In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  I continued north-west, skirting Garn Bentyrch and now using as my mark the mottled heather-purple and scree-brown of Yr Eifl, at eighteen hundred feet a major landmark of the north coast of Llŷn. Before it stood the mammiform outline of another of the so-called Rivals (by an Anglicisation of Yr Eifl): Tre’r Ceiri, one of the great Iron Age hill forts of Britain. Iron Age it may be, but since the English translation of the name means ‘Home of the Giants’, how could I not climb it? Before the rise of the hills I was diverted by a loose pony adrift on a back lane. The owner didn’t seem much concerned, but we ushered the beast back into its paddock all the same. At a smallholding I could not see the true path and chatted to the farmer before he showed me where the stile lay. On another path, diverted to circumvent a farmyard, the bramble was so thick that I tore my ear open and bled like a stuck pig for a couple of miles. In the late morning I came upon Llanaelhaearn, a village distinguished not just by well-known Latin inscription stones but, for the weary and hungry traveller, an excellent small café run by a Mancunian former Para’ and Royal Engineer, Dave Watkinson. I was the only customer, but I don’t think I did any injustice to his splendid breakfast. The news that day was dominated by the beheading by Islamic State militants of an American journalist, James Foley, so naturally talk revolved around the Middle East where Dave had served his time, mostly in the hellhole of Basra. He wasn’t much impressed by my bramble-torn ear.

  On, then, to the church, in whose graveyard I found the so-called Melitus stone, inscribed solely with that otherwise unknown Christian’s name. I was more keen to see another stone belonging here, inscribed in memory of Aliortus Elmetiacos—Aliortus the Elmetian—that is to say, a native of West Yorkshire, the British kingdom of Elmet. But find it I could not. I supposed it to reside inside the church, which was locked with no trace of a keyholder. Along the road from the church, on my way to the foot of Tre’r Ceiri, was the site of another holy well, in this case belonging to the seventh-century St Ælhaern who had given his name to the village. These hills are steeped in early Christian tradition. If not all priests and holy men were literate, enough of them were to keep Latin alive not, in the end, as a spoken language, but as a written form of intellectual expression, protocol, faith and learning. But my suspicion, given the proliferation of saintly names preserved in this landscape, is that sanctity may have been applied to a significant proportion of the otherwise disinherited aristocratic male population of the sixth century—perhaps the equivalent of the second sons of the manse who became clergymen in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that time of plenty and of social upheaval, third sons could not even expect a modest living in the church; many of them went to London, or abroad, to seek their fortunes and became a generation of entrepreneurial innovators—Davy, Maudslay, Bramah, Brunel, Faraday, themselves redrawing the landscape and becoming memorialised in buildings, bridges and the hardware of the industrial revolution.

  The tumbled drystone hut circles and curtain wall of the Home of the Giants were memorable for their technical sophistication and architectural excellence, for the shelter they gave from buffeting winds and for the huge view the hilltop offered: back to Anglesey and to Snowdonia, south to the broad sweep of Cardigan Bay and the heights of Cader Idris, west and south-west to the long elephant’s trunk of Llŷn with its dewdrop, Bardsey Island, far in the distance. Llŷn was and is part of Gwynedd, the Venedotia of Latin memorials. The name was once supposed to have derived from a legendary northern warrior, Cunedda, said to have brought his people here one hundred and forty-six years before the reign of King Maelgwyn and to have founded that dynasty. The attractive Cunedda story, preserved in the Northern genealogies in the Nennian compendium, relates that Cunedda and his eight sons were brought here to expel the Irish from the northern part of Wales and that, after their arrival, the Irish never returned to Britain. That there was Irish cultural and perhaps genetic influence on Wales in the Early Medieval period can hardly be doubted; there are stories of Irish raids—St Patrick was a victim of such slave-hunting pirates—in the fourth and fifth centuries. But they do not seem to have been expelled by Cunedda or any other Arthurian hero. To begin with, Welsh Llŷn shares its etymological root with Irish Lein, from the Irish tribal name Lageni, denoting those who lived in Leinster, the province lying to the south of Dublin on Ireland’s east coast. And, although Cunedda fits neatly at the head of some genealogies, his name is more likely than not a back-formation from Venedotia and its Brythonic equivalent Gwynedd. A more plausible origin of the tribal name Venedotii is the Irish Fein, from another eastern Irish predatory kingdom.

