Memories of Elsewhere: The King of Rome, by David Lewis

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By David Lewis:

The corona virus has made it impossible to travel, but in memory we can revisit places we have not seen for many years. This morning cypress trees against a blue sky reminded me of Rome, before Easter 1995.

We had a strange, confusing night high above the harsh floodlights of Santa Maria Maggiore and were delayed, directed, and redirected, until eventually we washed up at Salvatore's crumbling palazzo on Via del Clementino. A soft midday light fell down the stairwell onto the palazzo’s blood-brown walls, protected by a small Madonna and Child with a flickering electric candle. Salvatore welcomed us with a roar. 'You have the Queen in England,' he bellowed, 'but I am the King of Rome!' The palazzo was being restored. Thick plastic sheeting instead of walls, staircases without hand-rails, rubble. Our rooms had a lopped square of blue sky, three storeys of families, a courtyard of scooters and a solitary battered Fiat. Every morning I ate alone in a tall grey room, the windows open to the clatters of the street below. Billowing muslin curtains, iced croissants and coffee, but I remember no other guests.  

We had no money. Warm days carved the city into slabs of chocolate-black shade and fierce sunlight and we walked everywhere, saw broken arches, crowds, Lambrettas, tombs. The light fell from a strip of blue above the ochre streets, from the oculus of the Pantheon or from a high unseen window, showering dusty light onto angel and cherub - the huge Roman churches were cool and gloomy, as if we walked a cold marble pavement on the floor of the sea.  

Lunch was usually small tubs of olives, fish, tomatoes and rice from Piazza Nicosia near the palazzo, picnics on the dry grass of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Palatine Hill, the old street market in pre-hipster Trastevere; but I also remember lunches in the flower market of Campo de' Fiori, a table for two in the cool gloom, the long tables outside taken by the flower sellers' families.  

And the great ruins - we crept around the giant silences of the Colosseum, the shaggy remnants of the Forum, isolated fragments of towering wall. We saw gold and silver foil eggs in shop windows; sunlight on book spines and vine trellis in the Keats-Shelley House; gleams from golden icons in the Vatican, after emerging blinking from the cold graves of the Catacombs.  

Salvatore's Madonna welcomed us home as the scooter kids roared in from college. An irregular flag of sunlight played on the wall opposite, a cracked fresco of brown-red and cream plaster. As the light darkened, we finished the crumpled tubs of lunch, drank flasks of Orvieto, read Byron’s journals. Sometimes we walked the streets as the soft darkness and jagged splinters of light divided the city, as a door was opened and closed like a lantern veiled and unveiled, a Caravaggio moment when hooded spies were revealed as students turning to laugh at a shout from a passing Vespa. I remember moments – footsteps echoing on snakeskin cobbles, floodlit churches, a night in the bars around Piazza Navona.  On our last night, a Chinese meal near the Oratory of St Philip Neri, where the Saint broke out of the solemn procession of consecration to play football with local boys.  

Memory is as slippery as fishes. How many days were we there? Were we really the only guests in the palazzo? It does not matter. In memory we can revisit lost places, and strengthen our recollections of time and place. In times of quarantine, I find this a comfort.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Parenthesis in Time: Journal entry from a road trip in northern Chile

By James Kelly:

Down in the valley, among the verdure, the landscape seems still, immobilised in time. Giant slopes of sterile rock bear down from above, arid, expectant in an epochal wait for rain. Yet carved between the high walls, the valley floor, with its regular crops of alfalfa and corn, is of a different time. The boulders and pebbles that lie scattered across the riverbed stand at rest, a temporary pause on their journey down from the Andean highlands to the sea. These petrified fragments of an immense telluric memory are testament to the youthful vigour of the mountains that bore them, the wave of rock that surged up from the Pacific Ocean to form the Andes.

