Fire Fire

When churches catch fire, it’s usually due to either an electrical fault or arson. When I was visiting a church a few days ago the archivist told me how very severe damage was caused to the building in the 1990s when someone pushed burning paper through a letterbox which, eccentrically, led into a vestry, and onto a carpet, and from there the flames led to the organ and the woodwork. Vandals have made their presence felt at Swanvale Halt but it’s actually quite hard to set large bits of wood alight: near the candle stand is a scorch mark on the floor where a lighted taper was left burning, but that’s all it did; while on another occasion an Easter Garden was burned but the 17^th-century chest it sat on wasn’t so much as marked. You need a lot of heat to make an impression and a single candle, or even a bagful of candles, won’t do it. Electrical faults are another matter: you try to carry out the inspections at the right time and check the often antique arrangements of the organ, and trust that the risk is fairly low, at least when someone is present in the building.

Low, but not absent. We’ve been aware for some time that our fire precautions – in terms of what to do in the remote eventuality of something happening while the building is in use – need to be tightened up. We had a survey done towards the end of 2019, and I filled out our insurer’s risk assessment template, but then the pandemic intervened and everything ground to a halt. Over the last few weeks, as we suddenly twigged that a range of concerts and other events were coming up, the whole issue lurched into life again. Another consultant visited and did a lot of estimation how many people could get out of our exits: the big clear-out we had recently brought another underused doorway into realistic play for the first time, which helped. Sandra in the office has worked very hard coming up a rough emergency plan, we now have relatively discreet exit signs over the doors, and I have briefed the hirers.

It is vanishingly unlikely that anything could actually happen during an event like a concert: a far greater risk, it seems to me, is that in the heat of the moment (as it were) everyone forgets what they’re supposed to do. Calm and collected action is a harder thing to arrange than an evacuation plan on a bit of paper.

Community Building

One of the people who has joined the congregation pretty recently is Malcolm, and just as I was thinking I ought to call round and visit him, he asked me to do so. It was mild enough to sit in the garden with tea and talk about his pond, but not just that. He's been living in the area for decades, as first a lecturer in physics and then computing, and latterly working in the IT department at the university. He was brought up as a Baptist but much of the time has worshipped at Hilltop, before gravitating towards us over the last few months. He's always been concerned about community issues, from the local development taskforce to promoting the welfare of summer-visiting swifts; and has come to see attending the parish church as a way of integrating his community activism and his spiritual life. 

I've always seen 'community-building' as part of the mission of Swanvale Halt church. This isn't vague and wishful thinking; we try to provide opportunities for people to meet and discover more about one another, sharing experiences and endeavours - to regard one another as more than just anonymous faces passing on the street. Ultimately we are God's, equally in our diversity and need, and while most people will not get as far as articulating it in that way, a church can do something, at least, to counteract the forces that conspire to make us despise and scorn each other, but engage with more of the reality of who we all are. That seems to be a worthwhile endeavour for a Christian community.

'Yes, I agree with you,' Malcolm told me. 'Good man', I confirmed.

St Catherine at Ottershaw

Before long I will report on a day of church-crawling last week, but, just for now, here is an image of St Catherine from Ottershaw church. I could tell it was there before I even went inside the building because I could see the outline of the wheel! The Catherine window is one of a suite in the church supplied by the studio of the great CE Kempe in 1901. The stereotype is that Kempe's glass always has a predominately greeny-yellowy tinge, but you can't see that very much in the Ottershaw windows. What you can see is a sweetness of composition and meticulous detail in the saint's cloak - the black flashes of the ermine, and the roundels of pearl. The window was a great bonus on my day out, as was the marvellous café in Egham where I had tea in an enamel mug and the best chips I think I've ever tasted.

