Letter from Cwm Ystwyth (the middle of Cymru)

Julie Brominicks

A car approaches the lonesome postbox at the top end of Cwmystwyth where I stand. I stick up my thumb. The car stops.

My third (and penultimate) hitch of the day is with Mike Robinson. “If you’re here again in winter” he says “and you stay with someone who’s got a birdfeeder – not us because of the dog – you’ll see a lot of wildlife.

“A merlin took a great-spotted woodpecker in our garden. We get redpolls, siskins, bramblings.”

My binoculars are zipped inside my coat. How does he know I want to know?

“We had a snow bunting once. Often driving back you’ll see stoats, sometimes weasels, we’ve seen polecats. Nightjars. Crossbills.

“Because I resemble a hedge?

“It’s a remote part of the world, but you get some extremely lovely people here’ Mike says, driving further than he’d intended to leave me somewhere helpful.”

If you’re a regular reader of this column you might remember the Letters I wrote from each ‘corner’ of Cymru visited by bus from Machynlleth which I blithely described as being ‘somewhere near the middle.’

Public-transport desert

The actual middle, according to Ordnance Survey, is Cwmystwyth. Although nearer to me than the corners, the middle of Cymru is a public-transport desert.

Hush. It’s what I live for. This rose-porcelain sky above the T2. This X47 driver, eating a sticky bun. This road unravelling through mining country.

Lead was mined here by Bronze-Age peoples, Romans, the Cistercian monks of Ystrad Fflur, industrialists. I get off at Ponterwyd, seven miles from Cwmystwyth. This.

Lead tips

I have walked through Cwmystwyth on the miners-trail paths. I know what I’ll find; the lead tips, dead tips. Blast and blight. But not yet.

A sudden swish as pines scrub the sky, a valley sigh. A small flock of redwings an acknowledgement of sheep. A buoyancy.

Here’s a truck, I stick up my thumb. Sam, Algerian-French, is delivering tiles. ‘You know about colonization? Mate! They say they don’t like immigration! Is like England and Ireland.’ ‘And Wales.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If they no come over and change our system we be alright!’

He drops me at Pontarfynach (Devil’s Bridge). ‘You enjoy your day and your life! Meet only the nice people!’

The silence after his cheer. Save for the redwings chiming. Listen. No traffic. I walk down the middle of the road.

Lead country. Miners began work aged seven and died between thirty and fifty. Poisoned water, poisoned grazing. Evidence for Bronze-Age atmospheric pollution has been found in this valley. Dead country.

I might walk through this sprawling village all the way to the mines and see no one at all. Cwmystwyth used to be busy. Here’s a noticeboard saying; ‘Many incomers came to the area. Before long they became fluent in the language and confident enough to participate in local culture.’

Just as unemployed miners from Cornwall, Spain and Italy found work here, when the industry collapsed, Welsh lead miners emigrated to the collieries of South Cymru, Russia, or America. There’s America in the road’s long unwinding, Siberia in the wind.

Down at the bridge a woman unloads her car; Mandy Goldsmith. ‘We live in this little house, we think it was the toll house. My Dad was from Birmingham, he bought it in 1973 but I only moved in six years ago.

It was a holiday home for years, we were lucky it didn’t get burned down by Sons of Glyndŵr! I’m learning Welsh’ she adds. ‘Our actual class is in Devil’s Bridge but it’s like Butlin’s there in summer. We meet in the vestry here every Wednesday for revision.’

She suggests I seek out Eluned in the old chapel. Eluned’s husband John invites me in as if admitting strangers is nothing unusual. My fingers defrost around a mug, an old clock whirs, chinaware gleams on the dresser. Eluned has offered me a room for the night before I’ve explained why I’m here.

‘Roedd fy’n nhad Cymro-Cymraeg a Mam yw Americanes – we all speak to each other in whatever language and John jyst yn ffitio mewn.’ (Eluned’s parents are the famous musical couple Meredydd ‘Merêd’ Evans and Phyllis Kinney, but that’s another – truly wonderful – story). ‘You know what villages are like. Aside from the farms, we’re all of a certain age.

We realised that when we are gone, the memories would go too. So we set up a group called Cofnodion Cwmystwyth. We’ve had a digital archive since 2006, but we’ve been given so many artefacts. I would love to get David Olusoga involved, I mean Cwmystwyth is the history of Wales in microcosm! There is nowhere I’d rather be.’ By the time I leave, my heart and head are full.

The road is empty, save for sparrows and leaf-rush and wind. And Derek ‘o Lerpwl’, who’s been asking neighbours for feedback on his cheese-straws. ‘Dwi’n hapus yn y gegin’ he beams.

Below the bending road the river twists. Sessile oaks burst from its banks as if; but no, here the road turns north-east, the valley unfolds and suddenly, here are the mines.

Hills scored with leats. Scant trees, raw slopes. Water-filters on overdrive. Badlands. This bald beauty. This bare wind.

Millennia of mining boom and bust and damp and dust and the valley’s disembowelled. Fourteen-miles-worth of excavated rock. Slagheaps. Broken buildings tagged by Sanjit and Flash. Barbed wire. I venture over clattering tips. Here’s an adit; a black hole at the centre of Cymru.

Heck but it’s thrilling, yellow grass flickering. And when I crouch; splendid mosses. Lichen and bryophyte kingdoms, among which are specialist metallophytes, some resident since periglacial times when the whole of Britain looked something like this. Cwmystwyth; so rich in life!

I wedge myself into the riverbank. Overhead, two raven pairs part and reconvene, composing sky music. A dipper zigzags upriver. Sub-aqua walking, even against the current. The dipper pops onto a rock like a squeezed orange pip, sleek and plump looking this way and that before, with a shakeout of wings, diving back into the riffle.