Wide Mythology and Deep Landscape
Have a good look at the photo below for a minute and then scroll down…
Tomen y Mur, Eryri/Snowdonia - photo credit chriswebbphotography.com @chrispicasso
In the distance you can see mountains carved by glaciers during the last ice age which began 100 000 years ago came to an end 10 000 years ago (give or take).
Now come down to the bottom of the picture and you will see a low diagonal ridge going from the bottom right-hand corner. This is the remains of a Roman military base that included barracks and an amphitheatre.
Go up and you will see a ruined farmhouse between a couple of trees. The farmhouse itself is not that old but it is partly made out of the dressed stone from the Roman remains.
Now look right and you will see a large green mound. That is Tomen y Mur (that’s ‘tomen-uh-meer’) . It is the remains of the mound from a Norman motte and bailey castle built on the orders of William Rufus, who succeeded William the Conquerer.
It is also the Tomen y Mur that features in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi - the story of Gwydion, Lleu and Blodeuwedd (the woman made from flowers). This is where Lleu and Blodeuwedd lived after their marriage and where Blodeuwedd had her tempestuous affair with Gronw Pebr.
Just under the mound you can see a crenellated castle-style wall. This is a reconstruction built in 2007 and includes a reproduction of an inscribed Roman stone.
If you were in the actual location and turned round to face the other way you would be facing part of Sarn Elen - a series of long pathways across Wales which, according to the Mabinogion, were commisioned by Elen, a Welsh princess. She had cleverly persuaded Macsen, the Roman emperor, to fall in love with her by making him dream about her. Once they were married, she got him to build the roads with his Roman engineering know-how.
This viewpoint gives us a deep time perspective from contemporary to historical, into archeological and geological time with a tantalizing glimpse sideways in to the world of myth. Now is the moment you’ve been waiting for - we get to climb up on top of the mound! And this is the view…
Three tired and wet performers on top of Tomen y Mur with Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power station in the distance. photo credit chriswebbphotography.com @chrispicasso (from left to right - Lynne Denman, Stacey Blythe and Michael Harvey)
You’ve probably noticed the gloriously moody sky, the steely glint of the sun on the lake and it is hard to miss the three tired, wet and bedraggled performers (it had been a long day!) Just to the right of where I am sitting you can see a couple of huge concrete bunkers. This is Trawsfynydd nuclear power station which is currenlty being decommissioned (only another hundred years to go!) It was designed by Basil Spence, who also designed Coventry Cathedral. An urban legend goes that he was inspired by the square shape and solidity of Edward I’s castles in Wales, layering in yet another bit of our history, oppression and ‘power’ to the view.
It also brings us full circle because the nuclear waste currently being processed from the plant will not be safe for tens of thousands of years, placing us back in a geological time line, only this time facing the future.
In the context of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi the presence of the nuclear power station became strangely relevant. The story is all about the ability of Gwydion to create magic. He had already led a successful raid on Annwfn (the Welsh Otherworld) and brought back treasure and power and in this story he creates a human being from flowers in order to overcome a curse. His love of his own magic gets the better of him, there is a bloody war and, by the end of the story, the dynasty he is part of is doomed to die out.
I’m sure that both the creation of a human from flowers and power from nuclear fission seemed like a good idea at the time. But in both cases the ambition and hubris of creation dazzled the creators so they couldn’t see the inevitable consequences of their actions. The fact that both mythological and modern sites are opposite each other does not feel like a mere coincidence.
The picture on the right is from a performance of Dreaming the Night Field in the Felin Uchaf round house. The site of Tomen y Mur features strongly in our retelling and all the deep layers of sequential time. We also include the nuclear power station in our description of the landscape.