Making an Exception

Some years ago I occasionally used to see Justin around Swanvale Halt. Little did I suspect, when a woman with a heavy foreign accent (Russian, as it turned out) left a message on the church answerphone enquiring about a christening for her son, that I would discover when I went to see the family that Justin was her husband. She did most of the talking, and what a lot of talking it was! I could see quickly that this was not going to work out in the way the Church of England tends to assume. No, the Church (in a Reformation mood) assumes that people should be attentive and take things on board intellectually, but Justin and Sara failed to pick up on anything that I said and it felt as though I was having to plunge through conceptual fog to find out what I needed to know. They couldn’t come up with godparents – Canon Law says there must be ‘at least three, saving that when three cannot conveniently be had [what an Anglican phrase!] two only … may suffice’. Justin has family,  but nowhere nearby and it didn’t sound as though the relationships were of the sort that would produce godparents in the way that people normally rope in their siblings or in-laws. He and Sara didn’t know their neighbours that well, and they couldn’t think of any close friends.

I remembered my beloved accidental god-daughter Karina who I acquired at Lamford when she was baptised at the age of 9 and no godparents could be had, and she is a great delight to me. Could I stand as godfather to little Owen, or could I find a generous soul in the congregation to do so? The trouble is that being a godparent should be a genuine and ongoing relationship, a commitment to the future. I’ve kept in touch with Karina (she’s just left Oxford and gone to Italy to teach English for a year), but she and her mother sang in the Lamford church choir so I already knew them and that they were not crackers: I didn’t really know that about Justin and Sara, and in fact knew next to nothing about them. I didn’t feel I could take them on as a pseudo-family, nor ask anyone else to.

Donald, the retired hospital chaplain who is an occasional worshipper with us, understood this instantly and in fact mentioned it before I did. Although it was irregular, he suggested, perhaps the whole church should be treated as Owen’s godparent. ‘The question is’, Donald said, ‘would sticking to the rules and saying no to this family encourage them in whatever kind of faith they have more than breaking the rules and saying yes?’ and of course you hardly need ask that to answer it.

Sara was very keen that a group of the congregation could attend the baptism as witnesses. Over the last few weeks the family has been coming to the Toddler Group so most of the people who joined in the very small baptism service were helpers at the Group. Those who weren’t were Paul with some of his amazing collection of icons and Lillian the ex-lay reader, who used to work at the British Embassy in Moscow and speaks Russian. It was a quiet, gentle, and thanks to their presence, a very devout gathering. I will defend it, should the bishop ever want to tell me off. 

Finding a Substitute

My recent long break was the first time I've been in the position of leaving the parish to its own devices without any ordained person around. Previously, so far as services are concerned, I could leave our curate Marion to do the lions' share and call in an odd favour or two to make sure she wasn't overburdened. This time, Swanvale Halt has no curate, so lots of favours had to be called on. My stand-ins this time were an ordained couple who are on the staff of Hilltop and are always happy to come to us; an NSM from a neighbouring parish; Catherine, who used to be a member of our congregation before her ordination and now looks after a tiny church nearby; and Colin, chaplain of a public school for whom I have done several weddings and whose chapel I've agreed to preach in later in the year. Just as well, as his was the biggest favour: I wanted him to cover a baptism for a couple who were anxious to have their son baptised before his second birthday and had already delayed the service twice due to plague. Just as knotty a matter as the services is Church Club at the Infants School: for that, I roped in the families worker from Hornington Baptist Church who to my relief found the children 'delightful' and apparently had them acting out the story of David being chosen as King of Israel - not his fight with Goliath, that could have got dangerous.

Parishes in need of a priest to cover a service can always apply to the Register of Clergy on Call, but if they do, they have to pay them the standard fees and expenses. For the period of my holiday, as I worked out the duties, doing that would have cost us £231 rather than the four bottles of wine and a box of chocolates it did, and I'd rather have people I know looking after the congregation, in any case.

As I was in the middle of trying to arrange the cover, the Area Dean reminded me that we'd agreed as a Deanery not to approach people individually, but to send out a general request for help through the Chapter secretary. I thought nobody would respond if I did that, but complied. Nobody responded. Thankfully Catherine and Colin aren't in the Deanery.

Anti Vaxx

Three non-mainstream views from people I know: not because I agree with them, of course, but because they interest me. 

.......

