This post is an abridged version of the discussion chapter framed around the core research questions of my recently
submitted PhD thesis, examining a hypothesis that
the medieval monastery, over centuries of managing and moulding its precinct
and estates, has left a topographical legacy that remains a core though often
unrevealed component of the historic landscape, of experienced and remembered
sense of place. The aim here to provide a coherent and holistic narrative of carefully selected case
study landscapes associated with three monastic houses in the border geography
of the southern Welsh Marches.
Firstly, the
Augustinian priory of Llanthony in the Black Mountains: the case study focused
on the core home estate of Cwmyoy and adjacent sub-manors. A lordship taking
the medieval name of Hothneyslade. Secondly, Tintern Abbey on the west bank of
the lower River Wye, in Wales but also on ‘the very rim of England’; the case
study area made up of the abbey estates on both the Welsh western side of the
Wye and the English east: an encircling of home granges and manorial farms
around the abbey precinct, referred to here as the ‘Wye Valley estates’.
Finally, the Cistercian house of Llantarnam, in the lower Eastern Valley of western
Monmouthshire between historic Caerleon and the new town of Cwmbrân. This case study concentrates on the home
manor of Magna Porta, a diverse landscape adorned by several granges.
The project has sought to
apply, in synthesis, methodology from both landscape archaeology and cultural
geography, an underplayed modus operandi within
historic landscape study. Walking as fieldwork practice has been a key
methodological anchor: the routes of landscape walks across the case study
geographies highlighted on the slide. For brevity, however, I will save
reflection on how this fieldwork contributed to the research objectives, on how
successfully practice from different disciplines blended, for another post.
Suffice to say that provisional thoughts or leads on boundaries, grange farms, field systems and an
array of other landscape features were ground-truthed during the walks. It was such rooting around that confirmed or
cemented, inter alia, the likely location and bounds of the
Llantarnam granges of Dorallt and Llanderfel, Tintern’s Secular Firmary,
various grange out-farms and the perimeter and nucleus of Llanthony’s Redcastle
manor. The footways followed also embody linear archaeology in themselves: the
course and physical remnants of several monastic routeways have been
discovered, including the Old Roadway (Llanthony) and the Long Way (Tintern).
Foundational to this
project has been the identification, cataloguing and mapping of reconstructed
topographical baselines for the medieval landscapes of the case studies. Once established, these
‘monastic landscapes’ enabled the tracking of later estate evolution, beyond
the functional to dig into ‘embedded, deeper meanings’, to shape, in David
Austin’s words, a ‘biography of place’ encompassing the perception and
remembrance of the monastic legacy.
Comprehensive gazetteers
of topographical features compiled for the project signify contemporary
historic terrains inhabited by patterns and clusters of material relics from
the centuries of monastic estate management. These archaeological
clues, together with other evidence assemblages, have enabled the mapping of
the landscape features in and around the monastic precinct and the wider
medieval hinterland pivotal to the accompanying narratives. This analysis
consolidates, extends, and in some cases challenges, existing data-sets,
notably David Williams’ inventory of Welsh Cistercian estates. Most of all, it
deepens previously preliminary and unconnected portraits of estate extents,
economic and agricultural history and site-based testimony into a richer
topographical reconstruction. Some of the key characteristics and themes will
now be briefly drawn out.
At an estate boundary
scale, charters and other medieval sources have offered a draft outline of the
case study lands, the detail of a fuller facsimile drawn from post-medieval
manorial archives, map regression and field observation. The Strata Florida
project has shown how the perimeters of gifted lands were often not new lines
in the landscape but trailed existing dykes, tracks and other markers,
fossilising the extents of pre-monastic territorial units. Such is the case
high on Mynydd Maen where the bounds of Llantarnam’s Magna Porta manor were
meared by the Llanderfel Rhiw track and marker stones in an inherited landscape.
