The Edge of Cymru by Julie Brominicks, A Book Review by Jane Powell
A Journey from Redundancy to Walking in the Welsh Landscape
In 2012, Julie Brominicks left her teaching job at the
Centre for Alternative Technology for a new life exploring and writing about
the Welsh countryside. Originally from Shrewsbury, she’d spent school holidays
in Wales and studied at Aberystwyth University, before winding up at CAT. She
was in Wales, but not (she thought) quite of it. When the offer of redundancy
came, she took the opportunity to step aside from teaching and get to know her
adopted home.
This took the form of a walk around Wales, following the
coastal path and the Glyndwr way along the English border. Taken in short
sections over a year and a half, sometimes with her fiancé Rob (they get
married during a break halfway through) but often alone, and then marinaded in
years of research and reflection, the journey takes the reader not just around
present-day Wales – or rather Cymru, as she uses Welsh placenames throughout –
but deep into history, culture and politics.
Choosing to Avoid Comfort on the Walk
Brominicks sets serious and ascetic intentions for her walk:
“Avoiding comfort made me more alive, more observant,” she says as she is
drenched in rain. She eats sandwiches “so cold they made my teeth hurt” and camps
wild. Along the way she grapples with her English identity and the awkwardness,
familiar to any Welsh learner, of choosing between the embarrassment of using
imperfect Welsh in front of native speakers, or colluding in the invisibility
of minority languages.
Then there is the conflict between the environmental message
that she had enjoyed sharing with willing audiences in her teaching job, and
the apparent indifference of the general population. Not wanting confrontation,
she merely observes and feels: “I was serenely happy, till a power
station…hoved into view,” she writes of Aberddawan B, better known as Aberthaw
B on the Glamorgan coast, built to burn low-grade coal and once responsible for
the highest nitrous oxide emissions in Europe. It was shut down in 2019.
Finding Tension and Solace in Dylan Thomas Country
The travel narrative which drives the book is exquisitely
observed, with vivid and quotable images on every page. Nature, people and ugly
developments alike appear in luminous watercolour as she moves from a flock of
lapwing to an aeroplane taking off, “huge and silent like a surfacing river
dolphin,” to a policeman eating crisps in his car. Snatches of conversation are
reported in a deadpan style, and the tension between the careless ways of
people and the beauty of the countryside is ever-present.
“I loved that it was quiet, but maybe it was too quiet,” she
writes of a solitary stretch around the Bryniau Clwyd (Clwydian Hills), where
she treads “leaf-softened lanes where crushed crab apples were silent testament
to traffic” on her way to an overnight stay with friends. Farmers and farm
workers are scarce, and she regrets the absence of the reapers, sowers and
herdsmen who populate earlier travel books.
Nevertheless she finds pockets of an older landscape here
and there. A friendly farmer passes a greeting as a “rolling cloud of pollen
puffed from the trees and light was holy gold on an oak.” This is in Dylan
Thomas country, where she admires “silver estuaries dissolving into sparkles” and
her writing at times seems pure Fern Hill.
From Kings to Ice Ages
The travelogue however is only half the book. Interrupting it
at regular intervals are sections of history, written in reverse order from
devolution back to the ice ages, in a dry factual style that requires a
different form of attention. At first I wanted to skip these interludes, but on
a second and third reading I came to appreciate how, by sitting perpendicular
to the present-tense narrative, they open up a space in which the reader is
invited to contribute their own response.
Read slantwise without any attempt to memorize the
information, these sections peel back the layers of modern Wales and reach to
its origins in rock and sea and migrating peoples. The themes of language,
culture, land use and wildlife with which she wrestles shape-shift under the different
historical perspectives that appear as she moves deeper into her journey, and mesh
with the accidental details of her journey.
When the Wolves Disappeared
The climate has been changing all the way along – although
not at the present-day scale, Brominicks is quick to point out – and
biodiversity loss is not new either. Lynx disappeared shortly after the Romans
left, the last wild boar was killed in the thirteenth century, while the crane
and the wolf disappeared around the reign of Henry VIII.
Celebrating the Welsh Language
The very ideas of Welshness and Englishness were not always
there. In north Wales, celebrating the opportunities brought by devolution and
a new political consciousness, Brominicks is eager to practise her Welsh and
celebrate the status that the language enjoys. She is troubled by the uneven
response she receives. Then, after she turns inland to follow the English border,
where she hears no Welsh spoken, the Marcher lords are establishing their
ascendancy and creating areas of monoglot English.
The Arrival of Farming
At Dyfrffordd Aberdaugleddau (better known as Milford Haven)
the historical narrative has got to the arrival of farming, but the appearance
of the oil refinery prompts reflections on the creation of oil from ancient
plankton and algae, and her environmental concerns emerge again. She struggles
with the heat “driving nails in my head” but stumbles onto a welcome at an
organic farm camping pitch, where the heat wave has been good for the hay
harvest.
And on to the abandoned mill at Trefin, with reflections on
the Neolithic invention of bread, and the diversity of crops that was once
grown in Wales and is perhaps returning. Then just north of Trefdraeth
(Newport), with her husband, a terrifying path takes them past precipitous
drops around cliffs that were “hacked blocks of Parmesan, bitten by giants,”
and they picnic in a field until “an orange haze drenched the sky and the fiery
sun dropped through it and sank behind a quilt on which red cursive script was
written in a language we couldn’t read.”
Hunter gatherers preface the section on Ceredigion, where
she reflects again on the environmental crisis. She finds relief in recognizing
the deep roots of human behaviour, seeing collective grieving as an antidote to
individual guilt, while finding solace and determination in the beauty of
nature which she so successfully conveys. Released from her earlier
self-consciousness, she chats in Welsh with a farmer, and they joke in English.
Reflections on the Journey’s End - Aberystwyth and Machynlleth
Back in Aberystwyth she meets the Filipino owners of the
chip shop she worked in as a student, still here twenty years later, and reflects
that all Cymry were immigrants, at some point. Finally, with the Ice Ages, we
are back in Machynlleth. A final glimpse of the formation of England and Wales
near the South Pole a billion years ago drives home the message that all is
change and flux, and that applies to the future as much as to the past.
“Farms full of people and wildlife. It can happen. If we
want it to.” This is a book of hard realism but also of hope and imagination,
and it calls us to stop and pay attention to our own experience and actions in
a time of challenge.
She finishes with a poem inspired by recent conflicts over
re-wilding in mid Wales, and then nearly 50 pages of references, testifying to
the amount of thought that has gone into this journey – and is invited of us in
return.
If
you liked Raynor Winn in The Salt Path, try following Ursula Martin as she
traverses Wales travelling 3,700 miles on foot following a diagnosis of ovarian
cancer. Along the way she meets with help and support from the people she meets
as well as gaining strength and understanding from the physical challenges of
the journey. She reflects on her experience whilst all the time being immersed
in the beauty and nuance of the Welsh Landscape. Written in 2018, this book is
an inspiring and adventurous companion to The Edge of Cymru.
All
the Wide Border: Wales, England and the places between by Mike Parker (Harper
North 2023)
All the Wide Border is a journey through the places, people,
and divisions of the border between England and Wales. Picking apart definitions
of Englishness, Welshness and Britishness, Mike Parker plays with the idea of borders,
our fascination with them, our need for them, and our response to their power.
It’s the story of the Wales-England border as an ongoing exploration of a
concept and division both intangible and geographical.
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