Neither Julia nor her partner Stan have been vaccinated. They’ve both had bad reactions to vaccinations in the past, and prefer to rely on other measures. Julia says Stan is generally very healthy and never gets colds or bugs, while although she has a range of health difficulties this makes her less worried about covid than you might imagine: it’s just another thing to take into account when she goes out, in the way she always has. She had hand-sanitiser in her bag long before it became the fashion. Reason holds her back from being a full-fat covid-sceptic: ‘people are saying the same thing across the world, so I suppose it must be true.’ This is very sound reasoning. Nevertheless she feels governments are exaggerating the threat in order to take control of more of our lives.

.......

Florence is an evangelical Christian, and life experiences have given her a firm opposition to abortion and the scientific use of foetal material. This is the root of her objection to the covid vaccines. It leads her to seek out media stories which emphasise their ineffectiveness, and the self-interest of the bodies that produce them and the governments that promote them. It’s not that she’s a covid-denier: she’s had the disease, and been ill with it, and faith pulled her through, she insists. It’s that, for her, the damage of the sickness is outweighed by the immorality of the measures taken to combat it. Because she can’t understand how any Christian could take a different view, she sees the response to the pandemic as an aspect of an ongoing, long-term secular attack on Christian values. Friends who comment on her posts on social media use more extreme language than Florence does: one said that while there might be a case for vaccinating the old, vaccinating young or otherwise healthy people, or children, was ‘demonic’.

.......

I’ve mentioned Jasper before. He has a rational reason for not wanting to be vaccinated, having had relevant health problems in the past, but even were that not the case his deep ideological stance conditions his attitude to the pandemic as a whole. His basic belief (which I took a long time to work out) is that human beings have within themselves everything they need to solve their problems naturally, and that therefore anyone who promotes scientific or technocratic solutions does so out of self-interest or malign intentions. He sees the medical response to covid as part of a widespread assault on human nature that began decades ago, leading to humans being enslaved by technology and those who control it. Like Florence, he was ill with covid, so he doesn’t think it’s a hoax, but as far as he’s concerned he saw the disease off with meditation and willpower. He not only rages against the powerful individuals he sees as responsible for what’s happening, but is also contemptuous of the majority of people who are meekly falling in line with their agenda, mocks mask-wearing, insists the vaccines are causing the deaths of thousands of people, and describes medical professionals as liars and stooges, and worse. He publicises, very uncritically, anything that seems to endorse this viewpoint. Like Florence’s friends, it’s Jasper’s who say the more extreme things: commenting on his social media posts, they use words like ‘genocide’ to describe the vaccination programme, and predict that the officials of the World Health Organisation will be ‘tried for crimes against humanity’, hanged, or end up in front of ‘a firing squad’.

.......

All three begin from their own experience, but Florence and Jasper place over theirs an ideological framework which leads them to interpret what has happened to them, and their own instinctive feelings, as just one aspect of something much larger. This larger context is a society-wide conflict in which they are on the side of right, and, precisely because it positions them as part of a minority who understand what is truly going on, powerfully validates who they feel they are. It’s also polarising: it forces them to see everyone else as an ally or an enemy. Violent language both reinforces that sense of polarisation and pushes it farther. I wonder, in the case of the people who comment on Florence’s and Jasper’s posts, how far? I have a university friend who works for the WHO, and would like him to remain safe, thank you.

Missa Not Quite Solitaria

After venturing to Hindhead for the first Sunday of my Autumn break, I played safe this week and went to the 8am mass at the Cathedral. Last time I attended, way, way back in the far-off days of 2019, there were about ten of us present: this time, there were four, including the priest (who I didn't know) and one of the virgers. The other member of the congregation was a woman who had a coughing fit partway through and left. When the sermon began I looked round to find that the virger had slipped out too so I was being preached at on my own. The celebrant did his best to cast his eyes around the empty Lady Chapel, perhaps engaging with the innumerable host of angels who may, possibly, have been present, speaking about Isaiah and the nature of service, exposing ourselves to the chance of suffering. We were back up to a full four a few minutes later. I wonder what has happened at Swanvale Halt while I've been gadding about!

