Gwalia Deserta XV

As a teenager I loved one of the Byrds hit songs, The Bells of Rhymney. It spoke to me of my family history and life in the South Wales valleys. The lyrics were a poem written by miner turned poet Idris Davies and reached a wider audience when they were put to music by American folk singer Pete Seeger. The rest is sort of history, for anyone around at that time who knows the Byrds music.

The photo is a view looking back across Rhymney from the mountain road across to Tredegar. This may become a little thread if I can put together some photos from the other places mentioned in the song. In the days when I travelled across the mountain road with Mam to visit her family in Garden City the hills were black; mountains of coal waste vomited from conveyors working twenty four hours a day as the black gold was ripped from the guts of the earth below.

Even in my youth Rhymney had already seen its peak as an industrial town, but I knew nothing of that at the time. Like today, I visited family in the area from an early age - but there were more of them that I knew then. Today I visited cousin C to catch up on just about everything that's been going on in our lives. Although I have plenty of cousins in the area, it's been so long since I've seen many of them that I wouldn't recognise them if I met them in the street.

C and I keep in contact as often as we can, with a connection that seems to arise from something more than just shared family. There's an affinity with the place, the sense of history and connectedness to the landscape that shaped our destinies in an age before computers, instant communication and the global market.

At some point we all have to negotiate challenging circumstances, as did miner turned poet Idris Davies, to find a new equilibrium if we are to survive. There's something for me still when I visit Rhymney, even though I've never lived there. I am connected with the place through maternal bonds and affection for family who've lived here and cared for me when I was younger. The landscape sometimes struggles to recover its sense of balance from the depredations of generations, but I know that we are only like the passing shadows of clouds on the hills in the scale of things.