Ben Myers - The Gallows Pole: Once upon a time in the West Riding

The arresting cover of Ben Myers' sixth novel is a statement of intent for the work inside: historical fiction with danger and harshness and radicalism foregrounded; a bit punk rock, a bit psychedelic, not too knowingly retro. Frankly, I'd have bought it for the cover artwork alone. Thankfully, this is an author with form and the story itself does not disappoint; it cracks along at pace, based on a little-known episode in history tailor-made for the strain of gritty rural-noir which Myers, Paul Kingsnorth, Cynan Jones, Ross Raisin and others have rendered in recent years. The unearthed source material merits such a telling. It's the 1760s and the wild West Riding of Yorkshire is on the cusp of transformation, careless of the coming pandemonium to be wrought by industrialised manufacturing. Amidst the self-reliant weaving communities of the Calder Valley - for William Atkins (The Moor) 'a ditch made dim by its narrowness', a place of fugitives - emerge the Cragg Vale Coiners. Led by the brutally charismatic 'King' David Hartley, their outlaw business is the clipping of coins to produce counterfeit money; local currency for local people, recycled coin outwith the control of not only the crown, government and taxation but also the new capitalists ready to harness and exploit the power of land and labour. Thus, a dangerous business and (literally) a capital offence.    

The book's stylistic and narrative similarities with Kingsnorth's The Wake are striking. Both have central characters - David Hartley and Buccmaster - who are deluded, self-mythologising and ruthless yet also cast with a certain 'Man With no Name' dark allure. Like mythical cowboys of the northern past, these doomed men raging against the dying of the light are also possessed of pagan visions of stagmen and the old gods. Both authors utilise blunt vernacular speech to give voice to their protagonists, albeit in Kingsnorth's case a 'shadow tongue' version of Old English is utilised for the whole narration.

In the opening chapters, we see how up and over from the surrounding valleys men come to King David's call, 'like crows to the first pickings of carrion after the snow melt'; a repetitive roll-call of locally entrenched surnames: Dewhurst, Clayton, Sutcliffe, Bolton, Hepworth, Eastwood, Bentley, Hoyle, Pickles, Sykes, Greenwood, Feather and Proctor. These everyday monikers later counter-pointed by the tally of Yorkshire nobility called from across the ridings to address the threat to their wealth and power presented by the coiners activity. We dig repetition, as Mark E Smith would have it, and so does Ben Myers. It's a technique used deliberately and effectively throughout, toughening the narrative: 'the moors are ours and the woods are ours he said. And the marshes are ours and the sky is ours and the fire is ours and the forge is ours. The might is ours and the means are ours and the moulds are ours and the metal is ours and the coins are ours and the crags are ours and this grand life in the dark wet world is ours.'

Hartley's lair is high amongst 'the hill's hanging silence', to use Ted Hughes' description of this haunted terrain of his youth, where bosky slope gives way to moorland waste. A hint of Cormac McCarthy pervades the depicted harsh beauty of this landscape. When Hartley's nemesis, excise-man William Deighton - a walker of the moors and valleys in pursuit of those who would evade the (real) king's tax - returns to Halifax in the gloaming, the town's lights flicker 'as if the sky had fallen in defeat, and draped itself across the rise and fall of the bloodless, smothering land.' To my mind what elevates Myers prose above much similar place-bound company is the clear rootedness of the writing in the Calderdale-based author's embodied knowledge - based on walking and observing - of the landscape in which the actors operate, buttressed by an authentic portrayal of the life-rhythms of those working the land. This is an author unafraid to leaven the drama of the story with the small detail of rural life: for instance, a couple of pages describing a scything team working their field at pace 'as they raced against the season and the coming of the harvest moon.'

A certain poetic mysticism is also scattered amidst the thrifty speech of Hartley and the Coiners, somewhat at odds with their rough ways: 'rope or rain or a day threshing grain ... I take each as it comes'; 'the moor is the moor and the wind always blows.' Thugs ain't what they used to be, perhaps. Silver-tongued maybe, but there are frequent brutish scenes of rising and implied violence, recalling prime-Scorsese or, closer to home, Shane Meadow's Derbyshire-set Dead Man's Shoes in their cinematic menace and liberal deployment of the harshest word in the English language, not quaint. The shocking end of loud-mouth drunk Abraham Ingham thrust head-first into an open fire, 'left smoldering, a spent match in human form' as his killers return to their tap-room pints, is particularly wince-inducing. As is the defilement of the traitor James Broadbent in York gaol. A gruesome end seems to be a possibility for just about everyone involved.

