I once belonged to a group of people who often walked in the Black Mountains, until I was disinvited from the group, by a person who thought she was the leader. I suppose she was the leader because she wanted to be the leader more than anyone else. She walked as if the mountains were a treadmill, so we were bound to disagree eventually. When I walk in the mountains I get distracted by things that interest me. I may see a plant I don’t know and want to get my Flora out of my knapsack and look it up. Sometimes I need to get out a map and compass to check the name of a distant mountain, or use my binoculars to identify a bird. So I was always way behind herself, and eventually I was barred for being too slow. I don’t blame her at all – we didn’t really belong in the same walking group. Maybe not even on the same mountain.
One of the places where I really annoyed her was way up above the Olchon Valley. I know this area fairly well. I rode the dustcart one summer round to all the farms and cottages, way back in the 1970s. I once broke my leg on the Cat’s Back, which was the last place where my lover and I walked before she died. I knew it too well to march past it as if it was my exercise video.
I think that the Olchon Valley is the most special place in all that mountain landscape. It was once, I think, part of the lands of a local monastery, and after the dissolution of the monasteries it eventually developed into a community of family farms with small hedged fields, inside a boundary wall that marked where the farms ended and the common grazings on the mountain began. The slopes are marked by paths (rhiwiau) up to the ridges, paths that show graphically how important the mountain was, either for grazings or peat diggings, or as the route from this outlier of Welshness to the Llanthony Valley across the border. Now there is delicate network of small hedged fields where the hedges have grown tall and open as the farming has gradually degenerated to fairly haphazard sheep grazing. There is now no need for hedges to keep stock out of hay meadows or turnip fields, there is no attempt to grow crops, and the hedges have been allowed to turn into lines of trees. The field landscape in the valley floor has an intimacy and a patterning that contrasts with the stark hillsides all around where the skin of vegetation scarcely covers the rocky bones beneath. From the ridge above Llanthony looking east, as the sinking afternoon sun seems to set fire to the bracken on the side of the Cat’s Back, there is nowhere so lovely in the county. I think my stopping on a walk to look for clues to the lives of the people of the valley, revealed in the landscape by the ruins and the tracks and field patterns, was what got me finally chucked out of the walking group.
Since I rode my boyhood bike or the corporation dustcart round these lanes much has changed. Many of the messy farmyards have been dramatically smartened. Farmhouses have been renovated, as farming declined to a matter of desultory sheep grazing and less desultory collection of the subsidies, and newcomers have moved in. I am normally wary of these developments, because of the way that rich incomers can outbid locals needing a house in their home place. Sometimes even the language is threatened by such changes. But here the number of ruins seems to suggest that the locals do not value the valley as highly as the incomers do. Sometimes incomers have new ideas and enthusiasms that can revitalise a place where the native culture is running out of steam and the farmers can’t think of anything else to do. Sometimes the rigours of a place like this select for a very special kind of incomer.
I cannot count the number of times I have looked down on this landscape of small fields and overgrown hedges, with alder-shaded streams cutting into the hillsides, and have visualised how easily it could be returned to the kind of woodland that existed here before the trees were cleared by the constant gnawing of the monastic sheep. I never walk the Black Mountains without indulging this fantasy. And here I was one bitter sleeting Saturday, on the western slopes that lose the sun so early, working with the Weekend Warriors, volunteers with Stump Up For Trees, helping to transform part of an upland holding by planting hundreds of native trees into the bracken between and alongside two deep alder-lined stream beds. These volunteers came from as far away as Bristol and Newport, at the very least; maybe further. They were such a dedicated bunch that socialising took second place to tree planting. If we had been less dedicated I might have found out that they came from even further. The list of volunteers for each weekend fills up quickly, and I wonder if the folk at Stump Up For Trees are sometimes overawed at the power of what they have started. But me, I’m so delighted to have met these people and feel an optimism now that has been a bit thin on my ground lately.
The possibility that visionary people like these are ushering in a great age of rewilding, of reintroductions of lost species and the nurturing of devastated ecosystems, gives me some hope amidst my contemplation of the way that in the past we mercilessly harried our wildlife in the guise of ‘vermin control’, and the way we continue to tolerate the industrial farming which continues this process under the guise of ‘crop protection’. I believe, on a good day, that the current farming apocalypse that is steadily eroding our wildlife is bound to end eventually, because there are good people like these who care more about nurturing the planet than squeezing cash out of it, and because in the end surely intelligence and optimism has to prevail.
I wish my wrecked bones would let me take part in things like this. However, I do my part; I collect and plant tree seeds [I've got an obliging hornbeam and spindle] and I give them to people wo DO plant them. Keep at it, Richard. Your pieces are fascinating.