Cwmfforest
And the rain just keeps on coming. Lucy and I have left France for Wales, for our long-planned week of horseback riding, and in the next few days the weather is unlikely to crack 20C. And it’s raining.
But about this I am not complaining or feeling even mildly cranky. I am tucked up under a down comforter in a tiny white room in a rambling 17th century farmhouse. I have a narrow bed, a chair, a wee table with a lamp, two shelves, and a few oddly framed reproductions of nineteenth-century German paintings to call my own for the next seven days. That, and two windows. One looks out over the creek and into dense greenery. The second looks at a bank that rises steeply towards the sky where, silhouetted, I can see a half a dozen horses grazing.
The house feels like someone’s home, and well it should as it’s inhabited by three generations of Turners, who’ve been here for forty-odd years. The common areas downstairs, the sitting room and dining room, are full of wonderful stuff– not antiques, not objets d’art, just stuff– a weird old sofas covered with the skin of an actual horse, quite probably the Appaloosa whose portrait hangs near it on the wall, bits and pieces from Africa where the pater familias worked for years, maps of everywhere from Botswana to Bavaria, children’s toys (because at least 5 grandchildren are in semi-permanent residence), and lots and lots of books. I’ve been reading Highways and Byways in South Wales by A.G. Bradley with illustrations by Frederick L. Grigs (1903) this evening. I haven’t yet pinpointed us on the map in the back of the book, although I do know that we drove (in Tyrone’s taxi) from the train station in Abergavenny through Crickhowell to get here. I’ll try to be more precise tomorrow, but in the meantime here’s a wonderful example of Mr. Bradley’s prose:
At Abergavenny Castle, so runs the tale, [William de Braose] had invited his Welsh neighbours to a sumptuous and friendly banquet. When the wine cup was flowing freely, and the harpers were all hard at work, he gave the signal for silence and demanded on the authority of Henry I., but more particularly “in the name of the Lord,” which seems to have been a favourite formula with this unreliable person, that every one should give up their arms. This did not merely mean that they should deposit their daggers in a cloak room till the fun was over lest they should perchance hurt each other–which would have been a truly thoughtful and friendly suggestion–but his command had another significance altogether, and the fiery Welshmen, not rendered less so by copious libations of mead and the inspiring songs of the bards, indignantly refused. The hall was then filled in a moment with men equipped for slaughter, and in less than no time de Braose had turned his dinner party into a bloody shambles.
He goes on to tell another story, about someone I’ve decided to adopt as a dubious ancestress: Maude de St. Valerie, “known in Welsh lore as ‘Moll Walbee’.” But I’ll put that one in later. Now it’s growing dark outside, and I can hear the water flowing and I’m hoping I’ll get just the right sort of horse tomorrow: placid but not slow, good-natured but not dull. Four hours in the saddle. It will be quite a test!