This violence, combined with the radical social commentary of the story and pervasive sense of movement through the landscape, bestow filmic qualities which the author acknowledges as he describes an eclectic playlist put together whilst writing the book. It's not hard to hear this music soundtracking a film adaptation of the book, which might look a little like a mash-up between Ben Wheatley's A Field in England, Ken Loach's Black Jack and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lydon.

As the place-names in the narrative came thick and fast - reminiscent of a seventeenth-century survey of manorial bounds - I pulled out my battered Ordnance Survey map of the South Pennines, weathered by time, held together by yellowing sellotape. Family connections bond me to the country immediately north of Calderdale, Keighley and the Worth Valley over Cock Hill and Nab Hill, and I have previously posted about this landscape, my younger self's introduction to hill walking, now embedded in memory. The names on the map speak of place as, above all, morphology and topography. Northern - mostly Anglo-Saxon or Norse - descriptors of the lie of the land. Clough, slack, holme, delf, edge, nook, wham, carr, hey, hole, head, nab, bank, dyke, shaw, royd, shelf, stones. A lexicon used by Myers to rivet the narrative to its locale; to particularise the valleys and streams and rocky places and moors and woods in which the story unfolds. Many of these toponyms have been appropriated as local surnames, fixing a symbiosis between people and place; the bearers literally a product of their landscape. And there, above the river Ryburn feeding into the main Calder Valley, a crow's fly over Crow Hill from the Hartley homestead in Cragg Vale, spreads Gallows Pole Hill. Presumably, part-inspiration for the book's title (alongside the traditional song, The Maid Freed From the Gallis Pole)?

One minor place-naming misstep is the use of Calderdale and West Yorkshire, modern-day administrative units which would not be used as descriptors of the local area by eighteenth-century folk. Not sure either about the use of the archaic 'Yorvikshire' in Hartley's vernacular, but artistic license at play here so fair enough. Of course, it is the storyteller's prerogative to extrapolate the partial facts that are fed down through history but this reader also wonders whether King David really was as locally revered and acclaimed as suggested. How many really were thankful to Hartley for clothing and feeding them, and giving them hope? Did thousands really line the old streets of York to view his procession to the gallows?

Not in dispute are the economic changes which circle around and loom over the actions of the Coiners (the 'progress' of proto-capitalism, industrial development, a hardening of the rule of law and land ownership), prefiguring the enormous rupture in the way of life of the independent dwellers of these previously left-alone valleys that the Industrial Revolution would bring. Earlier in the eighteenth-century Daniel Defoe had commented approvingly on the lack of dependence on and subservience to the gentry amongst the self-sufficient and egalitarian populations of the farmsteads and hamlets of these hilly districts of the West Riding. As the century draws to a close the characters here are lamenting not only that 'the machines and mills are coming' but also 'they do not give a fuck about us hill-dwellers'; 'the land is being sold off. They say there are mills the size of cathedrals in Lancashire.' The self-made prosperity of the cottage industry of small-holdings and hand-looms is coming to an end. A few decades later Halifax and the Calder Valley would be central to a more famous popular uprising, the revolt of the Luddites; a conflict which Robert Reid in Land of Lost Content described as threatening 'the stability of the nation from within as it had never been threatened since.'

In the end, and in the face of this maelstrom, we leave Hartley dreaming of his moor and woods, and the Stagman: 'still he waches now and so too will be there when im drug up to that gallis pole that awaytes us Heel be thur I no it Waytin a me.' In reality, as the epilogue hammers home, 'the stone cathedrals of mass production' were to win out and King David would be forgotten. Mills and new rows of terraced houses, and turnpike roads, canals and railways, would remorselessly fill the valleys, transforming not only the population's economic and social lives but also the very landscape. The Coiners and their descendents would ultimately bend to the will of the new puritans of capital, commerce and mass-production.