In common with the great
swathes of monastic territory accumulated across northern England, Wales and
the March more widely, these estates demonstrate a balance of underexploited
country and long-established agricultural units. Here the early monastic communities
– the Cistercians of Llantarnam and Tintern in particular – were certainly busy
transforming the landscape through clearance, drainage, new livestock practices
and higher-intensity cultivation. Any apparent taming of ‘blank canvas’
wilderness, however, was largely allegoric, the reality more nuanced. Even in
these relatively underpeopled terrains there was little wholly unsettled or
unmanaged land. Economic activity also had to adapt to local circumstances. As Janet
Burton and Julie Kerr have pointed out, the Cistercians were ‘not so much
pioneers as entrepreneurs whose successful reorganisation of fragmented estates
into granges reshaped the landscape’, delivering a more efficient economy.
This can be seen in the
development of Tintern’s Wye Valley estates. Backwater Porthcasseg manor
transformed into the epicentre of the abbey’s farming operations, the new
granges of Ruding and Secular Firmary and their secondary farms carved out of
abundant wooded margins. South, west and across the Wye, the established but
perhaps moribund arable farms of Rogerstone, Trelleck and Modesgate expanded
and worked harder by teams of lay brothers. As with the large tracts of
Yorkshire in the hands of the Cistercians, the countryside was substantially
worked and moulded during the monastic centuries of corporate continuity and
privilege, creating a structure that is largely still retained. Within the
margins of the estate boundaries, the medieval landscape maps present a broad
template mirrored in the historic environment today: a general land-use
segmentation into sectors of woodland, farmed land and open common; the
location of the larger farmsteads and routeways; relict landscape features of
grange and manorial infrastructure such as fishponds, mills, sheepcotes and fish
weirs; and networks of chapels and churches.
Clearing of woodland, the exploitation of
previously marginal country and changes in agricultural techniques may have
taken place with or without monastic stewardship and the role of local farming
communities as key agents of landscape change should not be overlooked. The
scale and intensity of transition, however, speak of the planning, resources
and sustained resolve displayed by monasteries and their workforce,
particularly in the pioneering stage of dynamic estate management and grange-led
re-orientation. The dominant players in galvanising this landscape modification
were the flourishing granges of Llantarnam and Tintern, the large valley farms
of Hothneyslade.
At the grange and
individual farm spatial level, the core demesne
estates and specialist farmsteads surrounding the monastery and general
land-use character have been defined and mapped. More tentative has been the
tracing of medieval field boundaries associated with these steadings. Here,
contemporary documentary evidence has been slight. Moreover, the field systems
remaining in the historic landscape often display regular forms that suggest
post-medieval re-setting of farmed land. There are some exceptions. Llantarnam’s
highland bercary of Rhyswg, carved
out of an elevated wooded ridge, is sub-divided by small rectilinear enclosures
bounded by earth-banked out-grown beech hedges suggesting their origin as
assarts, the conversi workforce
laying out a designed grid to enable efficient stock rearing and
self-sufficiency. Field-names, particularly those of older documents and maps,
sometimes also hint at ancient farming practice, the case study gazetteers
cataloguing an array of examples that speak of arable and common tillage,
livestock and other land-use.
Perhaps most revealing,
however, are the occasional impressions of now vanished enclosures highlighted
by LiDAR beneath the post-medieval palimpsest, such as those at Penterry and
Porthcasseg on the plateau above Tintern. Such glimpses, though, offer-up only
partial or indicative infilling amidst the more confidently drawn grange and
estate boundaries and general land-use patterns.
The evidence drawn from
the case studies points to a somewhat unenclosed farmed environment across many
of the hill-country granges and tenanted farming communities: picture the
rolling grasslands interspersed with wood cover of the archetypal Alpine
valley. Crops and livestock kept around the farmsteads certainly penned in,
demarcated and protected by the fence and wall of the infield, the wider
outfield space encompassing (sometimes large) tracts of rotational or transient
enclosures. A more open prospect across the extensive outlying ground: the
wood-pasture hillsides and long flood meadowlands along the valley floor. This
patina only later transformed into the patchwork of individual fields so
characteristic of these landscapes today and in living memory.
