1668

The hills here are like whales rising from the valleys, low and wooded, long and hump-backed. Over the border the hills start to rise and around New Radnor they are steep and strangely bald, stitched together with Welsh field boundaries, overgrown walls retreating underground, cropped grass, stunted thorn bushes, the whistle of the wind. I love these boundaries, so old they look grown not artificial. We went to see a house, a farmhouse with a collection of barns. How many of these derelict barns have we seen now? I photograph latches, boards, old doorways, strangely rootless agricultural details. The house was built in 1668 and was wide and low, with good views across the steep fields, massive floor-beams, stone roof. Damp, cold, unloved. How old must the beams have been in that house, a century old say when it was built? They were saplings at the end of the sixteenth century, the late 1500s. The barns were later but still massively wooden and in fierce winds would have creaked like upturned ships, dry-stone-keeled and lined with straw. Behind the house on the bare hill was a bleak wood, full of dead branches bleached like old bone, gnarled trees fifty feet high, tight grass. And beyond that the steep curve of the hills, the sheep, the endless wind. It was beyond us in many ways, but we loved it.