Some of the stones, no doubt, have siblings way up there, up where the air is thin and fresh, where the snow-capped volcanoes of Isluga and Guallatiri attract giant storm clouds with their magnetic pull. Some of the rocks would have been present in the immense columns of burning ash and debris thrust skywards from the bowels of the Earth to hang suspended in the air by great updrafts of igneous gas, before collapsing in devastating waves that ripped down the mountain slopes with force enough to bury a small country under the volcanic rubble. 

And it’s there, up in that other world, in the heart of Cerro Anocarire, that the river begins, the same river whose flows have sculpted the valley and its hillsides. It’s there that the source of the water can be found, the water that washes gently over the pebbles, polishing and massaging them, conveying their sediments on towards the ocean, the same water whose minerals now nourish the transience of these sun-kissed plantations, day after day, year after year.

15:25, 9 January 2018. Camarones Valley, Arica and Parinacota Region, Northern Chile.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. More of his work can be found at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Boneyard

By Claire Margaret Howe:

There are very few places I would happily spend the rest of eternity. The graveyard in Miobhaigh is one of them. It’s a stone’s throw from the seashore, lapped by the cold water of the north Atlantic. It sits squarely between the sea and the sky and on a sunny day it throws up a solid blue vista. The air is so clean that it is frequently thronged with midges, making it almost unliveable. It is surrounded on four sides by a dry-stone wall clad with lichen, ivy and a few flowering bushes. On the seaward side there is an accommodating dip in the wall that makes for a scenic seat. I like to sit there and watch small fishing boats trawl up and down checking their lobster pots. On a calm day the noises of busy work and conversational shouts carry up from the boats. In early autumn seals bask on the rocks at low tide and their occasional barks break the easy silence of the valley. Delicate sea pinks grow along the high tide mark. Strategically speaking, the graveyard is well placed to avoid surprises. Guarded on one side by a long stretch of sea, the east and western reaches are swathed in high grass and marshland. The occasional industrious beast grazes them; usually a donkey with an alarm call that reverberates for miles around. The sprawling brambles house birds that will alight noisily at the sight of any intruders. It is accessed only by a long, winding lane that twists steeply down the valley. The graveyard’s inhabitants – myself and the spirits – have ample opportunity to survey visitors before their arrival. 

This graveyard is very old. Local tradition puts it at ‘chomh sean leis an gceo agus nios sinne faoi dho’. Roughly translated, as old as the fog and twice as old again. Its earth is packed to capacity. It has been decommissioned as a burial ground, but exceptions are made. My grandmother is here, one of the last burials allowed. And my grandfather’s ashes – there was room for an urn, but not a coffin. Often, gravediggers would disturb an old grave, or unearth a coffin, or old bones. I remember hearing about occurrences of it as a child. It was never a cause for unnecessary ceremony. Coffins were re-buried. Bones were lifted from the ground, placed in a small sack and put to one side while the funeral of the day took place. After all the mourners had left, the old bones would be placed carefully alongside the new coffin, and the grave was filled. When the remains of several bodies were disturbed, they were grouped together and placed in one coffin. After decades of this practice, it was not unusual to open a coffin and find six or seven skulls. Once or twice, I have watched the gravediggers at work, silently sweating, and heard the rhythmic clink of spades on stony soil. The ground is treated with respect, but no solemn pomp or pageantry. It is a place of peaceful purpose. 

