Bog Myrtle & Peat

A fair measure of drink was taken in the Black Mountains above Crickhowell. We capered into the evening like bats, and when it finally turned cold and the moon was lost at last in banners of high cloud, we moved inside to the barn to smoke cigarettes. I haven’t seen my friend for five years, but we slipped into the same old conversational waters like eels returning to water.

I listened to the story of his farm as it stands today; how it’s made of a dozen smaller holdings, and many more which have grown into trees and bracken over the last one hundred years. That’s the way of this place, and every hilltop festooned with domestic and agricultural ruins of a people who have simply vanished. On the walls of the old abandoned houses, strands of ivy trail in place of wiring that was never installed, and many of these buildings were abandoned before electricity ever sparked the hills into brightness. Immersed in a phase of reading short stories by Caradoc Evans, my imagination soon joined the dots to conceive of this place in its heyday – the stamp of cattle driven to market, and parishioners striding to chapel beneath the scent of sawn wood and charcoal ovens.

This part of Powys has grown rich and prosperous in recent years. The wealthy choose to live there, but what estate agents market as “peaceful rurality” feels strangely like abandonment and loss because it shouldn’t be peaceful here. People made these hills; in vanishing, their absence echoes loudly.

Not long before I arrived, my friend had been clearing a path through the woods above the house. In doing so, he’d come upon the skeletons of several horses which had been buried there when the woods were still fields. Perhaps it had been a communal dump for the carrion of the parish, and in the wake of his work with the digger, fallen sticks were blended with brown bones like the ruins of a raven’s nest. Turning to a pile of sacks behind me, my friend showed me a skull which he’d brought to the shed for safekeeping. And didn’t that put my hackles up; the dark eyes dancing in the trembling flame of a candle, and the terrible hangman’s loop of teeth where an upper lip had hung.

The skull itself was yellow, and several teeth had fallen out. But it was odourless, and encrusted with the tannin-brown stencils of oak leaves and roots like the shreds of a long-lost mane. Here was the finest expression of an old tradition of Celtic paranoia; my well-nursed nightmare of Mari Llwyd or the Hobby Horse stalking through margins of the hardly-sparking night. I rushed to remember the words of the poet Vernon Watkins and the endless, terrifying Ballad he wrote for just such a spectacle, then chanted them out loud with my eyes like saucers – Betrayed are the living, betrayed the dead – all are confused by a horse’s head. My ears rang; there wasn’t enough cider in all of Wales to calm me down.

And then it was gone again, put back to one side on a bin above a rack of bottles. I tried to move on, but I couldn’t. That I was covetous of that head goes without saying; I wanted to possess it more than I have ever wanted to possess any other object in all the grassy green world. But you can’t just demand a thing, particularly when it so obviously deserves such an immense degree of reverence and value. It would be like enjoying dinner with a friend, then asking offhand for the keys to his house. So I kept quiet, and if my eye thereafter wandered away from the face of my friend to the skull which lay behind him, then I’ll concede that I am a poor kind of pal. 

But order was restored. The night was fine, and I worked hard to recover a sense of the reunion. In the morning, I told myself that the head was a home of its own, and perhaps it was never meant to be mine. It was hard to imagine how owning that skull and keeping it around me could ever perpetuate the enormity of that first encounter. Surely it was better to keep it fresh as a memory, and God knows I’ve held onto the wrong things for too long before, hoping they’ll set the dye of a moment which is already bleeding away. 

I came away after breakfast and drove down towards Abergavenny on the high road, thinking that if Galloway was ever lost or blown away, I’d move to the hills above Crickhowel in a heartbeat. I was haunted by the place, and thrilled by the loss of it. A few weeks later, I wrote to my friend and told him how much I’d enjoyed our evening together in the barn, and how the horse’s head still haunted me. His reply laid plans for us to meet again soon, but he closed with a sentence that killed me. “You should’ve taken that skull if you wanted it”. Turns out that he’d thrown it away.

Picture: Mari Llwyd from the exhibition “Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain” at Compton Verney, photographed 31st May 2023