Tuesday 24 March 2009

Thinking . . .


There will be more photos from Castell Coch tomorrow, but right now I am shattered from all the gardening I've been doing the past 10 days or so - especially the mattocking I have been doing in the paddock.

I sat down on the bank in the paddock this afternoon, when the sun was out, and having just dug up some round pebbles (possibly Iron Age ammunition), glass (Victorian or later), tile (possibly earlier), glazed tile (1950s fireplace) and a burned stone (any period), I got to thinking about the people who lived here in late Medieval and Tudor times - I would need to be digging deeper for traces of THEM! I wondered where the original house was and whether the 'great hall' was in front of where I was sitting at that moment or buried inside our present house, which has 1718 over the door, but that is just modifications to the architecture as we have an external wall a couple of feet thick in the middle of the house. We have found two parallell lines of foundation stones on the line of our present driveway.

I imagined the Bardic poet Lewis Glyn Cothi arriving on a sensible cob, and settling down by the fire to compare genealogy with his host and write praise poetry (he is recorded as being a great friend of the influential family living here then.) I imagined the excitement when one of the sons here was given a position as Esquire to the body of Henry VII. I imagined the other sons - or even their father - riding into Carmarthen in search of entertainment when country life got tedious. Perhaps their father had a mistress there who he visited when he was supposedly on official business and he would ride into town like Yuri in Dr Zhivago, visiting Lara.

I wondered what it was like here when Carmarthen Castle surrendered to Glyndwr in his rebellion, and when local Dryslwyn was so badly damaged by his forces in 1403 that it ceased to be of any importance and the townsfolk of its hilltop village would have been killed or at least displaced. Were the beacons flaring along the line of command up the Towy Valley, from Carmarthen to Dryslwyn, to Dinefwr, to mighty Carreg Cennen on its limestone crag? Did our family rally to the call to arms?

I am glad that we don't have to fight local battles or defend ourselves against all-comers, but every time I find a round pebble, I think of the defended Iron Age enclosure in the field next door to ours, and wonder, was it a slingshot? And does that burnt stone come from a Medieval hearth?

5 comments:

Greentwinsmummy said...

Ah my mind runs away with me like that here,its as if sometimes you can actually *feel* the layers of time,I am incapable of walking past what was the old pub without picturing it packed full of old ag labs lol!
GTM x x

Rowan said...

How lovely to live on land with so much history that you can sit and visualize the previous families and their activities. I've never lived in an old house, nothing earlier than the 1930s.

nancy said...

I agree with your previous commentors. I had to read this aloud to the captain, and we both pondered what a pleasure it would be to live over that much history that it just pops up out of the ground while you're digging a garden. Amazing.
As a boy, he found a lot of ancient artifacts around the Alaskan Islands where he grew up and explored. Not realizing how important they were, he just sort of left them there. They are probably still where he left them, the sites being so remote and untravelled.
Me? My claim to fame in finding artifacts -- arrowheads -- which used to be all over the Cincinnati area where I grew up.

Bovey Belle said...

I've been giving it some thought - having to fight to keep what you have, and with DH (who is a crack shot) reckon we could hold our own. Reckon it must be my much-diluted Border Reiver blood coming to the fore . . . I can be brave - when I HAVE to and would fight to the end to save my family . . .

We have always felt that we were just custodians of this house. I would love it to go to a Welsh family when we downsize, who would appreciate its history and respect it. Nice Next Door Welsh farmer wot owned it before, was all for turning the bottom part of the house into a tractor shed . . .

Unknown said...

I just reading about your house and am so looking forward to exploring Wales very very soon