The graveyard is multi-denominational, much like death. It was used by every village and household for miles around. The deceased from across the peninsula were rowed over in currachs, traditional skin boats. There is a ‘coffin stone’ on the shore were the bodies rested before being carried to the grave. Surrounded by fishing villages, many of its inhabitants are victims of drowning. The locals believed that those who drowned lasted longer in the earth due to the salt in their bodies. The graveyard has seen epidemics and war and famine. There are hundreds of children buried here from the tuberculosis outbreaks in the 1900’s. Sitting on the wall watching the grass rustling over the graves, unwelcome thoughts must intrude. The southernmost corner is clear of headstones. This corner, not unique to this graveyard, is known as ‘the lonely corner’. Unchristened babies and suicide victims were not permitted on consecrated ground. Traumatised families, fearful of their lost ones spending an eternity in hell, would bribe clerics to bury their dead here. Buried at night, the graves weren’t marked, and the deceased were not spoken of again. This graveyard saw the rise and fall of Ireland’s booming trade in graverobbing in the 18th and 19th century. Fortunately, I can find no evidence to suggest that the trade disturbed the inhabitants of this soil. There would be little anonymity in small rural villages to protect graverobbers. It is comforting to think that for all the hardship my companions might have endured in life, they at least didn’t see this ignominy in death. This ground is, in all respects, a final resting place. 

Perhaps that’s why the graveyard is a peaceful place to sit and think. Here, where so many were committed to the earth, I am never lonely. Still, when I look at the unmarked corner and the flagstones where desperate people made offerings to a wealthy church, I can’t help but think that graveyards would be decidedly more pleasant without the oppressive religious overtones and the distressing histories. But then, I reason, they would be parks, and parks are often boring – with history as featureless as their lawns. This old boneyard has a history and a presence that will keep me sharp and keep me humble. I am happy to sit with these spirits, these old grafters. Soldiers, sailors, scholars. Crowded and muddled as they are, they have a quiet place to observe the fishing boats haul in their loads. Only the keening of the gulls to disturb them. 

***

Claire Margaret Howe is a freelance writer and mixed media artist based in Ireland. She divides her time between the sea and the hills and draws inspiration from both. She can be contacted at clairehowewriting@gmail.com

Memories of Elsewhere: La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Krueger

La Fleur en Papier doré by Antonio Ponte - Licensed by CC-NC-SA 2.0

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Marcel Krueger: 

I love beer. This may sound shallow, but I guess every one of us has one of those "Save the Earth, it is the only planet with ...." items. For some it might be chocolate, for others avocados or Polish pierogi. Mine is beer, all types and colours, preferably not mass-produced. So it might not come as a surprise that I have visited the European beer nation par excellence, Belgium, often and with immense pleasure.

When it comes to brewing and culture around beer, there is no place like the slightly surrealist multinational Kingdom of Belgium with its three official languages and distinct Flemish and Wallonia identities. This small country of 11 million inhabitants and a size of 30,000 square kilometres has around 230 breweries that produce an impressive array of different beers including pale lager and ales, amber ales, lambic beers, pilsner, Trappist beers, bock, wheat beers, porters and stouts. Each brewery, often in operation for hundreds of years, comes with a distinct labelling and its own glass for the beer, like the gnomes on the labels of Brasserie d'Achouffe in the Ardennes, the distinct Art Deco lettering of the Rodenbach Brewery in Flanders and the strange small wooden gallows for the round-bottomed, hourglass-shaped receptacles for the Kwak ale brewed by the Bosteels Brewery near Brussels. On average, Belgians drink 84 liters of beer each year, which is shockingly down from around 200 liters per capita in 1900. Maybe the water quality has improved in the last 120 years. And that Belgium's other nutritional staples include artisan chocolate and the best chips in Europe I shall only mention in passing here. 

Fittingly, when living in Cologne, my wife and I lived in the Belgian Quarter, a lovely though gentrified neighbourhood with many 19th Gründerzeit houses lining the leafy streets and a cafe or restaurant never far. Just around the corner from our house was (and still is) the small cornership named Brunne vun Kölle (literally the ‘Fountain of Cologne’) which stocked many rare and delicious Belgian beers, especially my favourite type, the dark and sweet dubbel Trappist ale - which is these days also brewed by places not associated with the Order of Reformed Cistercians of Our Lady of La Trappe, as the Trappist order is officially called. So, after a long and exhausting day in the home office, I would often use the opportunity to stretch my legs on the approximately 450 meters that separated my house from the Brunne, and return with two or three bottles of Westmalle Dubbel or Waterloo Double Dark, brewed near Napoleon's last battlefield and with three sabre-wielding British dragoons on the label, for an appropriate apéro. It is a bit sad that, despite the excellent beers available in Ireland where I now live, Belgian beers are hard to come by here in Dundalk. Our only well-stocked independent off license closed at the end of 2018, and the only other place in town that sells Belgian beers is my local pub, the Spirit Store by the harbour - which these days is also sadly closed due to a certain global pandemic.                   