By now you’ve probably already noticed that a simple description of Tomen y Mur and its surroundings also brings us into contact with the mythology of the site. That’s where we are going next…
Through the Hole in the Stone
We spent a long time working in the landscape for Dreaming the Night Field and we were put through our creative paces by the visual artist and creative facilitator Maria Hayes. She encouraged us to really look, see and be in the landscape and open out to what it was doing to us as we inhabited it. We listened, wrote, moved, collected things, made constructions and got muddy.
The next time we worked on site we went to the banks of the river Cynfael where there is a rock that is the epicentre of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.
Dr. Maria Hayes giving us home work
Llech Ronw (Gronw’s Stone)
Llech Ronw/Gronw’s Stone
The three of us look a bit apprehensive and unsure as we look at this upright, pierced stone. There is a good reason for this. When Lleu (Blodeuwedd’s husband) was away she began a torrid affair with a local nobleman called Gronw Pebr. They conspired to kill Lleu, which was difficult because the only way to kill him was beset with a series of almost impossible conditions.
Nevertheless, they managed to fulfil them. But when the spear struck Lleu he was not killed and he flew away, transformed into an eagle, with the spear blade still sticking out of his ribs. Gwydion, the magician, discovered him and magically restored him to health and his human form. Then it was payback time.
The two men, Lleu and Gronw, agreed that they should each stand in the same postion where the other had stood the year befofre and, this time, Lleu would throw his spear at Gronw. Gronw asked to put a stone between himself and the blow and Lleu agreed. Lleu threw his spear and it went straight through the rock and killed Gronw.
The stone itself is not that remarkable and there are probably a number of similar stones in the area. Various people claim to to have been the first to rediscover it and make the connection with the Mabinogi. The story is most fully told in Michael Senior’s book Gods and Heroes in North Wales.
The location of the stone and its role in the story has a tantalising feel of ‘Could this be the place?’
But when we look around the immediate landscape we see even more correspondences. The stone itself is on a smallholding called Bryn Saeth (the hill of the arrow), less than a hundred yards away is another called Llech Goronwy (Gronw’s Stone) and making a fourth corner is a smallholding called Bryn Gyfergyd (the hill opposite the blow).
Now the feeling of connection is positively vertiginous. The stone seems suspended between the three smallholdings on threads of myth. And remember that the stone’s rediscovery comes centuries after the smallholdings were named, pointing us back in the direction of deep time.
This is a whole new level of impossiblilty. How do we respond?
We could …
Retreat into archeological supposition
Grab our Gandalf cloak and declare that ‘this is the place’
Just listen
Actually these responses come from something I wrote twenty years ago (my answer then was ‘just listen’, in case you’re wondering). However lately I’ve been inspired to find another response from an unexpected direction.
Enter the Theologian!
I’ve been reading a lot by the theologian and former nun Karen Armstrong recently and she has the answer!
For millenia we were able to clearly distinguish the difference between practical and mythological behaviour. They were equally valid and completely different ways of thinking and being. Although they could be undertaken simultaneously they were discrete activities. The hunter who knapped a flint into an arrow-head may well have sung a song into it in order to bring luck. The arrow-head was a result of years of apprenticeship, practice and attention and the song links it and its maker to the world beyond the one we normally perceive.
During the Enlightenment logical thinking became the dominant way of thinking and decribing ‘reality’. Eventually theologians and priests started to think the same way and believed that their sacred texts could only be valid if they were literally true. As we lost sight of a nuanced and reflective way of doing mythos so it burst out in the established religions in over-hightened and ego-bound displays of rapture.
At the same time the textual literalism led to fundamentalism and intolerance. Karen Armstrong quotes many early theologians warning against this self-indulgence and lack of awareness (This is a horribly truncated version of what happened - see Karen Armstrong’s books for the full story).
The story, the stone and the names of the small holdings all bring myth and reality together in a way that we cannot comprehend. The epicentre is the hole in the stone. Which is, of course, just a gap. Nothing.
It is through that hole that we are encouraged to step, to the outer limits of our sense-making, to get a feeling of the mythos beyond. And come back simpler, wiser and more resonant with our stories.