Reverie in tranquil industry

Like much of the surviving relict remains of the explosion of industrial activity in Britain in the late eighteenth century and the Victorian era, Sapperton canal tunnel has been slowly and incrementally seeping back into the landscape from which it came. Pandaemonium and rupture replaced by quiescent stillness. Transporting the Thames and Severn Canal through the Cotswold hills the tunnel was opened in 1789 and, at two and a half miles long, was and is one of the longest in the country: the HS2 of its day.  

Coming across the crenellated western entrance of the tunnel during an early summer afternoon and returning in the gloaming, hallooing bats from the murk, evokes a feeling of antiquarian discovery. How strange that an example of what was raged at as the disfigurement of picturesque landscapes has become, with obsoletion, time and benign neglect, an organic component of the terrain that it scarred; recolonised by endlessly patient displaced flora and fauna and stillness.

Returning through wild garlic abundance alongside the silted channel to the camping field downslope from the magnificently unchanging Daneway Inn, once lodgings for the men who propelled the narrowboats through the tunnel by 'legging' - using their feet on the tunnel walls, I enter a Rousseau-like reverie contemplating the tranquillity of exhausted human endeavour.

The Sad Road to the Sea: Walking a forgotten branchline by Jack Cooke

A guest post from Jack Cooke on the storied melancholia of walking a forgotten East Anglian branchline. 

No one departs, no one arrives

From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.

They've all passed out of our lives

On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

(Flanders & Swann)

Ducking in behind the pawnbrokers on Saxmundham High Street the footpath leads north, following a sheltering embankment of cow parsley and crisp packets. After a few hundred feet and glimpses of neat allotments, I emerge alongside rails, picking up speed like a train pulling free of the town. Ahead of me, the track splits, the Lowestoft service passing on up the coast. How many of its passengers ever spot a sister track, half-hidden behind gravel sacks and wire? This forgotten line curves gently away to the east, disappearing into the hedgerows. I cross the rails, a necessary trespass to follow the old route to the sea.

Board a train anywhere in mainland Britain tomorrow and you have roughly eleven thousand miles of track ahead of you. You can coast along steels to every city, a thousand towns and even the odd village. Yet if you yearn to travel by rail into the small corners of the British countryside, you have missed your train by a margin of fifty years or more.

From the moment the first steam engine berthed in the 19^th century, British railways spread fast across the length and breadth of the islands. At its peak the system extended over twenty-three thousand miles of rail, hundreds of branch lines diverting from the main trunks and journeying into lonely valleys and onto isolated headlands. As the network expanded it became increasingly eccentric, with different operating systems and burgeoning costs. With the rise of the roads after the First World War, traffic from many of the smaller tracks found other means and some branch lines ground to a halt. Following nationalisation in 1948 this programme of closure accelerated but, by the 1960s, the warp and weft of the network was still haemorrhaging over three hundred thousand pounds a day.

In the midst of this deepening crisis, two opposing forces came head-to-head on the spider-web of British rail. The infamous Dr Beeching, rationalist and man of science, newly appointed Chairman of the British Transport Commission, and John Betjeman, romantic and man of letters, soon to be appointed Poet Laureate. These men were emblematic of polarised attitudes, on one side the desire to modernise Britain’s sprawling rail network and cut its crippling deficits, and on the other a passion for preservation, for conserving a rural and industrial past and the communities served by the branchlines. The ‘Beeching Axe’ was victorious. Link-by-link most of the remaining tracks were torn up or cut off; they became fading constellations in a universe of shrinking steel.  

Trains that end in the sea have always had a peculiar romance. As the ground falls away to the coast, the traveller seems to pick up speed, accelerating to meet land’s edge. For one hundred years and six, a small railway branch on the East Suffolk coast serviced fish, coal and passengers. Leaving the Lowestoft line it looped away from a junction, breaking for the sea on a long descent through small towns; Leiston, Thorpeness and finally to the shore at Aldeburgh.

Today, it is a half-track, four miles of rail and four more of farmland. The dawning of the nuclear age has saved the first section as far as Leiston. The A, B, and coming C of Britain’s nuclear power complex at Sizewell beach provides enough traffic, construction and radioactive waste, to keep the steels in place. Beyond, the old track is marked only by its absence. There is little evidence left of the thousands of tonnes of fish sacks or coal stacks, or the people who used the line.

