Bog Myrtle & Peat

The river Lugg is all that stands between England and Wales at Presteigne. The town lies on an outcrop of Wales which juts into Herefordshire like a fingerpoint, but it’s hard to justify the line because this river marks nothing at all – and soon the border leaves it again, following hedges and the crowns of roads in a senseless, endless zigzag. Drive for more than a mile or two in any direction and you’re likely to cross into England and back several times; the countries are bound together like two halves of a zip.

Trees grow evenly on both sides of the Lugg, and bats swirled in the twilight as I crossed it. If I had been looking for some ancient moan of conflict here, I would have been disappointed – the fault line between two nations sounded more like a chatter of water running keenly beneath the arches of an ancient bridge. Something had died and was rotting in the darkness, but it was hard-pressed to make a mark against the smell of warm streets and fallen apples. Himalayan balsam spewed brightly from the wrecked remains of a riverside house half washed away in a flood.

The streetlights came on drowsily as I walked into the town. People were beginning to close their curtains for the night, and Rachmaninov played from a nearby house while a man bent to pick dog shit from the pavement. As I passed him, he rustled his little bag ominously and said “it’s the best time of the day”, and I hoped he was talking about the quiet and cool of early evening. Above the pools of orange light which lay splayed across the streets, the black silhouettes of roofs and chimneys were overlaid on a chalky blue twilight. There were stars in that twilight, and a woman eating chips with the same methodical detachment as a hay baler. 

Outside an antiques shop, a selection of clothes and books had been left beneath a blue and white awning with an honesty box for any passing custom after hours. There were chairs and sepia prints of trains for sale, and everything left to grow older and more valuable in the darkness. A little further on, the street became uneven with a mixture of slumping, brick-built houses in a mixture of black and white timber. The buildings bulged and frowned above the pavement, practising shapes which seemed deliberately quirky. I later found that most of these houses belong to English people, and there’s a sense of southern affluence in the place which tends towards affectation. It’s a curated kind of beauty which tips a balance from the passive “it’s how we’ve always been” to a determined statement of “it’s how we’ll always be”. So it’s hard to read, and if a Welsh flag flies from the top of St Andrew’s church, it doesn’t flutter much. The Marches are neither England nor Wales; just as when red and white are closely mixed, the result is something different.