St Alban's Hindhead

An 8am mass doesn't give you much idea of how a church works, as they tend to be pretty similar across the board unless a church is bold enough to do the Book of Common Prayer as the Book of Common Prayer was intended to be done, and few are, or clergy choose choir dress rather than vestments. At St Alban's Hindhead they do maintain the latter, but it is no longer the four-star church it once was. A big Victorian barn of a building, St Alban's retains the signs and marks of Anglo-Catholicism in the form, as you can see, of a statue of the BVM, a hanging lamp, Stations of the Cross, and, somewhat confusingly, two aumbries, but that isn't how it thinks of itself any more: its driving force is evangelical but trying to bend itself around the traditions of the church. That's just my impression, others may express it differently (and, perhaps, better)!

Even More Museums

Bath is a city like an architect's drawing-board, and Richmond has a bit of that feel about it, at least if you linger in the Riverside area which was given the Quinlan Terry treatment in the 1980s. I was in the former on my own on Tuesday, and at the latter with Ms Brightshades yesterday. In both places there are museums: in Bath I steered clear of both the Roman Baths with its £20 entrance fee and anything to do with Jane Austen to visit instead the Museum of Bath at Work, located behind a red door at the end of a yard off an obscure street to the north of the city centre ... There wasn't a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard', but it was almost that overlooked.

MBW is not part of the Bath Preservation Trust which looks after several of the other museums, nor linked to the Council which has responsibility for the Roman Baths: I was greeted by an elderly lady on the front desk (I think with a northeastern accent) who informed me that 'the museum was set up to tell the story of the people of Bath who weren't Romans or Georgians', with a hint, I thought, of defiance. She stood behind the original shop counter of Mr Bowler's engineering business, based not here in this 18th-century building, but down by the river: as the business - which had begun with brass-founding and progressed through general engineering, soft drinks bottling, and even shoe-selling at one stage - began to run down in the late 1960s, the Bowler family were courted by Russell Frears, who'd trained as an industrial designer and realised that the Bowlers had never thrown away a single bottle, founding pattern, bill or bit of paper, and that what they had on their hands was an industrial museum in the making. Frears spearheaded the founding of the Bath Industrial Heritage Trust specifically to make that a reality, and six years after the Bowler factory was demolished the Museum opened. 

Even though what you're looking at is all a mock-up, it's mocked-up so fully that you do feel at points that you are walking through a small factory - or you would do if it wasn't for various bits of art for sale around the exhibitions. Straight after the reception is the machine shop, where you press a green button on the wall and the whole thing gradually judders into life, driven by the flying belts to a frenzy of rattling, banging, screeching and whirring, until you can bear no more and press the red button whereon it all slows to a stop again. It all looks massively dangerous and you are glad to be looking down on it from a mezzanine rather than being in the midst of it.

There is then a quieter gallery looking at the history of Bath as a whole with special reference to industry and work. There was a special display about the avant-garde havoc the Bath Arts Workshop caused around the city in the 1960s and 70s, a scourge of the City Fathers and an outrage to public decency.  Wonderful stuff and not a toga in sight.

Richmond Museum is nothing like that. It is upstairs in the Town Hall, and I and Ms Brightshades being bears of little brain we found it quite hard to find our way in, taking wrong turns several times and nearly ending up in the Library instead. It is quiet, though the helpful assistant on the front desk did warn us it was about to be deluged with schoolchildren so we might like to bear that in mind. While at MBW the setting is part of the show, here the surroundings are anonymous - but restful, if you like, a calm white backdrop for the history on display.

You do get a good idea of how the town developed, from the influence of the Charterhouse of Sheen followed by Richmond Palace, an increasing presence of fashionable residents and those who served their needs creating a place with a distinctive character. Richmond Museum has far more of what you would usually expect in the collection of a small municipal museum, from the ubiquitous knife-grinder to Mayoral regalia. I wasn't expecting the papier-maché Tudor trumpeter, though.

(We got lost on the way out, as well.)

Harvest 2021

I am still on leave but I don't mind breaking into the succession of holiday snaps to report briefly on what we did for Harvest this year. In fact it was all very modest. The Infants School came to the church on Wednesday at the end of September for two short services, one for Reception and one for the older children, with no parents present, as they did last year, so it was very low-key. They sang, brought their gifts, listened to me talk in very short order, said a couple of prayers, and went away taking their gifts with them to be taken up to the Food Bank. No other organisation made its presence felt at all.

