An Audience with an Elephant (7 page)

One old gentleman claimed he had known the wireless was coming long before it was even invented, because up there with his sheep he had heard voices in the air. When he finally did have his own set and heard people coughing, he and his wife would sit as far away from it as possible because of the risk of disease. An old lady, recalling life on the Epynt, told Herbert Hughes, ‘We had the whole world to ourselves.’ And it is a quote that, once read, you never forget.

It was on this small, close, traditional society, the heartland of the Welsh rural past that, one September day in 1939, Nemesis called, carrying maps and ringed with the morning sun, for it was glorious weather. Nemesis was an Army captain in a khaki-coloured Hillman Minx driven by an ATS girl. She was blonde and beautiful, but a boy who saw her remembered chiefly the sadness of her expression. Afterwards, when the two had gone, he remembered the terrible silence of the grown-ups.

They never forgot the words the captain had used. Epynt, he said, ‘would be turned into a desert for Government purposes’. Another phrase was widely quoted, of the intention ‘to blast into a wilderness’ the 54 farms and smallholdings. It was ideal for the purpose, the wet land precluding the danger of ricochet. They were given until the spring to make their own arrangements to go, the worst time of the year, though this was later extended to the summer because of lambing. The amount of compensation was determined by the Government.

‘We were given to understand that this was on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘If we’d argued, we would have had nothing with which to buy another farm.’ The shepherds, who did not own land, were not given any form of compensation.

By summer they were all gone, but the animals were more intractable. The Davies family of Gwybedog having found a farm 30 miles away, Iorwerth Davies had to round up their horses. ‘I rode two mares into the ground before I got eighteen together and we started to walk them by road. I was riding in front, my nephew behind on a push-bike, and we thought they’d follow, but this one mare kept defying us and looking back. After we got them there she broke out one night, four others with her, but a fence stopped her. We found them 6 miles away, all of them making in a straight line for the Epynt. If the fence had been down they’d have got there.’

The Army attempted its own round-up, using three planes, fifteen tracked Bren-gun carriers and a hundred men. By the time night fell, one plane had collided with a rock, and several carriers were bogged down in the target area but, to give credit where it’s due, 60 ponies and 4,000 sheep had been brought down to the valley. The only thing was, at first light most of them were back on the mountain. Later the Army, employing its finest horseman, managed, after many attempts, to capture a white stallion.

In the end some sheep were allowed to remain, otherwise the mountain would have reverted to the wild, and it is ironic that there are more sheep there now than there were in 1940. This has allowed people to revisit the mountain, said Iorwerth Davies, but many, his mother among them, could not face it. Others, a dwindling number, still come back for the annual service held by a pacifist group in the ruins of Babell chapel. But what Herbert Hughes found when he began to research his book was how many of his countrymen had forgotten what had happened. Their memories were jogged once when in 1955 the Army proposed firing long-range guns into the Epynt, which would have sent live shells over the A40 and its holiday traffic. They laid on a demonstration with a 5.5-inch gun, watched by farmers on horseback. Unfortunately, the moment the gun was fired every horse bolted, with the riders clinging on for dear life. The proposal was quietly shelved, and the Army has learnt PR skills, one of its commandants regularly attending Welsh singing festivals in the neighbouring chapels.

It is their world up there now, with their names like the Burma Road, Journey’s End and Piccadilly Circus, though local people have their own names like Hellfire Pass, one of the crossings above which the red flags fly. The safety record is impressive, even though once the German motorcycle team, rehearsing for a rally, rode through the target area with guns firing all around them, a nostalgic occasion for some of the older gunners. The Senny-bridge Hunt has also materialised unexpectedly up there. But it is the cold that soldiers remember.

The Farmer and I, we watched a lorry pass, full of young men, their faces blackened for a night exercise, but under this still looking about as miserable as it is possible for human beings to look. When they come down from the Epynt it is the custom to shower first in full kit.

The Farmer laughed. ‘You can see why some wouldn’t want to go back,’ he said.

‘Would you?’

‘Oh yes. When you bring sheep down off the Epynt, the old ewe wants to go back.’ He looked around him at the miles of moorland, and his voice was mild.

‘And the lambs?’

‘The lambs won’t follow.’

Roman Twilight

ICTURE MOORLAND
, a remote, barren moorland, the horizon a long way off and the sky huge. Now imagine a sunrise up there, the drums in Strauss’s
Thus Spake Zamthustra
giving way to a single, unearthly trumpet. In front of you, ringed with light, is the great black monolith out of the film 2002. It stands at the side of a road unknown to the AA, and there are no signs to indicate where this goes. But then there would have been no need of any sign: when that road was built, men knew exactly where it went. It went to Rome.

On an Ordnance Survey map, Sheet 160, find Glynneath on the A465, the Heads of the Valleys road to Merthyr. From this trace the yellow mountain road north to Ystradfellte. The green shading drains away, until where you are is just the white space and contour lines of moorland. Two and a half miles north of Ystradfellte, on your left, you will see on the map the dotted lines of the old Roman road of Sarn Helen reach the mountain road. Up there you will see nothing, not even one of those helpful brown tourist notices, just a gate, and a space in which you can park.

It is still a metalled road, but as you walk it you will see the stones put there by a local authority, or some local farmers, give way to older, much older flags, and a point will come, a quarter of a mile along, when, before a second gate, you will see the monolith start to rise, and rise, until 11 feet of it stands in the sky. On the Ordnance Survey it is marked as Maen Madoc, but that is just the name given in much later centuries when men had long forgotten what this was. In front of you is a gravestone.