I wanted to recapture the views of fifty years long gone, to come to the sea as a tourist might have done half-a-century ago, not funnelled up a tarmac corridor but flying over the flatland. By following the line from beginning to end, along the repossessed nuclear railway and then on, to the traces etched in crag path and clearing, I hoped to rediscover a lost perspective on familiar country. I wanted to conjure, just for one day, the steaming splendour of ‘The Eastern Belle’, ‘The East Anglian’, and other trains that once took this track, loaded with ice-cream anticipation, sea visions and thoughts of escape.

Turning off down the branch line, the track is well ordered. New Magnox rivets secure the sleepers and steel and, once a year, a ‘weed-killer’ engine comes shunting up these rails, lacing the embankment in a chemical cocoon, keeping the passage clear for nuclear flasks passing in the night. In photographs these toxic containers look just like the classic cash boxes of great Hollywood heist movies; treasure chest-shaped and lying in state on single carriages. Their innocent form cloaks a dead weight of fifty tonnes, steel casing and lead linings housing radioactive waste in transit. I try to imagine the flasks passing me on the track, mistaken for holy relics washed up by the sea; a funeral procession on its way up the line to some inland place of rest.

The track is sloping toward the seaward horizon now. Elated calls of mating birds blend with the distant curses of lone farmers, spring bringing sex for one and toil for the other. I am walking in the long shadow of Good Friday, though the parish churches I glimpse from the embankment will be observing it in small, solemn congregations barely filling single pews, much like the last passengers on this branch line nearly fifty years ago.

My legs were not manufactured for this gauge of railway. Just too short to bridge sleepers with a single stride, I fall between the cracks, boots scudding on the aggregate and clipping alternate ties. After a mile of this halting pace, I catch a rotten sleeper and fall headlong with hands outstretched. I make to rise, looking back between my legs and ahead, embarrassed by my mistake. Then I remember where I am, exposed but alone, and settle back onto the railroad, balancing my head on the warming noon steel.

There is a strange magnetism attached to walking a railway. Just as a train is bound to the limits of the line, after an hour walking between the rails I feel locked in and unable to deviate. A pedestrian on rails is melded in my mind with ideas of the American West; frontier towns, steel-driving men, endless horizons. As I press on down the old branch line the comparisons with springtime Suffolk do not seem so remote. The sporadic shotgun cases of farmers and poachers lie alongside the bones of predated rabbits in the track bed. On either side spreads flat desert with patchy trees and silent tractors, loose metal sounding in the wind. The pancake of coastal East Anglia becomes twinned with territories in Wyoming or Utah, all ‘big sky country’. On old ordnance maps, used when this line still carried passengers, some of these fields bear the same colouring as Saharan sand.

I come off the line on the outskirts of Leiston, next to the town cemetery. I have avoided the thousand pound trespass fine with no more than a hostile look from an old woman at one of the crossing cottages. I wonder if she has made a phone call and the British Transport Police block the next crossing, lazy blue sirens spinning on the verge. In my experience, there’s never been such a good way to meet people as trespassing on their property. You’ve immediately given them the high ground, which makes them a lot more sociable. You can then proceed to roll over like a dog. Everyone loves dogs.

Eating the remainder of my lunch, pulverised pork pie and sweet tea, I look back at the blank hedge behind me with no sign of the railway hiding under its blackthorn ridge. Like the Suez Canal, it takes a moving object to make you aware of what lies concealed in this landscape. The blackthorns form a ha-ha, hiding the margin into the next field and history in their shadow.

In 1872 an iron safe was installed in the Leiston ticket office. The volume of trade and passengers on the line had reached such levels that the Station Master regularly found fifty pounds worth of fares burning through his pocket at nightfall. In contemporary cash, that’s nigh on a grand. As I enter Leiston’s suburbs, walking in the shade of post-war housing estates, I try to conjure a cantering 19th century villain, shotgun under arm, cresting the rise ahead of me and bent on the day’s takings.

