BETWEEN RIVERS: INTRODUCTION – ALAN HORNE

It’s a great pleasure to introduce and act as guest editor for this section of David’s site.

One day, David and I found that we had both written poems which referred obliquely to the Gresford disaster, a coalmine explosion, in a village near Wrexham in north-east Wales, which killed 266 people in 1934. We discovered a shared interest in this part of Wales, which centres on the catchment of the River Alun. No surprise there: the area is a popular destination for days out from Chester, where David has lived for most of his life, and from the Wirral, where I spent my childhood.

We noticed that, as far as we could see, there is little attention paid to this locality in literature, despite the existence of some remarkable cultural institutions such as the Theatr Clwyd in Mold and Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden. Yet it has an emblematic position in British history: a contested border between England and Wales revised as recently as 1974, and a linguistic frontier, with hills, rivers and fertile lowlands, minerals, heavy industry, ports, and big winners and losers in the post-industrial economy. Others may know of glorious memorializations of this area: we needed to find them.

We envisaged a project which would highlight literary and cultural artifacts relating to the area, and generate new ones. We widened our horizons a little, to include the area delineated by three rivers – the Alun, the Dee and the Gowy – to include north-east Wales and west Cheshire as well as the Flintshire and Wirral coasts of the Dee Estuary. BETWEEN RIVERS was born.

This wider area includes the city of Chester, plentifully represented in art and history, though our intention is not to focus on the city but on its extensive hinterland. We hope to be disciplined rather then pedantic about this geographical orientation.

As this is an English-language site, we do not claim to represent the wealth of Welsh-speaking culture in the area. But as William Blake says: Without Contraries is no progression. So we try to contribute a little to fruitful interaction across the language boundary.

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly feature. Some we write ourselves. Some we discover, and we hope that readers of David’s site will point us to others. Over time we have featured a broad range of content, including paintings, fiction, history, photographs, poetry and review, and we aim to incorporate other cultural forms as we go along. We try to give equal weight and value to the past and the present, with both new and established work. As ever on David’s website, your comments are an integral part of the process, but for BETWEEN RIVERS we would also be keen to receive recommendations of literature, history and cultural objects which might be included.

In sum, we hope to instruct ourselves while drawing the attention of others to a fascinating region. I hope you enjoy this section. Welcome to BETWEEN RIVERS.

©Alan Horne 2024