THE MOLD CAPE
In what is now the back garden of a house –
a between-the-wars semi – in Mold, a town
in North East Wales, a gang of labourers,
one hundred and seventy years ago,
hired to demolish a burial mound –
known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, Goblin’s Hill –
uncovered what seemed to be small sheets of brass
on a small, fragmentary skeleton.
Cleaned, fitted together, a local scholar
declared them a Bronze Age cape of gold,
perhaps made to fit a royal child.
Since then the cape has been exhibited
in a glass case in the British Museum.
Imperial kleptocracy at work.
An artefact of such exquisite design
and craftsmanship could not have been allowed
to remain in a small market town where most
did not speak English, and were illiterate
in their own language. It was a place ringed
by the mining of iron, lead and coal;
a place where a riot about workers’ rights –
a reduction in wages, and miners
forbidden their mother tongue underground –
required four rioters to be shot dead
by soldiers of the King’s Own regiment.
After the discovery the mound was
completely razed. No record has been found
of the disposal of the bones.
Note 1: Ellyllon is pronounced ‘ethleethlon’
Note 2: The poem has been published in the 2022 winter edition of EAP: The Magazine – https://exterminatingangel.com/the-mold-cape/.
Catherine Reynolds
August 27, 2021A sad commentary on the acquisition of sacred artefacts by one country from another. A right deemed worthy by the victors of lands conquered a millennium ago. No respect for the child lost to the ages and no recognition for this ancient kingdom of druids. You paint a mournful picture yet give sanctity to the despoiled grave and the times far beyond memory. You bring us to the recent past, through the eyes of a historian, mindful of class struggles against dreadful and callous indifference to starvation and penury. More lives cast away by those who rule and who demand compliance.
John Huddart
August 31, 2021What are bones? Ashes? But art is what we aspire to be. Needs to be seen and marvelled at. There’s a debate here……
Thanks for discovering this, in poetry, for it should not have been a story lost.