Sunday 15 August 2010

Goldcliff, Redwick and Magor

Wales
Gwent (Monmouthshire)

Pottering back slowly from South Wales to Staffordshire we turned off the M4 west of Newport and followed the ring road south of the city. We passed the old transporter bridge and the docks before reaching Liswerry, where a minor road took us into the Caldicot Level, the alluvial wetland that lies between the M4 and the Severn estuary. This dank, flat marsh was the home of my paternal grandmother’s family until they moved into Newport at the start of the last century, and we were in search of family graves.

Where we Going?

When I was small my (maternal) grandmother taught me to recite the 13 counties of Wales. The local government re-organisation in 1974 reduced that to 8 while another in 1996 introduced 22 single-tier local authorities which now call themselves counties. A further suggested rearrangement in 2015 was overtaken by events. To avoid confusion (largely mine) I will stick to the 13 'historic counties' I learned at my grandmother's knee. These counties were created by Thomas Cromwell at the request of Henry VIII in 1530.

The Historic Counties of Wales

SE Wales with the approximate extent of the cities of Cardiff and Newport
and position of the relevant villages
I prefer the old counties, though, this map appends an inappropriate 'shire' to Glamorgan among others. My father, a native of Newport always claimed to be a citizen of the Autonomous State of Gwent, though he spent his last 45 years in Buckinghamshire. I am thus duty-bound to prefer 'Gwent' to 'Monmouthshire'.

Goldcliff

We drove through depressing territory all the way from the last urban and industrial gasp of Newport right out to where wet cows chew dispiritedly in meadows of long wet grass. Drizzle fell from a grey sky; it seemed the natural state of affairs.

Goldcliff has no gold and no cliff. The name originates from the siliceous limestone bank by the coast at Hill Farm; sadly quartz is not gold and an 18m high bank is neither a hill nor a cliff.  This world is flat and protected from the sea by a concrete wall. Drainage channels covered in green scum keep the land just about dry enough to be pasture. We found no centre to Goldcliff, though there is a church somewhere, but what we did find was a mile long dribble of houses lining the narrow road. There are well built farmhouses and a sprinkling of new buildings, many of them large, some of them very large. People with money have chosen this bleak place to build their homes. I have no idea why. I am forced to conclude that this landscape has charms I fail to see.

Redwick

We had to track a mile or two inland and then back out toward the estuary to find Redwick. The village is remoter and closer to the coast than Goldcliff, not that there is any sign of salt water. There is no harbour between Newport and Chepstow, the tidal mudflats being unable to shelter even the smallest fishing boats, and the villages have turned their back on the coast and made their living from agriculture - at least until the boom in commuter housing.

Around Redwick the land seems lusher and the atmosphere less desolate – though perhaps I was fooled by a pause in the drizzle. The village does at least have a centre - a pub facing a church across a bend in the road. The pub looks well kept and cheerful, festooned with colourful hanging baskets. It also boasts a ‘Piste de Boule’ suggesting the Bristol Channel is not the limit of its horizons.

St Thomas', Redwick

Outside the church a stone shelter houses a collection of artefacts from the agricultural past, most notably a cider mill and press. I had never thought of my Monmouthshire ancestors as cider drinkers despite the county bordering the English cider heartland.

Cider Mill and Press, Redwick

St Thomas’ church is an ambitious structure, big enough to accommodate the whole of Redwick and still squeeze in several bus loads of visitors. They are proud of their peal of bells and, helpfully, have a list of who is buried in the churchyard. None of them were the ancestors we sought.

St Thomas' Redwick

Outside, on the porch, a scratch shows the high water mark of the great flood of January 1607, though as New Year then started in March the scratch is dated 1606. On the 30th of that month a huge storm surge – or possibly a tsunami – rolled up the Bristol Channel. The Welsh coast was inundated from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire all the way up to Chepstow, while on the English side the water swept across the Somerset levels as far inland as Glastonbury Tor. 200 square miles were flooded, livestock and villages were swept away and over 2000 people died. And this was where my ancestors chose to live.