A fine beer deserves a fine establishment to drink it in. While the Spirit Store is surely one of those and just around the corner from my house, right now I cannot imagine anything more pleasant than a nice Belgian alehouse to drink my Belgian ales in. I have two contestants for this. One is the Café Vlissinghe in Bruges, a tavern from 1515 that is still open to this day and with its dark wooden ceiling, bullseye window panes and massive, 17th-century fireplace is the perfect place to sit in an order a dark and sweet beer on a cold and rainy day. It can truly feel as if either D'Artgnan and Aramis or Capitan Alatriste will be entering the tavern any minute, shake off the Flanders rain from their coats and plunk their booted feet down in front to the fire. 

The other, and for the sake of this piece the one I will have my drink in today, is La Fleur en Papier doré or Het Goudblommeke van Papier. This lovely small bar, of which the name translates to The Flower made from Gold Foil, is a fittingly dark and quiet place to have a beer in peace, despite its appearance on Tripadvisor (4.5 out of 5 stars) and Lonely Planet. It sits on the slightly sloping Rue des Alexiens, halfway between Brussels Midi station and the Grand Place in the center of Brussels, a street that used to run along the medieval city wall and the Droogeheergracht dry ditch, but of that medieval glory nothing remains today. The buildings here are all 1980s and 90s concrete and glass, so the pub building with its dark wooden window frames and floral metal ornaments on the facade already stands out. Once you enter, past a sign that reads ‘Ceci n’est pas un musée’, this is not a museum, you enter two dark and crammed rooms filled with chintz, framed and bleached-out black-and-white photographs, Art Deco graffiti on the walls.

There are simple wooden tables and chairs abraded by thousands of behinds over the years on the tiled floor, and that perfect pub smell of decades of spilled beer mixing with cleaning detergents and dishwater and a slight undertone of cigarette smoke, even though no one smoked in here for twenty years, fills the air. But when you observe the photographs and images on the walls closer, you'll see that these are not only the stereotypical things you might find in any old pub across Europe like pictures of long-dead soldiers, framed proverbs or small flags, no, some of the slogans seem to have been drawn on the walls on purpose and some of the images portray the bar and former patrons. This is because La Fleur en Papier doré was one of the main hangouts of the surrealist artist movement of the 1920s. World-famous painter René Magritte used to drink here, as did composer André Souris and poet Louis Scutenaire. Other former patrons include cartoonist Hergé (who allegedly loved sweet gueuze beer) and Belgian chanson crooner Jacques Brel, and all left the mark on the place, in ink or spirit. There is a slightly more bright backroom in a more modern annexe with framed cartoons on the wall, and a small theatre space on the first floor. La Fleur to this day contributes to the creative scene of Brussels.

But I'm not here for theatre. Instead I will firmly and comfortably wiggle my behind into one of the old chairs of this lovely anachronism that is really not an anachronism at all, and order a cold and dark Westmalle Dubbel, brought to my table in its trademark chalice and with plenty of delicious foam. If the barkeep asks before if I want the 'yeast in' that has accumulated at the bottom of the bottle I'll answer yes, and might even order one of the staples of Belgium bar food, spaghetti Bolognese (I really couldn't explain why this dish has become so popular in bars here, so you better not ask). 

I'll take a sip, smack my lips and lean back. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

A Quiet Edge of England

By Alex Gray

I’m in England for the first time in a couple of years. I had only planned to spend a few weeks here visiting family, but then the corona virus swept its way across Europe and my plans, like everyone else’s, changed.  