Of the grange courts
themselves, their building ranges and yards would seem, in most cases, to have
been overlain by succeeding post-medieval farmsteads and the infrastructure of
modern farming (or in the case of Llantarnam’s closest granges, the built
environment of Cwmbrân). This is a familiar monastic story: for instance, few
surviving buildings have been found at the numerous granges of the well-studied
Fountains Abbey. As direct management of large monastic estates declined in the
later Middle Ages, many granges and monastic farms reorganised to meet the more
modest needs and differing farming priorities of their lay tenants. The grand
stone buildings of these ‘miniature monasteries’ often fell into disuse or were
replaced with smaller structures more suited to local agricultural
needs. Such ‘downsizing’ and subsequent post-medieval rebuilding in stone
explains the paucity of surviving grange architecture. Numerous of the successor
farmsteads in the case study areas have, though, been shown to include some
remnant late-medieval or early post-medieval fabric, most strikingly
Llwyn-celyn, south of Llanthony, where it is hoped that ongoing architectural
restoration will reveal more of its monastic history.
Some parallels and contrasts between
the case study medieval landscapes will now be examined. All three monasteries
emerged from their foundation stage with a consolidated and considerable block
of home estates surrounding the precinct – enhanced by exchange and purchase –
which remained largely stable throughout the monastic epoch and beyond. This
pattern, repeated for many similarly-sized houses, further dispels the myth
that the primary goal of the new monastic communities of the twelfth century
was to settle in wild and untamed places isolated from the surrounding
countryside. The houses and their religious and lay communities became deeply
embedded in the surrounding landscape, economy and society. Tintern’s extensive
landed holdings and network of grange farms elevated the abbey to become an
important regional landowner; also the case, though at a more parochial level,
for Llantarnam and Llanthony.
The influence of
expansive monastic land management across south-east Wales on medieval life
was, though, often interrupted or checked by wider events and the degree of
hostility, either from the local populace or neighbouring landowners. Perceived
or real political loyalties in times of dispute and conflict such as the Glyndŵr revolt often had implications for the stability
and financial health of the monastery. Llanthony and Tintern, founded and
patronised by Anglo-Norman nobility were, moreover, heavily subject to the
fortunes of their benefactors; high-status dependents of the fiefdoms commanded
from the castles at Longtown and Chepstow.
Llantarnam was somewhat
out of step with this prevailing Marcher hegemony. Its very foundation by the
great Welsh house of Strata Florida and the native lords of Caerleon was as a
bulwark against Norman incursion. The monastery precinct, abbot’s park and demesne estates interlocked with a wider
native lordly countryside: the abbey conjoined with the adjacent lordship centre and
deer park of Caerleon.
To classify these shrewdly
planned and plotted landscapes as uniformly ‘monastic’ would be
something of a caricature. Though exemplars of expansion and agrarian
intensification, the home granges of Llantarnam and Tintern were not isolated
within an uncultivated vacuum. The abbeys were also lords of manorial tenants
peopling the wider expanses gifted to them. Evidence is, though, lacking as to
the extent to which the existing peasantry were incorporated into the lay
grange workforce or displaced by the new farming system as seen at some of the
holdings of Fountains Abbey. Whilst the Cistercian grange model was
underscoring landscape management at Llantarnam and Tintern, moreover, this is
less evident for Augustinian Llanthony. The canon’s stewardship of the
Hothneyslade manors was often notional as the fortunes of the priory ebbed and
flowed and it finally became a much-reduced cell of the more flourishing
Gloucester house, exercising looser lordly control over its
independently-minded tenantry. Nevertheless, here can still be seen a
degree of agricultural planning and innovation that betokens a monastic
influence, a working of this previously marginal topography more efficiently to
support the priory and maximise income. The fertile alluvial soils of the lower
and eastern side of the Vale of Ewyas exploited by the bigger arable valley
farms, pastoral farming and woodland management intensified elsewhere.