Flood marker, St Thomas', Redwick 

Barely a thousand people live in Goldcliff and Redwick put together but Magor is a much bigger village, maybe even a town. We parked by the ruins of the 13th century Procurator’s House and strolled into the central square. There are dignified old buildings, shops, pubs, restaurants and a profusion of hanging baskets and flowerbeds. The town looks smart, freshly painted and prosperous. It is also far enough inland to have grown a modern estate to the south, spreading up the side of the rise which protects Magor from the sea. To the north there is a little industry, the M4 and Magor’s very own motorway service station.

Magor

If Redwick church is too big for the village, the 13th century builders of St Mary's evidently expected Magor to grow into a city. 

St Mary's Magor

It is surrounded by a well-tended burial ground and we scanned a few gravestones searching for the ancestral Attewell family.

Magor churchyard

Lynne is openly scornful (but, I think, secretly impressed) that the graves of my mother’s family can usually be found by locating the largest monument in the cemetery. It worked at Trealaw where my great-great grandfather’s statue sits on a plinth even Nelson might envy while his son and much of the rest of the family lie under a substantial tangle of angels and cherubs in the more bucolic setting of Penderyn. The biggest monument in Magor churchyard is not huge or excessively showy, but it does tower over its rivals and yes, it is the resting place of the Attewells.

Me and the Attewell Monument, Magor

The spire-shaped monument was built to mark the grave of Mary Attewell, my great-great-great grandmother who died in May 1887. My great-great-great grandfather William Attewell joined her there in 1890, followed by an assortment of sons, daughters and in-laws though not my great-great grandfather Thomas Attewell who was born in Magor in 1833 but had moved to Newport before he died in 1917.

The grave of Mary Attewell, my three greats grandmother

Inside the church we met a friendly local engaged in writing a history of the church. Old photographs, she informed us, showed the now weathered Attewell monument to have once been shining white. Maybe they, too, enjoyed being just a little showy.

The Attewells had a farm near Magor and their sons and daughters married natives of Goldcliff and Redwick. They clearly made some money; William and Mary lived lives which were long and, I presume, comfortable by the standards of the day. I was surprised to find that all three villages were prosperous and remain so, though now for rather different reasons. Clearly there are those who do not find the landscape of the Caldicot Level desolate and depressing but I am not one of them. I am glad Thomas Attewell left, even if Newport is hardly the city of anybody’s dreams. They all went eventually, but even so the population of the coastal wetlands looks to be growing, not shrinking. And as for the people who live there now – well they’re welcome to it; this branch of the Attewell family is unlikely to want it back.

Friday 6 August 2010

Manchester, Llantrisant and Beijing

A Chinese Visa, an 18th Century Landscape and a Medieval Welsh Castle

05-Aug-2010

To Manchester for a Chinese Visa

Greater Manchester

We popped up to Manchester to hand in our Chinese Visa applications. The comfortable, spacious offices of the new Visa Centre mean it is no longer necessary to queue – usually in the rain - outside a pokey little room at the Consulate in Didsbury; and as the Centre is in Manchester’s Chinatown, it seemed a good idea to book a morning appointment and follow it with lunch.

Arriving a tad early gave us time to look round a Chinese supermarket and make a few purchases before ringing the bell at the Visa Centre the approved ten minutes before our scheduled appointment. Perhaps because of the appointment system, perhaps because visas can now be obtained by post, not only was there no queue, but we were in and out in five minutes.

Manchester City Art Gallery, Valette and Ibbetson

With an hour and a half to kill, we were pleased to discover the city art gallery – a most un-oriental building – squatting on a Chinatown corner. It houses a large collection of mainly British paintings and we saw a couple of Lowrys and several memorable Manchester cityscapes by his onetime teacher Adolphe Valette. The Victorians are well represented with the obsessions of Rossetti and Holman Hunt, curly-haired ginges and God, respectively, fully explored. There is also John William Waterhouse’s uncomfortably sexy Hylas and the Nymphs, a copy of which I recently encountered in a Malvern B & B, where its prolonged contemplation was unavoidable by anyone taking a bath. Finally, there are as many eighteenth century portraits and landscapes as one could wish for.

