Every Good Friday, when I was a child, friends and I used to
walk the ten miles or so to the top of Twm Barlwm, a mountain dominating the
reclaimed marshlands of south Wales. In
my imagination, uncorrupted by historical detail, this is where the Celts stood
fast, watching over the slow encroachment of Romans stationed in the fort of
Caerleon, just below. It was a mountain
of war, and later, in my teens, I witnessed real battles as gangs from nearby
towns fought with chains and axes, as determined as the Celts and the Romans
not to give an inch. I watched these
events from the safety of the ferns, and sometime later, when the gangs had
gone, returned with my dog to wander along the mountain’s spine, to the strange
mound at its summit. From there, under the steel grey sky, it felt as if the future was spread out before me.
Arthur Machen’s Hill
of Dreams is a book based on his boyhood love of Twm Barlwm, and Machen’s
later work, particularly his London
Adventure is a hike through the demi-monde of Edwardian London. He was a flaneur who perfected the art of
wandering. He wanders London as he
wandered the Welsh hills. When, in my
early twenties, I followed Machen’s footsteps and moved from south Wales to
west London, I worked hard at being a flaneur.
I loved strolling aimlessly through the leafy suburbs, and in the city I
adored the river’s muddy allure. But I
didn’t get to be a seriously good at it. I was Welsh boy in Dr Martens, I didn’t
have the style.
After my own decade and a half of London adventure, I moved
back to Wales, this time away from the industrial south and into the central
wilderness. Here I crave nothing more than to be rambling in the mountains, getting
closer to the clouds, and sometimes above them.
I tend to walk with a small bunch of serious hikers. These
people have all the kit, the Nordic poles, heavy duty water bottles, stainless
steel thermos flasks. They study maps. Some of them have beards. They are not wanderers, they are athletes. Usually
these walks take six hours or so, and often cover twenty miles. We struggle up steep slopes and spill over the top and down again.
We usually start in a car park and at some point manage to
find a pub, often an ancient, hidden place. I’ve come
upon remote hillside churches with eerie murals, like Death wielding a shovel,
or St George slaying what I supposed was a dragon but which looked more like a giant,
angry sparrow. I know the twisted spine
of Cwmyoy, and the tumbling, secluded magic of Llanthony and Tintern.
Most of my fellow hikers have travelled this way before, and
they know the stories. Up high in the
mountains I’ve seen the wreck of a Wellington bomber that lost its way in the
fog; the caves where the Chartists hid their weapons as they planned revolution.
There’s the poet’s chair, and the grave
of a famous racehorse. There are standing stones, remnants of Iron Age forts, terraced
ramparts, a hermit’s cell. I’ve looked
across the plains of Herefordshire and seen the blue remembered hills of
Shropshire. Look south and there’s the
Severn, glinting.
I like writers who are walkers: Rosseau, Wordsworth, Machen,
Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald. Wandering has
a great pedigree. In these walkers' books one phrase reappears time after time:
solvitur ambulando – you can solve it by
walking. After hiking all day whatever
problems you have disappear, and the simple pleasures of sandwiches, or a flask
of tea, with the land spinning about you, miles and miles of it, on and on,
never ending, whisk all worldly cares up into the clouds, to be lost forever in
the vast ancient wilderness.
www.andrew-strong.com
@yawnthepost