For the Sunday we kept our Harvest Festival, as such, at the first resumed Sunday Space service. Before the first lockdown last year we'd already decided to experiment with a non-eucharistic service once a month which wasn't consciously directed at children, and thus wasn't a 'Family Service', because no families had been there for quite a long time; but we'd only managed to do one when everything was shut up, and that was really the old Family Service pattern. For the resumed and renewed version, I shrunk the liturgy down to the very bare minimum which required the congregation to do nothing more than respond to the Kyrie, say 'Amen', 'thanks be to God' and 'hear our prayer' at appropriate points. We had one reading, and I talked about it. The much-reduced music group accompanied five hymns, and, for the prayers, aside from blessing the Harvest gifts, I brought the Blessed Sacrament from the aumbry in a monstrance, and placed it on the altar on the simple Step-Pyramid-like stand helpfully made from a nice bit of oak by Jack ('Just don't drop it on your foot'). Prayers done, we sand 'God be in my head' a couple of times, and back the Sacrament went. That is what will happen in the future. 

It was short, simple, and focused on Scripture and prayer, but the addition of low-key sacramental adoration adds the Catholic element I am anxious to preserve. There are two main problems: first, it's a bit heavy on contributions from me, the only other voice being a reader's: I want that to change. Secondly, we don't have anyone to serve refreshments afterwards, which I think is quite vital. That's got to be a priority!

Wales 4: St Catherine's Island, Tenby

St Elvan's, Aberdare, was the sole church I found open when I was across the Severn, and there were no images of St Catherine anywhere. There was, though, one very unusual Catherine site. 

A stroll across the South Beach at Tenby at low tide will bring you to St Catherine's Island. The mere name tempted me to pay my fee and ascend the slippery steps as best I could, battling my acrophobia which only gets worse as I age, to what turned out to be a 19th-century fort battened onto the rock: 'Napoleonic', they say, but usually neglect to point out that the Napoleon involved is III, not Le Petit Empereur himself. It's managed by a trust now, but has over the last century been a house, and in the 1960s and 70s, incredibly, a zoo. I found it a horrible place, and it was probably even more inhospitable for the animals unfortunate enough to be brought to live here than for the humans, who at least made the choice to do so. The journalist Norman Lewis rented the fort/house for some months in 1948 and remembered the wind battering the ill-fitting windows, and that Tenby town, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, could be invisible in rain and fog for days at a time.

But before the fort there was a chapel dedicated to St Catherine, hence the name, and a resident hermit at some point. Until the foundations were laid for the fort in 1867 the ruins of the chapel were the only visible structures on the Island.

Those remains were removed when the fort was built, and during the works three items were discovered. There was a human skeleton, possibly the body of one of the hermits; a scatter of Roman coins; and, of all things, an Egyptian ushabti dating from the 17th century BC. The objects were all taken to Tenby Museum, and the ushabti recently made a return trip so that visitors could see it. Here it is, in a snap taken from a short film on the St Catherine's Island website:

Now of course nobody knows how this utterly unexpected and inexplicable object got to a medieval pilgrimage site. But is there a connection? Could it be that some crusader, or other traveller, brought it back from the Near East, and that, coming from the vicinity of Alexandria, this indistinguishable figurine, so completely different from anything else anyone in the area would ever have encountered, was identified as an image of St Catherine? That's what they speculate on the Island, and I don't think it's so wildly incredible to dismiss out of hand. 

They have a wishing well on St Catherine's Island: but not even my fond fancy can re-imagine it as St Catherine's. 

Wales 3: Old and Would-Be Old Stuff

A week ago, Swansea City Museum being closed, I checked the map and made my way to the National Waterfront Museum instead. 'Use alternative entrance' instructed a sign on the wall, next to a very large blue arrow pointing to - a metal fence. I made my way in the opposite direction, and there, having reached the actual entrance, I was informed that I should have booked a (free) ticket in advance 'to keep our staff and visitors safe'. I sat on a bench, mingling fury with disappointment, but discovered on my phone that tickets were available. So the 'advance' period was the time it took to walk from the bench to the front desk. The Museum was not exactly overrun with visitors. It deals with Welsh industry, which is a pretty big topic. I did like the home-made Steampunk aeroplane from the early 1900s whose pilot's seat is a kitchen chair and whose engine switch is a brass light fitting, which has an egg-timer as a navigational aid, and which boasted two weights on chains, one twenty yards in length and one ten, to warn the pilot when he was about to hit the ground. 