One clear thread running
through the three case studies is the existence of a network of roads and
trackways connecting the monastery, its geographically spread manors, granges
and farmsteads and the wider world. Trade, high-status visitors, pilgrims and
local traffic, the multiple catalysts for a named and marked, maintained and
managed system of transit and safe passage. Spotlighting
and recreating these routeways foregrounds considerations of movement and the
multiple meanings of these shared ways: to connect but also to mark and codify
the landscape and people’s interaction within it. Travelling through, for
instance, the Abbey Gate before the descent down to the Wye ferry to Tintern
representing not just a waymark but also a passing from the open forest of
Tidenham Chase into prescribed monastic land. As such routes spread out from
the monastery, they also took on a geo-political role: linking economically and
strategically important places, acting as both ‘instruments of elite control’
and safe space in sometimes bleak and hostile country.
Examples of constructed
trackways such as the cobbled way above the Passage ferry to Tintern and the
stonework on the Fish Path down to Llanthony, banked or hollowed depending on
the terrain, highlight their role as multi-purpose critical infrastructure. It
is not hard to imagine that the effort, resources and planning that went into
building the monastery and developing its agricultural holdings would also be
channelled into these important routeways, bonding the house with its estates
and the outside world to ensure safe and efficient passage. As with Andrew
Fleming’s findings on studying the Monks Trod and other Strata Florida tracks,
the evidence suggests an, often underestimated, level of sophistication and
investment in medieval road construction and maintenance. A transition of
routes from general directions of travel into defined, maintained and named
roads and footways can be heralded as a key monastic topographical legacy.
Moving now beyond the
monastic era, the case study landscapes experienced a remarkable level of
post-Dissolution continuity in the estate configuration developed by the
monasteries. Local gentry – the Arnolds (Llanthony), Herberts (Tintern) and
Morgans (Llantarnam) – had cultivated prominent roles in the lay administration
of the late-monastic estates and, no doubt, long-term ambitions to take control when circumstances allowed. They were swift to secure the abbey and priory
sites and their extensive landed possessions after the suppression. Manors and
grange farms remained as integral working units within these high-status
domains, to be inherited or purchased from this first generation of secular
landowners. It was the inexorable splintering of great landed estates from the
late-nineteenth century onwards that saw this durability breached: the lost
monasteries only experiencing the final ‘dissolution of their landscapes’ in
the post-war decades as country estates were rapidly broken up, a full 400
years after their religious communities were expelled.
It was not only the monastic
estate unit that remained imprinted on the landscape. As already alluded to,
the land-use model moulded during the monastic centuries has endured: a
template for, rather than a mere staging post towards the modern landscape,
though evolved further and embellished in the post-medieval era. Successor
communities took on extant social and physical landscapes and, although they
applied their own agency in adapting this inherited terrain were often
much-influenced by what went before. Post-medieval farmers around Llanthony and
Tintern may have rationalised their practices to reflect a more individualised
and market-driven agriculture but they did so on the back of the
‘heavy-lifting’ of their medieval predecessors in establishing the core farm
units. Even the seemingly overriding modern townscape of Cwmbrân retains important trace elements of the medieval Magna Porta manor and its grange
farms.
Within this settled
framework, though, a new fieldscape emerged, open sheep-walks, wood-pasture
and flood-meadows progressively enclosed in straight lines and the old
infield-oufield reconfigured to reflect changing farming practice and
tenancy arrangements (as the tithe maps surveying Llanthony’s Cwmyoy manor
record). Manifest here was a decisive shift away from communal rights and
activity towards an emergent ‘private, hedged landscape’. The power of the
monastic corporations had been replaced by prominent secular landowners and
newly cash-rich farmers of the ‘middling sort’, such as the powerful cartel of
upwardly mobile provincial families who monopolised the Cwmyoy manor court. It
was the piecemeal enclosure by agreement enacted by these enterprising and
relentless proto-capitalists that fenced, hedged and walled these landscapes.
Its gestation traced to independently-minded farmed-out granges and tenancies
of the last decades of monastic ownership but flowering mainly from the
late-sixteenth through to the early-eighteenth century. Later waves of
similarly grass-rooted endeavour saw further intake from open common and waste
as a rising and land-hungry populace set-up new steadings, though more top-down
and expansive Parliamentary Inclosure was never enacted across these particular
upland commons.
