when I hit a snag, I decided it was better to go home and figure it out, as background office noise was too much of a distraction. Now that I've got my home and three office PCs linked to Microsoft Sky Drive, and, it seems to be working as intended, this was easy, and it meant I wasn't late for supper. When I return to Spain it'll make it that much easier to work on things, as if I was at the next desk in the office - provided the internet connection works.

Today Owain joined us and we went to Castell Coch. Annoyingly, it was closed for the month for restoration and cleaning work, but according to the CADW website it was open. We were able to park outside the gates - not even the car park was in use, and the narrow roadside was lined with the parked cars of walkers. Not a good idea. We let Jasmine explore the outside of the castle precinct. She found a discarded ivy wreath in the dry moat, seemed to know exactly where it was meant to be, and took it back where it belonged and hung it up on the door.

Then we walked up the hillside and played with her in the woods for an hour.

We then drove over to St Nicholas and visited the Tinkinswood and St Lythan's burial chambers. 

We had lunch in the excellent Duffryn House visitor centre restaurant in between the two visits. Fortunately, the rain stayed away long enough for Jasmine to make the most of the children's playground outside while we finished our meals, although the place she seemed to love playing the most was at Tinkinswood, and it was quite a challenge to persuade her to leave when we were all ready to go and eat.

We returned home for a final family meal together with Owain before Rachel and Jasmine leave for Arizona on Monday. Tomorrow we drive  them to her in-laws for a final night's stopover before the flight from Heathrow.

 

Castle visit

We got up surprisingly late this morning and it was midday before we got out of the house and drove to Caerphilly by way of Castell Coch to show Andrea a couple of our local treasures. It's about thirty years, when the kids were young, since we last took a proper walk around the interior of Caerphilly Castle. 

Ten years ago, a modern tourist shop was constructed to replace the elderly ticket booth just inside the outer eastern gate house, several buildings and towers have been restored for opening to the public. Clare and I had not long moved to Penyrheol during my first curacy in Caerphilly Parish in 1970 when the re-roofed Great Hall was opened to the public and started being used for mediaeval banquets. So much has been achieved by CADW since then. The Castle is now a great asset to regional tourism. It was cloudy all day, but occasionally the sun shone through, and created some interesting photographic moments for me with my Sony Alpha 55. The results can be viewed here

After our visit we had a bowl of delicious cawl in the Glanmor tea room just across the road from the castle, and then drove up the Rhymney valley to Ystrad Mynach, Nelson and Treharris to show Andrea a little of our beautiful valleys environment before turning for home. Waiting on the doormat there was a 'failed delivery' note from the postman who arrived an hour after we left, and presumably couldn't find a neighbour in to leave our replacement modem, delivered punctually as promised by Talk Talk Care. I'll have to collect it from the depot tomorrow, yet another un-necessary car trip because the arrival of the postman is so much later and less predictable than it used to be.


We had a further culinary treat for supper, as Clare cooked us some venison she'd been keeping for a special occasion with an unusual kind of cabbage resembling a large dense leaf of spinach. This went down well with a bottle of Stellenbosch Shiraz. 

 

Green Saturday

Recently Clare and I haven't had many Saturdays when both of us have been free for an outing together. Today was an exception, and we woke up to wind and rain. Nevertheless, we decided to use our newly acquired National Trust membership cards, and drove out of town to the nearest place we could visit - Dyffryn House and Gardens. It's a grand Victorian property, fruit of the immense wealth which coal and the shipping industry brought to South Wales in another era. It's been used for public functions since I was a boy, having been leased for a thousand years to the then Glamorgan County Council by its owner Sir Cenydd Traherne. 

I recall visiting to see an open air production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream early in secondary school, and I think I went to a sixth form conference there too. Speaking of Sir Cenydd, as a student in St Mike's forty five years ago, I was sent out to St George's super Ely to preach at Evensong in the summer, and Sir Cenydd and Lady Rowena Traherne were among the handful of people in the congregation of this delightful mediaeval country church, gracious and charming. His son Roddy still farms in the area, and has leased some of his land for the natural burial ground which sits on a hilltop overlooking Cardiff. 

By the time we'd reached Bonvilston & St Nicholas parish, n the way to Dyffryn, the rain had reduced to a drizzle. It meant we could stop at the Tinkinswood megalithic burial site, on the edge of a wood, overshadowed by a huge electricity pylon. The site is a brief walk through fields, made more accessible thanks to the  work of CADW.

On our way home we also stopped to look at the St Lythans megalithic tomb, no more than a mile away. It's sited dramatically in an open field at the brow of a hill, just off the road.

Both places have an audio broadcasting device, powered by a wind-up mechanism, rigged to the visitor information board. Ingenious! There are more photos here.

We greatly enjoyed our walk around the 55 acre grounds as the weather improved, and gave us a few patches of blue sky. In addition to the gardens, the house was taken on this year by the National Trust.

The house is in the process of being restored, and just five of its dozens of rooms are visitable, in addition to the main entrance, corridors and staircases. It's a fine building in opulent French Chateau style with lots of wood panelling and fine fireplaces. Some of its features were lost as an abortive attempt had been made to 'modernise' it into an hotel. Restoration includes acquiring similar panelling and ornate fireplaces rescued from other buildings of the period which could not be saved. Such an admirable way to conserve excellently crafted pieces of furnishing.

Several rooms although empty are equipped for use by school parties, in complete fidelity to the habitual use of the place by the local education authority over the past sixty years. I can see us returning here through the different seasons. Garden views will continue to change in a way that never disappoints. Photos are here.
    

Severn double crossing

I lost most of Friday to writing student year-end reports. I went out only briefly to retrieve a prescription from the GP surgery, for my next batch of medication and then again in the evening for a bereavement visit in Caerau.

After the usual leisurely Saturday start, we went out to Thompson's Park, awash with daffodils and spring wild flowers at the moment. I took my Sony Alpha 55 DSLR camera and got a few decent shots, but wasn't satisfied that they really captured the amazing expanse of yellow and green glory under a blue sky. 

Te little walk gave us an hour's aesthetic pleasure before driving out of town to find ourselves lunch before heading to Bristol to see Amanda.We stopped at a pub in Caerwent, and had a drink while waiting to order. The place was so busy that in the end we gave up and drove into Chepstow, got sandwiches at the Co-op supermarket, and ate them outside the Castle down by the river.

It's some years since we were last there together. I appreciated the new visitor centre and gift shop which has appeared in one of the rooms to the side of the twin tower gateway. 

We lived near here for seven years while the kids were at school. The area around the castle was a great place off-road where they could play safely. The town looks and feels more prosperous these days, a most congenial habitat for the commuting classes, as it was when Clare used to drive to work in Bristol across the now 'old' Severn Bridge, that opened the year we graduated from University.

It was good to see Amanda back home from her brief spell in hospital, finally being attended to daily by carers and in good spirits. She has acquired an 'ejector seat' armchair that lifts her into a standing position. This is a huge blessing, enabling her to stay mobile, as she can now sit down and then get up to use her walking frame unassisted. She's admirably brave, determined not to be defeated by her condition.

The sky was blue and the sun shone all day again today. Driving home across the newer Severn Bridge into a glorious sunset was more of a delight than a difficulty. Not often do we get to use both bridges in one day.