Tenby Museum was also hard to get into as the visitor ahead of me was having a debate of some kind with the lady on the desk but eventually I made it in. She apologised for the state of the staircase, but I don't think mentioned the art gallery which was under reconstruction, two young fellows drilling the walls in full view with, in fact, nothing to prevent patrons going to inspect their work, though none of us did. Over a doorway was a bugle, a musket, a black feather cockade, and a small pouch, labelled 'Relics of the French attack on Fishguard in 1797', with no information as to what that event might have been.

But Aberdare Museum I loved - and it was free! The displays there also presented a bit of a challenge as some cases were not labelled at all, but I suppose you could have made up your own stories about them; and the narrative lurched somewhat abruptly from the Neolithic to the early 1800s, but it was all done with great flair. I walked into an early-1900s shop display and the bell rang as I opened the door. 

I was staying, as on previous holidays, in a folly, an 18th-century gatehouse to the Penrice Estate which has been done up rather nicely from the days of the last permanent resident, the gamekeeper's widow who had only two rooms and had to access the bedroom via a ladder. 

On a day's walking I spotted a 'Tower' on the map and went on a detour to investigate. This folly is on a neighbouring estate to Penrice, Kilvrough, now used as an outdoor education centre. I shouldn't really have been there so I didn't feel it necessary to get too close. The seafront at The Mumbles has a folly of its own: possibly the grandest public lavatory in the country, though it surely can't have begun life as that. 

Parc-le-Broes comprises a peculiar assemblage of genuinely historical sites. The Neolithic burial chamber pictured sits just yards from an 18th-century limekiln. The barrow must always have been visible: what did those Georgian lime-burners think of it? Did they have any inkling that they were at work within a stone's throw of forty souls buried there some thirty-eight centuries before? Just up the hill, within the woods, is Cathole Cave, which was inhabited at one time and briefly by me as I sat to have my lunch. Understandably you can't go all the way inside, but an information panel states it's as high as 'fifteen stacked elephants', an unusual unit of measurement.

Finally, out on the moors west of Cefn Bryn is Arthur's Stone, a fallen cromlech. A family was there when I reached it, the children clambering over, around, and under the massive boulders. 'We're trolls!' they cried, and then worried about getting stuck and their parents leaving them behind.

Wells of Wales

You can barely turn a corner in the Principality without stumbling across, or even into, a holy well, but they can't all be brilliant examples. We will deal very briefly with St John's Well, Tenby, which survives as a plaque in a wall below the garden of a terraced house; Kithen Well near Parkmill, an active but featureless spring in the undergrowth by a footpath; and the Holy Well of Reynoldston, linked to an old waterworks on the west Gower moors, and in need of a bit of care.

But others seen this last week were far more evocative and rewarding. I wasn't even expecting St Teilo's Well at Llandeilo, set in the wall below the church: it leapt out at me, as it were, in so far as a stationary sacred site can, clearly well-looked after and treated in the manner it deserves.

Down a stony, wooded footpath leading to Caswell Bay from the hamlet of Oldway in Bishopston are the ruins of St Peter's Chapel, and St Peter's Well is nearby. Someone cares for it: there are jugs for collecting the water and even, though you can't see them very easily here, goblets for (I imagine) drinking it - not that I would want to risk its murk.

Finally there was Gumfreston, just west of Tenby. No trouble finding this site, though the steep road down to the church tests the mettle of your car if that's how you're getting there. In his beautiful photographic book Living Wells of Wales Phil Cope shows his parents taking part in the Ceremony of the Nails here on Easter Day, when - in lieu of a service in the officially-neglected church building - locals gathered to cast three iron nails into the water of the tripartite Holy Wells, in honour of Christ's Passion and Resurrection. The couple who organised that, and looked after the church, are gone, and the building now bears a sign telling visitors 'This church is closed pending a decision on its future by the Church In Wales'; now, what can that possibly be? Can nobody nearby really be found to open and close it every now and again? Well. Until then, the Holy Wells are more active than the church, flowing and flowing while it succumbs to ivy.

