CHAPTER 1

The Border Landscape

Reading a landscape

I am now setting out to uncover or rediscover a whole world that lies around me,and to discover it in such a way that the outer landscape might shape and moldthe inner landscape. It is an exploration that I believe I can best undertake byusing the imagination in image and poetry and metaphor. As I turn to the landand to its poets and artists, I want to make this an undertaking not only formyself. I hope that my own specific encounter with a specific place may alsospeak to my readers and give them images that they can relate to their ownpersonal experiences. This book comes out of a particular place that I know, butit is ultimately about making any place or any circumstance the threshold intothe other, the new, the strange, and showing the image of difference, mystery,otherness at work in God's world.

Although my earliest childhood was spent in the Welsh border countryside, I wasnever taught to read the landscape around me. I did not ask questions about it,for neither did my father. He was an antiquarian of the old school and I owe himmy sense of history and my knowledge of medieval architecture. His approach wasquintessentially that of a man fascinated by factual information of a mostprecise nature. He wanted to be able to date stones, whether in their naturalstate or shaped and used by local builders, but these were not living stones:they did not cry out. This was a world on which categories and labels wereimposed, a world known through charts and charters, dates and land grants. Theseland charters, with their concern for the giving and transferring of landbetween one owner and another, between one estate and another, encouraged anattitude of certainty and clarity about the past.

From my mother I learned another sort of certainty: certainty about the present,for she held very clear ideas about our neighbors across the border in Wales.Prejudice simplified her approach: the Welsh were small in stature, unreliablein character, not to be trusted, and unworthy of any respect. "Taffy was aWelshman, Taffy was a thief," the old jingle tripped only too easily off thetongue. They came to raid, crossing over into England to make inroads into ourfair and pleasant land. Therefore, there was not any idea of giving andreceiving, and doorways were shut, defrauding me of what, even as a small child,might have taught me to be receptive, ready to learn from the other. I had nosense of thresholds to cross, or borders to break; there was nothing toencourage openness or exploration.

Living on the border

But as so often happens in life, I was given a second chance. When I was marriedand with four young sons, my father presented us with a small cottage—tworooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs, the traditional local pattern, withonly one cold water tap and no inside lavatory. Two streams meet here, the Cwmand the Greidol, and flow over into a waterfall, where at the base lies a massof huge rock slabs whose shape and position would gradually but dramaticallychange over the years under the impact of flood and storm. These swirlingcombinations of mud and silt and stone, continually different and new, gave me ametaphor for a natural configuration that maintains its essential form whileretaining its ability to shape and adapt over the years. Since time immemorial,streams have formed the boundaries between properties and settlements and veryoften, as here, they still carry their earliest Celtic or Welsh names. But eventhough the streams' names might be Welsh, the village name was Saxon andpolitically part of England, even while the church is still the proud possessorof the Great Welsh Bible, the first Bible to be translated into Welsh by WilliamMorgan in 1588. A mile or two away, the neighboring tiny church ofLlangua—which can date its origins to a sixth-century Celticsaint—lies geographically in Wales while yet remaining in the Church ofEngland. Any neat demarcation, whether religious, economic, or cultural, haslittle meaning in a border countryside such as this.

So when I went walking along the stretch of Offa's Dyke that ran only a fewmiles away, I came to know afresh the world that had earlier delighted myfather. He had told me the heroic story of Offa and his eighth-centuryambitions, the man who dominated the whole of Britain between 757 and 795, acontemporary and almost an equal of the emperor Charlemagne. But that was nowsomething of the historic past. A military frontier had become a pastoralborder, though with visible differences whose pattern one could see written onthe land itself. It was still a place where two worlds met. I felt that I waslooking beyond political ambition and military conquest. Of course I could seethose differences: they were written into the pattern of the landscape. Therewas Wales on the west side, a country of mountains and scattered settlements,bare stretches of hillside covered with sheep and wild ponies. I recalled DavidJones's delight in the legend that these were the descendants of the horses ofArthur's knights, when they ran free after the defeat of the king and the end ofArthurian Britain. Now shrunk in size "those straying riderless horses gone tograss in forest and on mountain, seem, as their masters, to have acquired a newyet aboriginal liberty." On the east side, in contrast, lay a rolling landscapeof low hills and prosperous farms where neat hedgerows enclosed fields that werethe result of the more fertile soil and the strength of the landowning families.Two different worlds met here, each with its own past, shaped by geography,politics, and people.

Through others' eyes

So as I live here once again I am presented by the simple reality of the land.It is my mentor, my teacher, and in it I have a guide who can never becometheoretical or abstract, for I am learning the wisdom of the earth itself, theground beneath my feet, the people who settled it and shaped its cultivation.Above all, living deep in the countryside, I am faced with what I could soeasily be unaware of in a city: the alternation of light and dark, the changingpatterns of the seasons and the years, the ebb and flow of solstice and equinox.

As I return to live here, I find a place, a situation, that is both familiar andmysterious. That is right. It should take time for something to reveal itself,to unveil its meaning. Many of us were struck by the way in which, when he wasasked a question during a radio interview, Archbishop Rowan Williams said, "MayI take a moment?" For many of us who were listening, accustomed as we had becometo the cut and thrust of the quick question and the immediate response in publicdiscussion, this was a defining moment. It reminded us just how important it isto pause, in this as in any other context. It is to recall the role of reverenceand respect, in a question, in another person, in a situation.

This is what I have gained from my encounter with my native landscape. In theend, this border country and what it brings...