Beyond Leiston, I come to Crown Farm siding, where radioactive waste leaves the coast for its long journey North for reprocessing. In a gap at the end of the street, the titanic globe of Sizewell B sits, half-buried in its seaside bunker of sand and shingle. An elderly man, shuffling out of the adjacent Sizewell Social Club, looks at me suspiciously. “Yer awright boi?” he says, fag in mouth. Here men come to play pool and poker in the lee of the reactors, successive phases of British power sculpted by father and son. I give a thumbs up and scuttle off into the undergrowth behind the loading bays. There are no nuclear flasks lying upended in the scrub.

Past the bays and winches and the rails end abruptly, a sharp transition from steel to sand. Only rabbits use this railroad now, the old grooves providing perfect speedways for bunnies going about business. The ghost of the track remains in the landscape; rows of gorse bushes clinging to an unseen ridge; gate posts facing each other across fenceless margins.

Clouds gather and a light rain falls on a group of cabbage pickers, working under pylons in the field beside the track. Watching their progress I am surprised to turn forward again and find myself on a long, narrow lawn, running straight for two hundred feet toward a small bungalow. I pause outside, wanting to go in and compliment the owners on their well-mown piece of railway history.  Beyond the bungalow, abandoned in a small grove is Thorpeness Halt, the penultimate stop on my journey. I find the platform buried in brambles. Ambitious trees have rooted themselves in its spilt lip and tall thistles are the only travellers, swaying as they wait for a train that will never come again. Somewhere beyond the weeds is the Meare at Thorpeness, the resort vision of John Barrie, and behind that the town and the sea washing its back. I kneel on the ruined platform, bewitched by the mummified air surrounding a station that no longer exists as a mark on the map. If you take express trains across Britain there is a degree of comfort as you speed past tantalising, half-glimpsed stations, that you might one day alight there. The only way to return to Thorpeness Halt is on foot.

Continuing on down the last seaside miles to Aldeburgh, something drifts across the path behind me, dry leaves and dust. All the absent elements of the old railway, the steels, the broken ties, the shifting rock of the embankment, reassemble in my head. The wind through the firs that line the path starts to gather strength and then subsides, like the memory of an engine that won’t start anymore. Is this the first whispers of a ghost train soon to come steaming around the weeds and deadwood? I conjure a gleaming Pullman bearing down on the dog-walkers, bird-watchers and cyclists, all trespassing on its route.

I arrive at the end of the line at nineteen minutes past four in the afternoon – a late-running service. A journey that once would have taken twenty-two windswept minutes has lasted five hours on foot and the sun is already low in the west. What it must have been like, to come rolling in at dusk with ducks skimming off the marsh and the lightships slowly flickering to life out at sea. On the promenade a wind whisks salt rain over the houses and clouds bunch overhead. The advent of a storm is imminent, but even under dark skies The Railway Inn at the ruined end of the line is full; beer and chips spilling out onto the street once home to the terminus. That business should be so good makes me wonder, did Dr Beeching destroy a sleeping fortune?

The scratched plastic of the shelter spots with rain as I wait for a bus back to the working rails and the city. My thoughts turn to the future on this stretch of coast. When East Anglia sinks into the mud of the North Sea, what will become of this small embankment; a barely-visible lip, breaking the incoming tides that flood the land around it? Perhaps in another hundred years people will swim across these fields, long since underwater. Looking down through clouded masks they may glimpse a strange line of aggregate, fading slowly into the silt. Who amongst them will recognise the golden age of rail, lost beneath the sea?

You can find out about more of Jack's writing projects on his website.

Seven crossings of the River Severn

This is the story of a day spent exploring seven crossings of the River Severn below Gloucester as it morphs from a meandering river into a mighty tidal estuary flowing through the Bristol Channel and on into the impossible immensity of the Atlantic Ocean: three ferry passages, a railway bridge, a railway tunnel and two road bridges. Of a backwater estuarine landscape dissected over the centuries by communication routes ferrying goods and people from the coalfields and iron foundries of South Wales, the Irish Sea port of Fishguard and the timber lands of the Forest of Dean to Bristol, London and beyond. The road bridges and railway tunnel remain, transporting their sleek machines between England and Wales, but the railway bridge is lost beneath the water and the ferries are long gone, given a last hurrah, curiously, by Bob Dylan in 1966.