St Illtyd's, Oxwich, just down from where I was staying, in contrast, has regular services, and - according to a folkloric account clearly copied to and fro across the Web - a long-dry well 'in the upper churchyard' into which a ghostly white horse was supposed to have disappeared. I knew nothing about it until I saw a list of things posted in the church porch for children to look out for. I couldn't spot it, so perhaps it only appears for children, but I'd hesitate to send them searching through the steep and brambled churchyard, perched above the water of the bay. 

A Catalogue of Castles, a Flurry of Fortifications

The time will come when I report on Harvest at Swanvale Halt, but for now let us deal with Wales, from which I have just returned with another week to go of my long Autumn leave. I was in The Gower, a place I've never visited before, and there is much to share but for now I will begin with castles. I had a long list of these to see but Kidwelly, which I visited on Tuesday, was so good I concluded too many would simply leave me castled-out, so in fact many I merely viewed from the outside, and left Dinefwr out completely. Remaining outside was all I could do with the one at Oystermouth, which was undergoing some work, in common with a range of tourist attractions in the area all of which seemed to be using the pandemic as a chance to embark on refurbishment projects. Things being closed was a leitmotif of my holiday. Swansea City Museum was closed on Mondays; the Carmarthenshire County Museum closed for reconstruction. St Govan's Well on the coast was closed because the firing ranges around were operating, while Caldey Island was closed because of the weather. Every church but one was closed because the Church in Wales apparently still thinks that if allowed in the population will go down en masse with rampant covid contracted from door handles. The Aberdulais Tin Mine & Falls were closed for no readily apparent reason. Anyway: Oystermouth.

Several towns have castles which are shadows of their former selves, wound round by streets, squares and alleys. This is true of Swansea, Carmarthen, and Tenby ...

At others, as I say, I felt I lost little by simply viewing the ruins from a distance. This was the case with Felindre and Laugharne, where I resolutely ignored anything to do with Dylan Thomas, whether his grave, or his shed.

Sort of halfway between these castles-in-passing and full-scale visits came Pennard and Penrice. Pennard lay right across a footpath and you can simply stroll through it (as many dog-walkers were doing), so it was no hardship visiting that one after admiring its romantic situation high above the valley of the Pennard Rill; while Penrice - a private ruin - was on the estate where I was staying and one of the privileges of guests is being able to wander around at will. 

This brings us to Kidwelly Castle, a grand and complex ruin outside what is now a very, very small town, a bit like Corfe in Dorset. Up and down and in and out and back along the walls the visitor goes: although it is indeed a ruin, it's very well-preserved. There are some towers you expect to go in, but can't, making you wonder what's in them. The gatehouse, the guide says, is designed to impress as much as for defence, and, I think, succeeds.

Finally, not as good a castle but a more impressive experience even than Kidwelly comes at Carreg Cennen. The ruins of this castle ring the top of a hill which dominates its mid-Carmarthenshire landscape and drops away in a dizzying cliff to the south. The closer you get to the gate, the grimmer and more terrifying its aspect grows. It helps to remember the story that its owner, Lord Cawdor, accidentally sold it in the 1960s when his lawyers drafted the deed of sale for the farm to the west so poorly that they mistakenly included the castle too. 

But the unique treat of Carreg Cennen is underneath it: a natural cave that was incorporated into the defences, and is accessed via a staircase on the cliff side of the castle, then a windowed passageway, and finally a tunnel. The staircase is terrifying enough for anyone inclined to feel vertiginous, but I was soon reflecting that at no stage, either on the castle website or at the entrance, did anyone warn me that I would need my own light to get there, and I was grateful for the torch on my phone which showed me where my feet were going and when my head was in danger of being clouted on the roof. At the end of the tunnel is a tiny grotto containing a water-filled basin in the stone. It's usually said this is a spring (I would describe it as a drip-well) used as an alternative source of water for the castle (when it would take an hour to fill a jug). But, whatever the truth of that, being there at all is a weird and dramatic sensation.