Suffolk, on the east coast of England, is only a couple of hours from London by train, but it feels a world away. Here you can find the last lingering remnants of that English idyll where village traditions follow the seasons. It’s a land of farms, scattered woodlands and slow WiFi. At different stages of my life its remoteness has felt like both a prison and a refuge. Now it’s a combination of both.  

During most of February and early March I spent hours sitting at my laptop, refreshing maps tracking the spread of the virus and calling friends in other parts of the world to compare the situation. Almost all of them were in the same predicament as me, stuck at home and waiting for normality to resume. I video called my girlfriend and she said, “It feels like I’m waiting for you to come back from a war.”  

I laughed and told her, “It’s a very boring war.” 

But for a lot of us it’s true that so far this ‘war’ has been defined by an underlying unease and anxiety as we brace for an invisible wave that we know is coming and have little control over.   

As March continues winter eases into spring and better weather. I take the dog for long walks across the open countryside and begin to rediscover this quiet edge of England. There’s not much breath-taking about the Suffolk landscape. There are no spectacular mountains or waterfalls. Instead the beauty here is mostly subtle and undemanding of attention, in a way that I realise makes me love it all the more. A herd of deer on a distant field. Ancient twisted oak trees creaking in the wind. Waves of the North Sea lapping softly against the beaches. 

The ghostly shape of a barn owl at dusk. A gentle wildness. 

My parents get the local newspaper each morning and between the headlines about the coronavirus there are smaller articles, often about Suffolk’s vanishing coastline. The county has always been badly effected by coastal erosion and over centuries in certain places has literally disappeared into the sea.  

During my newly found free time I visit some of these places, defined by what has is no longer there. Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages was a bustling international port, is now a small village with a few ruins of an abbey on the cliffs. The subject of folktales and songs:  

“By the lost town of Dunwich 

The shore was washed away 

They say you hear the church bells still 

As they toll beneath the waves” 

The coast at Covehithe also has one of the highest rates of erosion in the whole of the UK. Fallen trees scatter the beach, one road simply drops away from the cliffs, and only a cluster of houses remain. But it’s also a great spot to walk and look for sea glass, twinkling like gem stones on the beach.  

The church here is another oddity. It sits within the ruined walls of a larger medieval church. Walking around this half destroyed structure, and with the sound of the nearby sea in my ears, I difficult not to think about the impermanence of our ways of living. Maybe it’s because everything suddenly seems so fragile.   

And perhaps for the first time I feel very lucky to have this place at all, even if it won’t be here forever. What I’m feeling is probably familiar to anyone like me who has grown up knowing only one home. A place to return to, and keep returning, to gather thoughts, and take shelter in troubling times.  

***

Alex Gray is a writer and teacher of English literature from Suffolk, England. He is a former sub-editor of 52 Insights Magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing. Since 2017 he has been based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His most recent writing focuses on travel and issues affecting indigenous communities. Website.

Memories of Elsewhere: Heartbreak Beach, by Emma Venables

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Emma Venables:

Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else, is in North Wales where I lived and studied for eight years. I’d never really explored anywhere beyond my university’s city, Bangor, until I met my best friend when working in retail. At a particularly difficult time in both our lives, she had just learned to drive and so we drove down those winding roads, the Welsh countryside wrapping around us like a comforter, in search of breathing space. I’d play DJ, feet on the dash (before I realised how dangerous it was), and we’d sing our blues away to Katy Perry, P!nk, and Lady Gaga. 

On Heartbreak Beach, we stood. Our wellies soaked by the sea. Hair frizzing in the wind. Cheeks stinging. We looked out at the Llŷn Peninsula, at the tip of Anglesey, at the weak sun hitting the Irish Sea. Breathing deep, taking it all in. Together, but alone in our thoughts. The view and atmosphere bestowing a definite calm on our addled minds which we carried with us into the car and back to our everyday lives. 

