The Poetry of Place

Some of a journal like this should be about events, our doings, but some of it should be about the poetry of where we live, the reasons for living here. We have more or less decided to stay within this area, between Presteigne and Kington or over the Welsh border properly, towards New Radnor; an ambiguous Border area, a faultine of English/Welsh identity. The area changes all the time, a turn in the road reveals new distances and smoky hills, bare woods, fields, hedges.

I like the ambiguity of the area because it seems to reflect a depth and richness in family history, family identity, the melting pot inside each of us. The Welsh is strong on both sides of my family and my maternal grandfather's family were entirely Welsh-speaking in the 1901 census; but I have lost this, and feel a slow rising of regret at this lost language in my heritage. My father's mother's family were from Bantry Bay in Ireland, the heartland today of the Gaelic speakers; this too seems a lost element in my make-up, perhaps a part of my soul. Of course this is just writer's overattention to detail, denying the more important idea that we make ourselves; neither of these elements are me, they are threads in the carpet of me, a part of the rich tapestry, that is all. But there is a similar uncertainty here, except it is topographical not concerned with family. I like living here because of this warm ambiguity of place, where towns have two names, towns which straddle an invisible border in more ways than one.

So - some local placenames, all within a mile or two of here. Court of Noke, Sned Wood, Cross-of-the-Tree, Hell Moat, Byton Hand, Rowe Ditch, Mistletoe Oak, The Globe (actually a woodland), Mortimer's Cross, Horseway Head, Cabal, Deerfold, Crookmullen. The placenames I search for the most are the ones in England that are left-behind Welsh names like Ty'n y Coed - 'the house in the wood' I think - or the Welsh names slowly disappearing into English, leaving a pronunciation like 'Mocktree' for Mochdre.