  The Irish, for their part, brought an energetic, vibrant Christian culture with them—hence the ogham on so many memorial stones. The Christianity of Gildas’s day, which he may have liked to believe was thoroughly Roman, owed much of its character to an Irish church inspired not by Rome but by the desert fathers. If the Irish did settle Wales in large numbers, then they assimilated successfully—the Welsh, after all, speak Welsh and not Irish. Nor did they speak Latin: although the Romans subdued the whole of Wales, Wales was never Romanised. No Roman villas were ever built in these parts; it was a militarised zone with a headquarters at Segontium (Caernarvon). In the absence of a north-western Welsh civitas which might have formed a focus of local power in the wake of Rome’s imperial decline, native elites seem to have exploited the political vacuum by reoccupying some of the ancient hill forts from which their ancestors had ruled and maintaining the native language. No Roman road penetrated the Llŷn peninsula.

  From the natural vantage point offered by the Home of the Giants, watching deus ex machina spotlights piercing the cloud to illuminate a village here, a copse there, I moved on to the north coast: the weather was closing in and the air cooled. I camped for the night on a farm just east of Nefyn and there had my first hot dinner since before Snowdon. While I ate it rained, a biblical downpour that had tourists scurrying off the streets and into hotels and pubs or back into their cars. I sat complacently waiting it out, although I would have been less sanguine had I realised that I’d left the flap of the tent open. A schoolboy error. It was a damp night, the only small consolation a sunset over the Irish Sea of polar luminosity: vivid pink against grey, with an intense white halo around the sun.

  My next day’s target was to cross the peninsula again, this time north to south. I wanted to see as much of the landscape of Llŷn as possible, to take in as many of its evocative sites as I could. Walking is for me the best means of getting to grips with the broad brushstrokes of topography, political geography and scale of the distant past, as it is with the present. Even so, I felt an archaeologist’s niggle at the back of my mind; a yearning to stick a spade in the ground at one—or all—of these sites and spend more considered time examining them.

  For now, I found myself walking back through the streets and lanes of Nefyn, more or less empty at seven in the morning but for the postman and a few delivery vans. It was a Friday. Nefyn has managed to survive the fluctuating fortunes of tourism, fishing, farming and industry and reinvent itself as a quirky but functional hybrid with small businesses offering subsistence, if not wealth, to the local community. As well as hotels, it supports a variety of churches, from the originally sixth-century St Mary’s to the non-conformist Sionist and Methodist chapels.

  I walked up the slope behind the main street, followed a lane that took me through fields full of healthy-looking steers and found an overgrown path that led circuitously to the summit of Garn Boduan, a companion of Tre’r Ceiri: an Iron Age hill fort commanding the coastline and interior of the peninsula. A fortlet constructed later on its summit may date from the Early Medieval period. Here the stone roundhouses have been consumed by summer bracken and bramble (I ate half a pound of blackberries on the hoof, as I had on most days of this trip). From the air, the pattern of cellular houses looks like a nasty case of ringworm: there are nearly two hundred of them. At just under a thousand feet the summit gives more stunning views out to sea
and along the peninsula, back to Tre’r Ceiri and beyond. These hill forts seem not to have been habitually occupied in their original incarnation, but used as summer gathering places where tribute was rendered, marriages and alliances brokered, chiefly justice meted out. The third of these massive enclosures stands on top of Carn Fadryn, just a few miles further to the south-west. Beyond it, I found myself looking directly towards my destination for the day, Abersoch, with Cardigan Bay beyond. Up here the wind was biting but there were signs that the afternoon might be kinder, so I did not stay to soak up the atmosphere, but retreated to the shelter of tree and lane.