A few months later I took my dad and our dogs, Bobbi and Charlie, to Dinas Dinlle. My parents had just split up and whenever I think of this time, I’m reminded of a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road: ‘They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.’ I see us, walking on the sand, up and along the pebble banks, united in our heartbreak and confusion, with our two terriers running in and out, making our load a bit more bearable.

It was a gloomy day, clouds touching the cliffs. We were well wrapped up against the breeze that nipped at us with its puppy teeth. I had my digital camera with me, determined to document these special moments with dad and dogs. As I raised my camera, pressed the button to capture Charlie running at full pelt along the beach, my dad said there wasn’t any chance of the photograph coming out – Charlie was going so fast, he’d just be a white and brown-eared blur against a dull, yellow, background.

But the photograph did come out. It’s one of the best pictures I have of Charlie. All four paws off the ground, ears up, a smile seemingly on his face. Pure joy. A dog’s life. That photograph hangs on my wall now, Charlie’s collar and lead draped over it. He’s been gone for nearly three years, and that image brings as much sadness as it does joy, but I wouldn’t be without it. 

I haven’t been to Heartbreak Beach for such a long time, but when I sat down to write this piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, much to my surprise. There they were, memories of that beach in North Wales alongside sitting in a rowing boat on Lake Bled underneath a cloudless sky and walking through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a late summer evening with foxes and rabbits skittering here and there. Perhaps my mind keeps returning to Heartbreak Beach now because, for me, the times I’ve spent there encapsulate periods in my life where I felt confused and scared, concerned for what would happen next. I went there in search of breathing space, of head space, of more-to-life-than-this space, with the people closest to my heart and came away feeling a little bit lifted, a little more hopeful. 

When the lockdown comes to an end, I’ll return to Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else. I’ll take my dad, my stepmum, and their rescue dog, meet my best friend there. We’ll clear the chaos from our heads, find ourselves again in the sea air, the sand, the glare of the sun hitting the Irish Sea.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

The 'Ghost of Tryfan'

by Rob Piercy

By Phil Scraton:

Moments can catch us unaware. Initially seeming simple, unspectacular, they transform to live in memory. It had been a long, warm early Autumn day climbing on Bochlwyd Buttress. Tired from exertion, joyous from achievement, discovering muscles rarely used, the group headed down to the renowned Ogwen Tea Shack. Excited chatter, punctuated by snatches of song and much laughter, echoed around the cwm. Eventually it faded, giving way to the mountain’s voice. The tumbling stream draining from Llyn Bochlwyd flowing on through its fissured moraine to Llyn Ogwen. A solitary raven en route to its cliff eyrie.

Perched on a low boulder, my back to the descending path, I coiled the final rope. I didn’t hear his slow approach. Suddenly he was there, breathing hard but regular, leaning on two sticks. Seeing my startled reaction, he apologised. He was old, unsteady on his feet. Surely he hadn’t traversed the summits? No, he had walked from the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel over the Bwlch Tryfan col. His starting-point holds a special place in mountaineers’ collective consciousness. It was the base where Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay planned their infamous 1953 ascent of Everest. My new companion’s destination was the tea shack from where he would hitch back to the Pen-y-Gwyrd.

I found myself concentrating on his lined, weather-beaten, kindly face. ‘You must have seen some changes in these mountains, especially since the new wave of popularity in hill-walking’. He was surprised by my presumption. ‘I’m a beginner. I started walking in the mountains in my late seventies’. I apologised. His strong accent and slight hesitation revealed Welsh was his first language. ‘I began walking in the mountains when my knees couldn’t take pedalling up steep hills’. I tried to disguise my astonishment.