And the drums are pounding.

If the light hits it at the right angle you can still make out the letters,
DERVACI FILIUS IUSTI IC IACIT
. (The stone of) Dervacus, Son of Justus, Here He Lies. The letters are jumbled and close together, the A’s upside down, as though whoever cut these was doing his best to follow a tradition, perhaps literacy itself, only dimly remembered. No one knows who Dervacus was, or Justus, and no one will ever know. But the artist Alan Sorrell has painted an imaginative reconstruction of the raising of this stone, a little group of men and riders on the moor with the shadows lengthening as the sun goes down. Which is how it would have seemed to them. This stone was set up in a world in ruins.

G.K. Chesterton in ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ is writing about the fall of the Roman Empire, the scale of which we find hard to acknowledge. It was the nearest thing to a world state the planet has known, with a standing army and a civil service, its public buildings grander than ours, and, for the rich, villas with more comforts (the Roman room, with its couches, sideboards and underfloor heating, recreated in the Museum of London, is still the last word in comfort). For the men of the time it must have seemed all this would last forever, but it ended with an abruptness terrifying even now. Then, in Chesterton’s words, there was just ‘the plunging of the nations in the night’.

In the Roman world the dead had been buried beside the roads. At High Rochester, north of Hadrian’s Wall, four of these tombs have been found, and they are very strange structures, big things, taller than a man, one of them circular and conical, the other three small pyramids. All were put up when the Empire stood. The difference is that the tomb on the moorland above Neath was not.

When the archaeologist Sir Cyril Fox excavated it in 1940 he found that to put it up someone had dug through the metalling of the road itself, which suggests this was overgrown even then. Roman Britain had probably been gone for two generations, with its organised life in cities and villas, and the warbands of the first English would have been picking their way through the countryside when someone decided to bury Dervacus in the old grand Imperial way. But not entirely in the old way. The Roman dead had been buried on the outskirts of towns, when, for some reason, perhaps because these towns were already ominously deserted, or for their own security, they buried him in this remote place.
The last Roman may lie here.

Some 10 feet from the stone, Fox found a pit 8 feet square and 2 feet deep, the outline of which can still be seen. This was probably the grave, only there was no body. He found evidence that it had been disturbed, and this, together with the acid soil in such a high place, would have destroyed the human remains. But it is what Fox did next which is so wonderful.

The stone had fallen and was lying beside the road, but instead of carting it off to some museum, the fate of so many Roman and Dark Age memorials, he, in a time of World War with British fortunes again at their lowest, re-erected it in the old place. This is probably the most imaginative decision an archaeologist has ever taken, for it is one thing to see a stone indoors, tastefully picked out by spotlights against hessian, quite another to see it in the wind and rain where it has been for 1500 years.

So much of Roman Britain has been tidied up and set behind glass like curiosities in a china cabinet that it is hard to realise these were not just people with different kitchen inventories, they lived in what can only be described as an alternative world. This wasn’t the Middle Ages, an early version of our own: this was a highly organised world, which bears comparison with ours, except their beliefs were very different. It is this
otherness
which is startling.

In Caerleon, where a Legionary fortress of 60 acres still dwarfs the modern town, you glimpse their indifference to human suffering in the great amphitheatre outside the town walls where men fought to the death. You glimpse this too in Carmarthen where an amphitheatre capable of holding 5,000 people is still the most major public space created in the town. But it can have its funny side, this otherness. In the museum at Caerleon is a small household ornament which must have stood on some sideboard, the Roman equivalent, say, of a Royal Doulton pottery Balloon Lady, except that this on any sideboard today would bring on an attack of the vapours in respectable Welsh matrons. The ornament is a carving of an erect penis, a family symbol of fertility for their equally respectable ancestors.

Still, it is when you make your own discoveries by chance that the otherness hits you. You go into the village church at Caerwent, and there in the porch is an altar not to the Christian god at all. It is to Mars, its inscription recording that a junior Roman officer had ‘paid his vow willingly and duly’, as though his HP payments were now complete. The Romans were very business-like in their dealings with the gods.

Then, in the church itself, near the lectern, you see a fragment of Roman mosaic so much more exquisite than the present stained pine floor, and, in a niche in the wall, a rare tribute to tolerance, a cremation urn which would not have been buried under Christian rites.

Some 15 miles to the north, in Lydney Park, there are remains on a hill of a pagan temple to the Celtic god Nodens. The fascinating thing about this was that it was built, not before Christianity, but in the late fourth century when Christianity was already the official religion of the Roman state. An excavation in 1804 revealed a mosaic floor, now lost, in which its dedication was recorded as being by one Titus Flavius Senilis, described as a fleet supply-depot commander, probably in a port on the Severn. So you have somebody whose job description would be familiar to civil servants in today’s Ministry of Defence, who quite clearly regarded Christianity as just another religion, and a mistaken one.

On this hill has been found one of the glories of Roman art, a small bronze figure of a greyhound looking over its shoulder as though startled by something or someone: it is so life-like you feel it could at any moment leap to its feet.

Rome lingered to the west of the Severn longer than anywhere else in Britain, so that in the eighth century, 300 years after the end of Roman Britain, land was still changing hands in the language and legal forms of an empire that no longer existed. It is in the east of Britain that the great coin hoards turn up, suggesting that there the end came with terrifying suddenness, men, as they had always done in times of danger, shovelling their wealth into the earth.