  There is no really direct route south from Garn Boduan. The topography is intimate and complicated and has to be negotiated via small valleys that thread their way through the volcanic, conical hills: progress was pretty, and slow. Llanfihangel, lying in the lee of Carn Fadryn’s hill fort, offers no more than a modest chapel in what might once have been a circular graveyard. There are so many of these early Llan names that it’s hard to believe they all reflect monastic foundations on the scale of Caer Gybi or Penmon. Many of them must have been tiny establishments, the result of patronage functioning at local level, perhaps competitively so: Jones has a holy man; I’m going to have a holy man. In any case, there never was a St Fihangel—the name is a local rendering of St Michael. The culture of these parts must have proved sympathetic to the idea of the hermit, the healer, the local wise woman. There is no sign in this land of a high cross (the nearest, I think, must be at Penmon), the stamp of missionary activity from Ireland to Scotland and Northumbria. It’s also notable that the church dedications to saints do not seem to coincide with the names recovered from inscriptions in those churches or their graveyards, except in very rare cases (Llansadwrn in Anglesey offers an example in the form of a stone inscribed to Saturninus, the saint for whom the church—and the village itself—is named). These inscriptions, mostly dated to the fifth century on linguistic and epigraphic grounds, belong to a period when the indigenous diocesan rule of the Roman church fostered a network of priests, deacons and bishops, a hundred years and more before the arrival of multitudes of wandering saints.

  Did these Roman clerics (the priests and deacons of Latin inscriptions) welcome Irish, Cornish, and Breton holy men and women among them; did those intrepid saints (St Ælhaern, St Cybi and their like) slip neatly into the vacuum left by a dying diocesan administration; or was the arrival of the foreign holy man and woman a subversive new element in the landscape? Either way, that their tradition has survived, even if only in name, for fifteen hundred years and more is a remarkable instance of continuity in the cultural landscape.

  The dispersed nature of the settlements lends itself, perhaps, to such survival. Even so, cultures have to want to preserve the traditions of their forefathers. In Early Medieval Ireland those noble families who boasted descent from an érlam, or founding church patron, were always keen to demonstrate their rights over the land which they had given to found a church or monastery—that is why so many Irish genealogies survive. Maybe a culture that has always seen itself under siege from a powerful neighbour tends to reinforce those ties to the past, even if the seismic shift from native Catholicism to colonial Protestantism in the sixteenth century must have severed many cultural links to the past.

  Because we find it so hard to identify distinct Early Medieval settlement features in the landscape—inherently hard to date and very often either indistinguishable from prehistoric remains or so ephemeral as to be invisible—the surviving evidence of the early church must stand witness to all the farmers, smiths, woodsmen, weavers, fishers, slaves and lords whose industry, patronage and productivity paid for the luxury of keeping men and women whose purpose was to pray for them.

  The small village of Llangian proved more rewarding, later on in the day. Its setting is lovely: a couple of rows of neat but individual unpainted stone cottages at the bottom of a dingly dell where a stream tumbled into the Afon Soch, which gives its name to the little port of Abersoch.60 Llangian has the church of St Cían, an otherwise unknown figure whose name is nevertheless suspiciously Irish. Here we have not just any old holy man finding a place to set up shop. Llangian, the historical evidence shows, was the centre of a substantial manorial holding in the Middle Ages: it supported a mill and tithe barn. The circular graveyard was surrounded by a vallum, a concentric ditch and bank which defined the sanctuary of an early monastery. In Welsh it was known as the corflan, literally ‘corpse enclosure’; but it’s an absolutely diagnostic trait of Irish-inspired monasteries, from Iona to Clonmacnois and Kingarth. Llangian, then, is the real deal: a monastery founded under the patronage of a powerful lord or local king during the great period of Western monasticism (the only partial excavation of the site has given up a radiocarbon date of c.AD 550). But the site was important even before Cían: in the churchyard stands a stone memorial belonging to perhaps a hundred years before his day: MELI MEDICI FILI MARTINI IACIT: ‘Here lies Melus the doctor, son of Martinus.’ It is unique in Britain, the only ancient memorial which survives to commemorate a doctor (unless we include the headless woman at Corbridge (see page 183). And by ‘doctor’ we might read something more, if we are inclined to a druidic interpretation of such things. For once the light was right so I could read the inscription for myself. I would have been delighted to see an image of the saint carved in relief, stirring potions in a barrel.