Though the building ranges of the medieval granges
– designed for monastic communities and practices now past – either fell into
disrepair, were demolished or replaced, their names survived. Even where the
physical presence had vanished, such place-names endured as what Alexandra
Walsham has termed prompting ‘mnemonics’, a lexicon symbolising continuity,
antiquity and high status. Llanderfel, its pilgrims long gone and its chapel high
on a shelf of Mynydd Maen above Llantarnam falling into ruin, lingered as a
place of local significance. Llanderfel
Rhiw, wending above the chapel and grange, remained part of the boundary
circuit cited in manor surveys, along with ‘the brother’s gate’ indicating the
north-western extent of the old abbey lands of Magna Porta. Such boundary markers
incorporating ‘material traces of the past’ helped to shape parochial identity and knowledge;
anchoring nodes underpinning custom and tradition.
All three former monasteries had in common an
ongoing afterlife and renewal, transformations which retained strong echoes of
medieval life, architecture and landscape. This post-suppression history has
now lasted longer than the era of monastic corporations. Although all were
integrated into post-medieval secular estates, the trajectories of the
abandoned cloisters and their surrounding monastic fabric varied.
The disused hulk of
Llantarnam Abbey soon saw rebirth as a new gentry mansion, trading on its
monastic past but also the author of the destruction of much of the old
medieval fabric. The ‘abbey’ name was retained, such an address conferring a
status and history particularly important for gentry keen to stress or promote
their pedigree. A new house with ancient antecedents in place, William Morgan
proceeded to further bolster his position in society by developing the precinct
and former abbot’s park into a contemporary Elizabethan garden and parkland
landscape, retaining features such as the Magna Porta gate. Such monastic
remnants incorporated into the grounds of a great house or estate later folded
into the ideal of a picturesque landscape.
By contrast, the
claustral buildings at Llanthony and Tintern remained largely intact as coveted
property but never became the permanent seats of their owners (and were long
utilised for more rustic utility and partially ravaged for building materials).
Curiously, given its later veneration, the dramatic wreck of the abbey at
Tintern did not become the centrepiece of a gentry landscape, falling instead
into backwater anonymity until Georgian resurrection.
Llanthony did witness a
late attempt at transformation into a country house estate by Walter Savage
Landor. The old priory was to be the heart of ambitious plans to create a ‘new
Llanthony’; not just a house but an ‘ideal community’ and a landscape by
design, an echo of its monastic past. Ultimately unfulfilled, Landor’s vision
nevertheless exemplified renewed enthusiasm for historic places during the
Romantic era.
The priory was revered by the discerning aesthete
and enjoyer of country pursuits, but it was Tintern that was to latterly become
simultaneously ‘both fashionable and commercialised’, remaining one of the more
visited heritage sites in the country. Both survived and thrived as worthy
relics of the monastic and medieval past into the modern age of heritage
tourism. At Llantarnam, with little surviving fabric on which to construct a
medieval narrative, the successor house and grounds passed through the acme and decline
of the Victorian country estate era, slipping into prosaic institutional use.
Even though the old abbey is long gone, though, its memory has framed successor
topography and utility, from the continuation of the Catholic spirit by the
Morgan family to renewed religious purpose as a post-war nunnery.
As the lordly inheritors
of monastic estates valued and proclaimed their continuity with the past, so
too did their tenants. The post-medieval copyholders of Cwmyoy controlling the
manor court were busy forging new homes, lives and agricultural incomes from
the old demesne manor of Llanthony. Their
manor court books still though proudly foregrounded a history of ‘the Abby of Lanthony which gives name to the
Lordship’, quoting the original land grants to the priory from which the manor
sprung. This incantation confirmed not only the ancient bounds of the estate
but also its pedigree as the Augustinian’s home ground, historic links to the
priory still symbolically important to the forward-looking court members. One
of their number also took the trouble to adorn the entrance of his new
farmhouse at Ty-hwnt-y-bwlch with an archway appropriated from its ruins; a
gesture at once both respectful and profane.