Looking down from the lip of Cwm Bochlwyd a thin mist had settled in the valley below. I finished coiling the ropes, draping them over my rucksack and across my shoulders. He said I should head down as he would be slow. Not wanting to patronise him I replied that I had plenty of time, that it would be enjoyable to share a yarn. From this point the descent is steep, over smooth and occasionally unstable boulders. We set off, initially in silence, concentrating on placing our feet, his wooden sticks clacking against the rocks. At that time, it was beyond imagination that light weight ‘anti-shock’, ‘carbon’ poles would become part of a multi-million Euro walking industry.

Slowly descending close to the tumbling water, he recounted cycling adventures. He had never been to ‘the Continent’ but had explored the remotest parts of England, Wales and Scotland, often cycling long distances - crude, home-made panniers carrying all necessities for the trip. His stories of time and place were wonderful. Sleeping on the white sands of Scotland’s beaches, under stars in the Pennine Hills, in draughty Welsh mountain huts. Absorbed in his vivid story-telling, I didn’t want our walk to end. Too soon we arrived at the footbridge where Llyn Idwal’s tributary tumbles towards Llyn Ogwen.

My habit is to pause on the bridge, lost in the dance of the water, while bidding a temporary adieu to the high buttresses of mountains I know and love. We parted and I remained awhile imagining that I too might live such a wonderful, full and active life. Eventually I turned my back on one of Snowdonia’s most beautiful views and walked the short distance to the now closed tea shop. The group was sitting patiently on the wall at the end of the path. ‘So sorry I’ve been so long but I came down with the old man’. ‘What man?’ they chorused, their voices in harmony. ‘No-one has come down the path, only you’. I looked beyond the car park to the road. There was no trace.

by Rob Piercy

***

Bochlwyd Buttress is 1,500 feet above sea level, due west of its parent mountain, Tryfan or Tri-faen in Welsh meaning ‘three rocks’ acknowledging three distinct points comprising its summit. Part of the Glyder range it completes the magnificent four mountain horseshoe of Y Garn, Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach. Carved out by glacial movement, the north-facing cwms or corries are marked by vast expanses of shattered rock, majestic buttresses and deep gullies. Its predominant rock-type is rhyolite with occasional flashes of quartz. Unlike its sibling mountains, Tryfan has no softer, non-glacial mountainside. Rising from the Ogwen valley like a shattered tooth it has an imposing presence in all weathers, most majestic in snow and ice fronting a clear blue winter sky.

It stands alone, linked to Glyder Fach by Bwlch Tryfan the col from where my companion had emerged. Ascending the south-west ridge, scrambling over boulders and high scree, below to the west Llyn Bochlwyd nestles in the cwm. There has been a protracted dispute about the mountain’s height. Initially set at 3,010 feet, it was revised in the 1980s to 3,002 feet. Using global positioning, however, its lost eight feet have been reinstated. Height matters, for Tryfan is one of the 14 peaks over 3,000 feet (there is a contested claim for a fifteenth ‘peak’). As so often happens in the great outdoors their traverse within 24 hours has become a classic challenge to mountaineers and fell-runners alike.

The distance is 30 miles with an approximate ascent 13,000 feet – and what goes up must come down! The fine mountaineer and prolific writer, Frank Showell Styles, recalled his successful record attempt. Head down, he had moved at speed, with scant awareness of the stunning views or the rare Arctic plants and wild blueberries skirting the worn, stony paths. Reflecting on his remarkable achievement he felt that moving at speed, inattentive to surroundings he knew intimately, he regretted betraying his deep love of the mountains. A sense of guilt committed him to making the slowest traverse of the peaks, camping on each summit. Fourteen peaks, fourteen days, thirteen nights.

I completed the traverse twice, in 1977 and 1987. Tryfan lies at the heart of the fourteen peaks. Following its descent, so much ground already has passed beneath tired feet, incorporating undulations between summits and two returns to the valleys. For me a stark image, revisited many times on lesser walks, is to pause the rhythm of the strenuous ascent of Pen yr Ole Wen, taking in the completed summits of the Glyder range and, now in the distance, Yr Wyddfa. With six summits remaining, the just-completed Tryfan summit appears to point forward willing you on. Seemingly at touching distance is the blessed trinity of lakes, Bochlwyd, Idwal and Ogwen - where I met my aging companion - now calm in the afternoon sun. It is an overwhelming reflective emotion captured perfectly in Rob Piercy’s wonderful Welsh mountain paintings. Rob, a friend, fellow mountaineer and seer of place. 

