Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’m looking for some kind of Wales, and the hunt is all-consuming.

Childhood visits to Portmeirion and Cardigan Bay turned out to be nothing against the country which has grown in my imagination as an adult. I drool over the short stories of Dylan Thomas and Caradoc Evans; I stall before the tall, commanding landscapes of Sir John Kyffin Williams – and now I’m cavernously hungry for The Valleys and the steep, demented fields of Ceredigion, fleshing out my mental map in more than literal terms with leaves of folklore and verse. I’ll admit that I’ve placed the country on a pedestal, and there are times when I reckon that I’ve gone too far. I start to think the Wales I want is just a figment of my imagination, but then I bump against something that feels true and I’m suddenly on the trail again.

Here in Galloway, we’re preoccupied with England and Ireland. Our nearest neighbours stir a range of emotions in the local consciousness. England’s the bigger, bolder brother, but the gap between Galloway and Cumbria is too narrow for us to hate the English as some Scots do further north. You can see them across the water on a clear day, and you’ll never beat them, even if you try – so content yourself with the knowledge that when it rains on us, it’s raining on them too.

Beyond the English, there’s a state of ambivalent truce with Ireland. Sectarianism doesn’t help to build bridges with our Celtic neighbours, and in the hills and hayfields above my home, I can think of a dozen neighbours who would bristle at the sound of an Irish accent. Onlookers say that Scotland and Ireland are united by a shared sense of cultural identity, but the dynamic can be unsteady. In Armagh, I met men who introduced themselves as Scottish, not because they were born or brought up in Scotland, but because my nationality is their shorthand for Protestantism and unionist pride. On the other hand, I have friends from Ayrshire who claim they are ready to fight for a united Ireland but have never even been to Campbelltown, let alone Belfast. When we think of Ireland in Galloway, we’re usually thinking of the part we can actually see – that’s Ulster, and while I love the place, I can’t help but measure all the associated baggage against the relative blankness of Wales.

If Wales qualifies as an “unknown”, that’s not to say that it lacks a corresponding richness or complexity – only that it’s slightly beyond our line of sight. It’s a five hour drive in the car, and we can’t even get a clear view on things which lie within arm’s reach. Neither of my parents have ever been to Wales, and local consensus is simply that the men sing nicely, and their rugby team can be ferocious at times.

A friend had a welsh-made hay baler which made three-quarter-size bales. It had a dragon on the frontplate above the powerdrive, and it was made by a firm called “Jones” in Flintshire. We liked it, but when the cast-iron knotter casings broke, we knew it was done for. That was the end of three-quarter-size bales in this part of the world, although we often speak wistfully of them. To commemorate the old machine, I went down to see it loaded onto the scrap wagon and I used a grinder to cut the dragon off the front to keep for a souvenir. Lost and disembodied from its role, it’s a nice summary of how little we know about Cymru.

So beyond these tiny, glancing blows, Wales feels like a mystery. We just don’t know enough to feel strongly about the place. But when I started to part the curtains, I realised that the country shows all the vital signs of wonder. I have loved the time I’ve spent in Wales these last few years; it’s never what I hoped for, and always something more. Of course my view is tinted by a vision of rural Wales as it was in the 1950s; the literary landscape of Vernon Watkins and the terminal frown of RS Thomas. That’s almost gone, but enough has survived to keep me awake at night. And much of what I love about Wales is also what I love (and loved) about Galloway too. The difference is that I have seen my own land lost in a thousand tiny excisions over the last twenty years; I’ve seen us descend into materialism and the guard-rails of nannyish anxiety, and it’s no specific criticism of Galloway to call it out here – it’s happened everywhere, but I’ve been too close to coal face at home. I’m sometimes disillusioned with Galloway, and the warmth of my loyalty eludes me. So it makes sense that I should throw myself into other places in the hope of comparable warmth. And it doesn’t matter that they’re often just as skint and fragmentary as the home I’ve left behind me – the trick is only that I take new places as I find them, and I can’t be haunted by the ghosts of things I never knew.

The Wales I want is there, just as the Galloway I want is here – both lie beneath the surface; in the rain and the silence; beads of moisture on the shovel and the gutter of candles and peat. The Wales I want is wet wool and oak mulch; the quiet pride of belonging, and pigs hung by their heels to cool in frosty weather. It’s not shown on the tourist-board adverts and the grim projection of Sunny Prestatyn, but I believe in it all the same – and as I galvanise myself to start learning the language, it seems like I’ve fallen in love with a cliché. But I’d console myself with the thought that clichés don’t just fall out of thin air without a grain of truth to start them rolling.

In Wales I sometimes detect these glimmers of old tradition lived truly, and maybe they’re getting weaker as we cut deeper into the twenty first century. But the impulse to find them drives me to spend time not only there but in Ireland, Mann and the West Country too. Perhaps I just want them so much that I’m willing them into being, but my appetite for those truths is only rising as the years go by, and the search is half the finding.