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Harlech

POETRY

THE CASTLE AMUSEMENTS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read679 views

The large corrugated iron shed – flaking

whitewash almost turned to grey – has been closed

and empty now since the last recession.

Some say the arcades of slot machines remain,

cobwebbed, darkened and muted, until

that last trumpet in an eye’s twinkle

resurrects their glare and the ring of money.

 

Visitors to the Plantagenet castle

opposite – driving up the corkscrew lane

from the coastal road – note the peeling plywood

nailed to the windows, and the fading sign

above the padlocked double doors up the steps,

where, beneath AMUSEMENTS, is the vestige

of CINEMA. Imagine, between the Wars –

on a stuffy summer night, the doors wide

for what little air there might be – the castle keep,

far, far above the sea, filled with sounds

from the rich arcades of Tinsel Town:

Laurel and Hardy singing “In the Blue

Ridge mountains of Virginia on the trail of

the Lonesome Pine…” – or Selznick’s Gone With The Wind,

and Atlanta burning.

 

 

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POETRY

CILAN UCHAF

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read344 views

From a grassy cliff top, shorn by sheep and wind,

at the Llyn Peninsula’s southern most tip,

we can see across North Cardigan Bay

to Harlech and the heights of Snowdonia,

stretching east to Bala, south beyond Barmouth,

north far beyond Porthmadog. Below

are gulls silent in the thermals – beneath them,

a sickle-shaped cove of sand and shingle.

The ancient place name translates, ‘Highest Chamber’.

 

Through a gate, beside a fishermen’s path,

in some farmer’s field is an unsignposted,

small neolithic burial chamber,

looted aeons ago, of course, but its vast

capstone and the smaller uprights, though slipped

a little, too long ago to be remembered,

are effectively in place. Whether the stones

were already nearby – ice age detritus –

or had to be hauled from afar, someone

thought life mattered enough to acknowledge death

with a major piece of engineering.

 

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POETRY

NORTH CARDIGAN BAY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read328 views

This evening’s gibbous moon is a blood orange,

rising over Snowdonia’s ranges

and Criccieth Castle’s promontory,

shining its rippled beams across the waves

unerringly towards us. Much later

it transforms into a gleaming silver, moving

south and high over Harlech Castle,

that towers above the far, dark shore.

 

From first light the sand and shingle beach,

beneath our windows, is lined with the black,

triangular paraphernalia

of solitary sea anglers. Diligent

environmentalists they return

each bream, and bass, and dab into the sticky,

salty vestiges of the Gulf Stream,

and stow away their gear like good children.

 

As the storm-gauge falls, the day turns humid, still,

and haze, out in the bay, mid-afternoon,

thickens into a smoke-grey cloud that seems

to hover just above the surface

of the glassy sea. Horizontal lightning

sparks and flashes, flashes and sparks, and thunder

rumbles briefly. The storm dwindles, becoming

a rain shower, and the bay begins to clear.

In the dusk we can almost see the castles.

Tonight the moon is gold.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

MAÎTRE JACQUES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read608 views

Master James of St George d’Esperance, Savoy –

civil engineer and architect,

a Lutyens, a Vauban, a Speer –

was ‘master of the Kinges werkes in Wales’.

He built the castles at Rhuddlan, Conwy,

Harlech, Caernavon and Beaumaris –

all accessible from river or sea,

the last four with bastides (walled, fortified towns) –

for Edward I, England’s ninth Norman king,

in the latter’s campaign to rob the Welsh.

 

Beaumaris – the final touches unfinished

through lack of funds, and the subjugation

of the Welsh – has two concentric walls,

twenty four towers, and the remains

of a sea water moat and a dock,

all stone work patterned and meticulous.

The inner courtyard is the size of a grand

public square, somewhere for the King to survey,

from a window of the Great Hall – a goblet

of wine from Gascony at his lips,

an English harpist playing at his back –

Maître Jacques command masons and carpenters.