***

Tryfan inspires memory and calm. Winter ascent, in firm snow and ice, of Glyder Fach’s Main Gully. On to Tryfan and a challenging descent down its North Ridge. The classic Cneifion Arete along Y Gribin Ridge, Bristly Ridge and down via the mountain’s Heather Terrace. Each place, each experience, unique in the moment and the companionship of others. I have rarely climbed or walked alone. Bivouacking at Llyn Bochlwyd, I shared my shelter with the international guide and wonderful mountaineer John Cunningham. In our sleeping bags we talked long after dark, not about mountains, but the decline of ship-building and the history of socialism in Glasgow, his home town, and Liverpool.

My most memorable moment was a warm, clear, mid-summer’s day with Sean and Jessica, young cousins born a month apart. We set out for the North Ridge, recommended by the fine guidebook writer WA Poucher as ‘one of the most interesting and entertaining scrambles in all Wales’. It is a demanding route from an immediate steep ascent in a wide gully to the ridge. From here the climb is unrelenting, demanding careful foot placement and a quick search for good hand-holds. Sean and Jessica scrambled up the steep rock sections with ease matched by enthusiasm. Momentarily we paused to help others in difficulty on an exposed outcrop. 

We raced on, along the occasionally exposed rocky ridge that sharply defines Tryfan in the minds of mountaineers and sight-seers alike. Passing the ‘cannon’, a remarkable rock cantilever on which many dance, the path arrives at a cliff face. Then a brief but energetic climb to the northernmost summit. Now revealed were the ‘twin peaks’ of Tryfan, two huge rectangular boulders – ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. They provide the mountain with a crown visible from distant peaks and from the valley below, enticing those who summit Tryfan to jump the gap that separates them. Many do. Not us.

As an outlier from the Ogwen horseshoe, yet central to the 14 peaks, Tryfan gives back to its summiteers the ultimate reward. Mountain climbers are asked constantly, ‘Why?’ On that memorable day, the answer was obvious. We sat, leaning against the warm rock that might have been Adam but could well have been Eve. A spectacular view across Anglesey to Holy Island, from where we had travelled that morning, foregrounding the blue of the Irish Sea. Across to the Glyders, the Carneddau, the lowlands beyond Capel Curig – the diverse greens of the forests, the grey mounds of Bethesda’s slate quarries and distant ploughed fields cut through by rivers. So much to take in, so obvious an answer to ‘Why?’ We finished our lunch, took on more water and scrambled down towards Bwlch Tryfan. 

Singing and laughing, Jessica and Sean ran ahead. I paused at the col. It was from here that the old man had appeared as I coiled ropes. I thought of him while we swam in the Llyn. Silently I acknowledged the bivouac site where I had shared one of my last conversations with John before his untimely death. Rejuvenated, we scrambled down in fine voice. Soon, we reached the easy path to the bridge where I had parted company with my ‘ghost of Tryfan’. This time the tea shack was open.

***

Phil Scraton is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Belfast. Author and editor of numerous books including Power, Conflict and Criminalisation (2007), The Incarceration of Women (2014) and Hillsborough: The Truth (2016).  Mountaineering, kayaking and, these days, hillwalking underpin the spirit of his work – freedom. p.scraton@qub.ac.uk 

Previously Welsh Artist of the Year, Rob Piercy is a well-known landscape artist. His Gallery is in Porthmadog, Gwynedd. A mountaineer and member of the Alpine Club, he has published The Snowdonia Collection (2009) and Portmeirion (2012). https://www.robpiercy.com/