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A Welsh Landscape

A Welsh Landscape

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2022-04-29

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses.

It is to be aware,

Above the noisy tractor

And hum of the machine

Of strife in the strung woods,

Vibrant with sped arrows.

You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.


I was in Wales between March and April. One is immediately drawn to R.S. Thomas' refrain that Wales is a place in which 'you cannot live in the present'. Everywhere you look, history is present. From the red dragon that adorns the Welsh flag to the castles that puncture the countryside. Its' woods, hills, rivers and lakes are stuff of legend.

And then there are the aqueducts and canals. A throwback to the Industrial Revolution. So much of this time is captured in the bleakness of Manchester's mills, the eroding of a pastoral way of life. But in the aqueducts, one gets a sense of beauty, of architecture taken to its limits, of engineering at its creative heights. None more so than the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct built by Thomas Telford between 1795-1805, a World Heritage site. When I chanced upon this stone and cast-iron structure, 18 spindly arches towering over the River Dee, canalboats slowly traversing it, the highest canal aqueduct in the world, it spoke of another life, an ancient watery web.

When one thinks of waterways, one conjures up Venice. But there, huge cruise ships have destroyed the city of love and turned it into a city of commodities. In Wales, the canals are still the preserve of an old way of life. Slow. Cheap. Connected.

I met a couple who have taken two years out from the maelstrom of the mainstream to wind their way on a narrow boat from Wales to York. I was smitten by the barge, its' daffodils and shiny red paint. I ran my fingers along its sides. And, in that moment, I thought of times past and that other great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.


And down the other air and the blue

altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a

child's

Forgotten morning when he walked

with his mother

Through the parables of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels.


That is the power of Wales. The dragons still stalk the countryside, and the child in us is always around the next waterway.