 

We do not know precisely where he was born

or died or when, or much else about him

apart from mentions by various

clerks of work in lists of expenditures –

and that his wife’s name was Ambrosia.

Where they both Savoyards? Did they ever

return? When they saw snow on the mauve mountains

over the Straits from Beaumaris did they think

of the many days’ journey south across

the Celtic Seas to the Bay of Biscay,

along the Garonne to Bordeaux, then by horse

skirting the lakes and crossing the rivers

of Occitania, the Alps of Savoy

in the friendly distance?

 

 

 

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POETRY

MYTH MAKING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read415 views

Whichever way the visitors choose to come –

up the steep, narrow road with blind corners

and left onto the Harlech Castle car park

or walking down from the high street – most

make for the statue, especially those

with young children attracted by the horse.

 

It is a war horse, so the tail is docked.

Its neck and head are lowered, its legs splayed,

its nostrils flaring, its eyes wide. It carries

two kings: Bendigeidfrân – Brân the Blessed

– and his nephew, Gwern, a boy still, who lies dead

across the horse’s flanks, bound in a cloth

wrapped tightly round his uncle. Brân – whose name

means ‘Raven’ – is hairless, his arms merely stumps

and his legs lopped off below the knee.

He was once a giant who crossed the sea

in a dozen strides. Later in these same

Irish wars his head will be severed.

His seven companions will bring it back

talking to Harlech, where it will hold court

for seven years. They will bury it

on the westernmost isle of Gwales.

 

The sculptor’s work is mostly busts or statues

in bronze of figures of note: statesmen,

soldiers, artists, and these mystic kings

from the Mabinogion. Most visitors

are silenced by the three figures though some

seem unconcerned by the horror or are

too embarrassed to mention it.

The littoral that features in the stories

is now populated with caravan sites.

 

Such rhetorical bathos is arriviste,

for they were bards for millennia,

makers of metaphor. ‘The severed head

spoke. But one, curious for truth, opened

the forbidden door…’. Before messiahs,

before calendars, before the curve

of the imagination, ‘the waters

turned, replete with gods and birds, unsung,

unblessed, empty of man’.

 

 

 

Note: The statue is ‘The Two Kings’ by Ivor Roberts-Jones – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Roberts-Jones.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE KING’S WORKS IN WALES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read416 views

Edward I’s decision, announced on 17 November 1276, to go against Llywelyn as a rebel and disturber of the peace, had, as not the least notable of its consequences, the inauguration in Wales of a programme of castle-building of the first magnitude.

THE HISTORY OF THE KING’S WORKS, HMSO, 1963

 

Maître Jacques, castle builder from St. George,

Savoy, walked the crag’s perimeter

two hundred feet above the breaking sea

that would ensure supplies during sieges,

and advised the king in what was due course then –

a relay of messengers riding to

wherever the court was – to build at Harlech,

Welsh heartland, dominate that long coast,

be grander even than Caernafon or Conwy.

 

Carpenters, charcoal burners, diggers, dykers,

plumbers, masons, sawyers, smiths, woodmen,

quarriers and labourers – all from England –

together with Master James have ensured

the elegant, sturdy walls and towers

have lasted beyond Glyndwr’s uprising,

the Wars of the Roses and Cromwell,

though some of the limestone from Penmon

and most of the steel and iron from Chester

have been snaffled over time by locals.

 

Victorian tourists, informed by guide books

in the grand tour style about ruins,

could catch the Paddington train to Oswestry

then the stopping train to Barmouth, alight here,

take the pony and trap up the hairpin road

to the Castle Hotel facing the keep.

 

The hotel has been refurbished: on two floors

luxury apartments; on the ground floor

the visitors’ centre with time lines, a/v,

museum shop, and café where there is

Fair Trade coffee, speciality teas,

paninis, scones – and all day full Welsh breakfasts

very popular with local builders.

 

 

 

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