  

First up an attempt to view the eastern entrance to the Severn Railway Tunnel. Constructed between 1873 and 1886, this subterranean 'crossing' is over 4 miles and long and, until the opening of the Channel Tunnel, was the longest in Britain's railway system. On the map this looks an easy stroll from the road, but this is a working mainline and I predicted that access could be tricky; and so it proved to be. Although a public footpath circumnavigated the entrance, its location in a deep cutting bounded by overgrown embankments and ditches prevented any possibility of viewing from the right of way. High steel fencing completed the sense of prosaic impregnability. If Railtrack were responsible for designing the ramparts and palisades of Iron Age hill-forts, this is how they would look. 

So, a detour is required across fields, marked by the humps and bumps of medieval ridge and furrow, to clear the range of the security fencing, negotiate a more conventional wire fence and plunge into bush and brier to ascend the embankment. Eventually a way is found through the nettles and thorns and a view of the cutting is won. Sadly, a service road in full sight of a nearby maintenance depot would need to be crossed to obtain a full view of the turreted tunnel entrance. A little disappointed, I retrace my tracks and notice that the gate to the depot is now open. Two fluorescent coated workmen are preoccupied with checking machinery and do not notice my brief trespass to the top of steps down to the tunnel entrance; and so I get the close-up photo I had been seeking.

As I trudge back to the car I muse on whether it should need to feel this subversive - should require a mild law-breaking adventure - in order to see a wonder of Victorian engineering. I'm sure a National Trust style visitor centre would diminish the experience in a different way, but there must be a happy medium. 

Half a mile away at New Passage and the ghosts of an older method of transportation, the ferry, haunt the shadows of the Second Severn Crossing Bridge, the gleaming conveyor of the M4 motorway across the estuary. Until the railway tunnel opened (almost directly beneath) the New Passage Ferry was the most direct connecting route from South Wales to England if a long circuitous route north via the bridge up-river at Gloucester was to be avoided. An example of the impossibly localised companies that sprang up during the railway mania of the mid-nineteenth century, the Bristol & South Wales Union Railway opened a line to a terminal pier here for passengers to board the ferry across to Portskewett. The ferry route's lifetime was though short-lived and it only operated between 1863 and 1886. The pier is long gone but its stone bulwark forms part of the flood defence topped by a foot and cycle path which gives suitably breath-taking views of both the Second Severn Crossing bridge and the original Severn Bridge just three miles further upstream. Opened in 1996 to provide a more direct route for the increased traffic volumes of the M4, the new bridge seems to display a haughtiness towards its precursor as it curves away southwards. Seen from the heights of the Forest of Dean or the Cotswold scarp the two structures seem like diverging monolithic siblings, two contrasting characters forever linked by their utility.  

The Second Severn Crossing

The Severn Bridge

Navigating to a 'high forcing chamber of history'

The Chartist Cave:
Image from www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk 

"The union met in secret on the dark side of the hill, by the light of a thousand candles" Ironmasters, The Men They Couldn't Hang

Participation in a day-into-night navigation course on the edge of the Brecon Beacons has got me ruminating on two unrelated topics, both stimulated by spending a cold Friday night on a moor looking for a cave: the understated value of moving through terrain using the basic disciplines of route-finding with compass and map; and a visceral piece of radical landscape history. 

The session was part of on-going training for the Black Mountains Upland Volunteers scheme that I have previously posted about.  At 4pm our small group ascended a track above the village of Trefil, just north of Tredegar on the high ground of Mynydd Llangynidr above the heads of the Ebbw and Sirhowy valleys; an area known with etymological accuracy as Blaenau, meaning 'heights, uplands, headwaters'. Before us stretched what would normally be a boggy morass of rough limestone moorland, but the ground was bone-hard on account of a lack of recent precipitation and the chill wind that whipped into our faces, like a perpetual slap. The temperature had remained resolutely low all day and, in R.S. Thomas' words, "the cold landscape returned my stare".