Albert Square, Manchester by Alphonse Valette

Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle is actually less remarkable than his name (he was born in 1759 by Caesarean section and was, allegedly, acutely embarrassed by his exotic monicker). In such small dark landscapes it is difficult to make out what is going on - I do not know if they were supposed to be like that, or are in need of a clean, or the paint is deteriorating. A view of Llantrisant from the south is well known to anyone who has driven along the M4; its church is clearly silhouetted on a hill, but we had never seen it from the west and never knew it had a castle. Maybe, we mused, it had existed in the 1790’s but was there no longer.

A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle, Julius Caesar Ibbetson

06-Aug-2010

Llantrisant and William Price

As fate, or luck, would have it, we were in South Wales the very next day visiting Lynne’s extensive but aging tribe of aunts and uncles. Our last visit was in Llantwit Fadre, after which we made our way to Peterston to spend the evening with a friend. Our route, inevitably, took us through Llantrisant, and yet again we had an hour to kill.

Rhondda-Cynon-Taff
Wales

Modern Llantrisant sits on the flat land below the hill and has dual carriageways, irritating road works and a huge Tescos. Turning off the main road and winding our way upwards we found an older, quieter Llantrisant centred on a small square at the summit of the hill.

The car park was free and offered us a suggested walk through the old town, including a visit to the castle. The coffee shop was less welcoming: “No, you can’t have a cappuccino, we close in forty five minutes.” We were graciously allowed a filter coffee, though it was not very good.

The square is still called the Bull Ring though the bull baiting that gave it its name was banned in 1827 - not for reasons of animal welfare, but because it attracted unruly crowds. It is home to a statue of William Price, surgeon, druid, chartist and eccentric. Price could hardly claim to have invented cremation, but it was not practiced in England or Wales between the Roman Empire and the death of his infant son, Jesus Christ Price in 1884. He was prosecuted for burning the body, but argued that as the law made no mention of cremation it could not be illegal. The judge agreed and within twenty years the practice had become established.

Me and William Price, Bull Ring, Llantrisant

Price had another son whom he named Jesus Christ II Price (he later changed his name to Nicholas). Although invariably described as an eccentric, Price was actually a 24-carat nutter. In his statue he wears his druid’s tunic and a fox skin hat and looks every inch a man marching gloriously to the beat of a drum only he can hear. This alone could have made him a hero in Wales, but he also gave freely of his medical expertise to help the less advantaged members of society, and espoused the Welsh language, and his own idiosyncratic version of Welsh culture, at a time when the professional classes were determinedly aping everything English. When the time came for his own cremation in 1893, a crowd of 20,000 turned out to pay their respects.

Llantrisant Castle

Twenty metres down the road, beside the old Weight House, is the entry to the castle fields. A shattered remnant of one tower is all that remains of the stone structure built in 1246 by the Norman Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, to replace an earlier wooden fort. The rebellious Welsh damaged the castle in 1294 and 1316, and it may finally have been destroyed by Owain Glyndwr in 1404. It was certainly in ruins shortly after that date, but has deteriorated little since Julius Caesar Ibbetson came here over two hundred years ago. Where he stood to get his ‘view from the west’ is a mystery, his angle apparently requiring him to hover fifty metres above the plain and be able to see right through Llantrisant’s substantial parish church. Such is artistic licence.

The remains of Llantrisant Castle

The positioning of Manchester Art Gallery on the edge of Chinatown is, doubtless, coincidental, but from the number of Chinese faces looking at the paintings, the coincidence is appreciated. Our subsequent arrival in the Little Yang Sing restaurant was less accidental, but we were equally appreciative. We went to Manchester for a visa and a lunch and discovered Julius Caesar Ibbetson and Llantrisant Castle. Ibbetson also visited China; in 1787 he was official draughtsman on the very first British embassy to Beijing, producing watercolours of the plants and animals encountered on the journey. Small world.

[and having acquired our visas we duly set off for China. Kunming and the Stone Forest, the first part of that story, is just a click away]