  My last indulgence of the day was to pass through Llanengan on my way to a pitch overlooking St Tudwal’s Island (you really cannot move for early saints here). The church of St Engan does not offer the tantalising realities of Llangian; it belongs to the fifteenth century and boasts neither monastic vallum nor Latin inscription. But the saint, properly Einion Frenin, is one about whom we know a little. He was a king of the Venedotian line claiming descent from Cunedda, and a brother and patron of that Seiriol who founded Penmon and the hermitage on Priestholm. He is said to have brought St Cadfan to Bardsey Island to found the important monastery there. Near by is a well, Ffynnon Einion, and his memory is preserved in the name of a cave, a hill and a distant farm. He counts, therefore, as much a royal patron as a holy man. Tudwal, another manifestation of the great flowering of the church in the middle of the sixth century, was a Breton holy man who, having been trained in Ireland, founded a hermitage on one of the two islands lying just off the point at Abersoch.61 Later in his career he migrated to Brittany and was made Bishop of Tréguier by Childebert I of the Franks.

  Saturday 23 August was my last full day of walking on the trail towards Bardsey. I wasn’t sure if I would get there. Only a couple of boats make it regularly to the island, and given that the following day was a Bank Holiday, I figured I might be lucky to get a ticket. At least, for once, the weather smiled: I had a full day of skin-soaking, bone-warming sun as I walked the clifftops and coves, bays and promontories of the south coast, westwards towards Aberdaron. It was a day of sensory treats: a clutter of a farm, clusters of old drystone enclosures and sheep folds, a rotting barn, a small herd of very affable and characterful goats, a brilliant display of yellow and purple, the coconut whiff of gorse and buzzing carpet of heather—and all the time the rippling light of sun on the dark blue sea with the odd fishing boat laying a lobster pot or taking divers out.

  I was glad to be ending this journey; it had been a long year and I felt all walked-out. I ate the last of my trail food early in the afternoon and came to rest at a campsite just shy of Aberdaron. I pitched the tent and strolled down into a busy village centre, crowded with Bank Holiday tourists and locals; the beach was a mass of bathers and picnickers. I drank a pint of beer in minor celebration and ate fish and chips sitting on a bench on the bank of the river that issues into the sea here. I stupidly neglected to explore the church which overlooks the bay, my Dark Age guidebook having failed to record two important early inscriptions.

  ABERDARON

  Sunday: another jewel of a day, and I was up early with the sun. There was no point hanging around,
so having stopped off at the excellent local bakery for a pastry and coffee I walked along the shore and then the clifftop path to Porthmeudwy, a tiny cove and slipway about a mile or so south-west of Aberdaron. I held out little hope of finding a passage to Bardsey, but I thought the early bird might catch a worm and before eight-thirty I was looking down on the cove from above. A woman emerged from the sea in a wetsuit. The man I subsequently knew as Colin Evans was leaning over the side of his small, powerful launch, talking to a man driving an old tractor. I had seen quite a few ancient-looking tractors along the coast, kept in good nick to take small boats down to the shore; here was a veritable museum of the things, all gaily painted and in tip-top condition. The launch was still on its trailer, twin outboards all shiny and fuelled up, ready to be lowered into the water by a dumper truck. I climbed down to the shingly beach and wandered over. Any chance of a ride out today, I said.

  —Sorry, my friend, I’m fully booked.

  —That’s a pity; but no worries, I thought you would be busy on this weekend of all weekends.

  —Are you here for a while?

  —Just today and tomorrow. But I wasn’t sure when I would get here, so I couldn’t book.