Jan Morris aptly describes the unusual feeling and topography of this transitional space between the, once mighty now post-industrial, valleys of Gwent and Glamorgan to the south and the majestic hill country of the Brecon Beacons National Park to the north:

"This is country unlike any other in Wales, partly because of its terrain, partly because of its fateful associations, and coming to it is like entering some high forcing chamber of history. Up your road goes, up the steep limestone ridge, pocked with caves and old workings and the remains of tramways, until crossing the ridge of the escarpment you find the harsh expanse of the Blaenau stretching there before you. Across it runs the cruel Heads of the Valleys highway, cars, trucks and motor-bikes crawling through the wind, and there are the remains of long-abandoned workings, and half-obliterated tips. It is colourless but compelling - the air rasping, the moorland glowering, and on the south side of the road the industrial valleys suddenly plunging away with their mines and chapels and railway tracks jam-packed and canyon-like towards the sea."

At first sight, our surroundings seemed unpromising country for navigating around: sink holes, cairns, springs, small pools and narrow water-courses the only features amongst the washed-out winter monotony of heather, course grass and sedge; the lazy meanders of the contours on the map mirroring the relative lack of variation in elevation on the ground. Slowly but surely we found our 'bearings', becoming accustomed to the coming dusky gloom; the relative sparseness of features actually sharpening our ability to match map with fact. And realising that small sink hole symbols on paper translate into mightily deep depressions in reality, literally swallowing up the ground. We were soon in our stride, communicating in the vocabulary of navigation, which has to be learnt like an esoteric code: magnetic North, back bearings, catch-points, hand rails, aiming off, Eastings and Northings.

Image from www.newportgwentdcs.org.uk

And so, like a team of worker ants, and repeating our mantra of calculations -  bearing, distance and estimated time - we worked our way from feature to feature to the half way point, a limestone cavern known as the Chartist Cave. With a bit of help from our instructor to locate the entrance to the cave in the now pitch darkness, we encamped in the chamber to refuel before plotting a course back to our start point. 

And the cave is also the entry point to the second theme of this post. It is named for its use, according to local folklore, as a secret meeting place and arms factory for Chartists from the area in the 1830's. Chartism was "...the first independent working-class movement in the world, a snow-ball movement of social protest..." (Briggs). Although some Chartists took a moral stance against violence others were less idealistic, including those who used the caves around Blaenau to help prepare for a semi-military campaign of social disobedience and insurrection.   

In  1839 several thousand working men marched on Newport from the area and other locations across the South Wales valleys in protest at the imprisonment in Monmouth of a number of prominent English Chartists. On the morning of 5th November the 'Battle of Newport' took place, but it was an inglorious defeat for the by now undisciplined and drunken Chartist 'army' who were no match for the professional soldiery who had been stationed in the town to quell the uprising. Nine of the protesters were killed, most quickly fled back to their valley communities and their ring-leaders received predictably harsh sentences for their crimes of treason; reprieved from execution but transported to Australia for life.

On returning home, and with thoughts of this piece of history  brought vividly to life on a chill winters night, I was reminded of a lustily sung favourite song of old, Ironmasters by The Men They Couldn't Hang; a hymn to the radical uprisings of the era against the ironmasters and coal magnets of South Wales, "...from the smoky stacks of Merthyr to the hills of Ebbw Vale".

Although the Chartists ultimately failed in their own time, the rights for which they protested, including universal suffrage, would later become corner-stones of democratic systems around the world. In the words of E.P. Thompson, "we may thank them for these years of heroic culture". And yet, pondering the ruthless, exploitative industrialists of mid-nineteenth century South Wales and the modern day hegemony of global capitalism, I can't help thinking that The Men They Couldn't Hang were right: "Ironmasters, they always get their way".

References

Birkett, Bill, 2002. The Hillwalker's Manual. Milnthorpe: Cicerone.

Briggs, Asa, 1991. A Social History of England. London: Penguin.

Morris, Jan, 1998. Wales: Epic views of a small country. London: Penguin. 

Owen, Hywel Wyn, 1998. A Pocket Guide to the Place-Names of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Thomas, R.S., 1996. Amen in Selected Poems. London: Dent.

Thompson, E.P., 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.

Blaenau-Gwent County Borough Council web site:
http://www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk/8042.asp

Pandaemonium begins

Fine map that neatly shows the (literal) powerhouses and important landmarks of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

And, as an accompanying piece, Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers is an absolute treasure trove of writings on the 'sturm und drang' of the coming of the industrial age.

Thanks to Matthew Ward for the image, from "an old text book".