At a more mundane
workaday level, field-names such as Ynys-y-prior (‘the prior’s water meadow’),
part of the bounds of Cwmyoy recited in 1612, and roads retaining monastic
monikers, such as the Monks Path and Stony Way out of Tintern, also reinforced
this memory. Aside from such folk-naming and snippets gleaned from manorial and
legal documents, folklore myths and stories articulated a sense of history and
place, as seen in the tales of phantom monks and hidden tunnels recounted in all
three case studies.
The physical and
perceptual landscape ‘of signposts to the destroyed monastic era’, often
integral to local consciousness but unscrutinised and taken for granted or
lying dormant, became the rich seam from which would spring the antiquarianism,
Romantic art and literature, tourism and heritage engagement of the future. Tintern,
of course, was something of a national figurehead in the revival of interest in
historical places and this is reflected in the way the abbey’s immediate
surrounds became heavily adorned with layers of touristic infrastructure: neat
lawns, visitor centre, car park, public house and other commercial elements.
Llanthony has often been
perceived to be a more rewarding and authentic experience of past times and
landscape, something of a hidden gem. These words from Victorian antiquarian,
Edward Freeman, still seem prescient for anyone affronted by heritage industry
paraphernalia and coach parties today:
‘Tintern is nothing to Llanthony…almost too
perfect, too neat, too trim…Llanthony is an utter ruin … One can wander in and
out unrestrained.’
The spiritual antiquity
expressed by the priory also seems to have been a magnet for free-spirited and
idealistic mavericks – Landor, Father Ignatius, Eric Gill – inspired by ‘the
Ewyas Valley and its mythological overload’ as expressed by psychogeographer
Iain Sinclair, for whom traversing the valley was to be in the presence of the
walkers of the past. These searchers were looking to take on the mantle of the
Llanthony canons, inspired by a foundation myth of creating a new utopian
community amidst the harsh ‘wilderness’.
As one respondent to an
on-line survey carried out for this project had it, the Llanthony valley ‘does
seem to be unique in its fascination for creative visitors and inhabitants.’ By
contrast, since the early visitations of Gilpin, Wordsworth and Turner, Tintern has
arguably lacked a cutting-edge artistic narrative. Where Llanthony inspired the
impressionistic, challenging imagery of the likes of Edward Burra, David Jones
and John Piper and the esoteric writings of Iain Sinclair and Allen Ginsberg,
artistic responses to Tintern have tended to the more mainstream and
conservative, often mired in Romantic-era sensibilities.
Now to address the problems and opportunities for
managing these landscapes in the future. Landscape can evoke the past, but it
can also hide and lead to forgetting. Although conspicuous relict markers such
as chapels and farmsteads can be conduits for remembering the past, often the
evidence of the impact of monastic houses on the landscape lies more covertly
around us, unsuspected.
This hidden-ness is
particularly striking when surveying the half-remembrance of Llantarnam Abbey
in the contemporary landscape adorning its sequestered location. With no
historic ruins as a draw, there has been no significant heritage conservation
or promotion. Much of the adjacent – and limited – infrastructure of public
paths, stiles and signage is often in poor condition, overgrown and blighted by
fly-tipping; the precinct landscape remorselessly encroached upon by
incremental urban development.
Often unseen though in
plain sight, even at the more visited and promoted heritage hubs of Llanthony
and Tintern, is the monastic inheritance of estate and farm extents and
boundaries, land-use patterns, field systems and communications networks drawn
together in this study. Such meta topographies litter the landscape but are
paradoxically often difficult to read: it can literally be hard to see ‘the
wood for the trees.’ Much is made of the sylvan situation of Llanthony and
Tintern, but these greenwoods are so often packaged as part of the unchanging,
‘unspoilt natural beauty’ of the monastic setting, removing the heritage ruin
from its connected and evolving landscape context. Groves such as the Abbot’s
Wood or Coed Cwmyoy were not simply a pleasant or untamed place for devotional
contemplation. Their real medieval value and utility as coppice, grazing or
repurposed agricultural land - is underplayed or uncharted. And, in recent
decades, the woods have been returning in more ragged form after a long span of
denudation: the old commons of the Wye Valley around Tintern ‘concealing
everywhere within its woodland the signs of the old agricultural landscape.’
Many footpaths through the woods and meadows enable the
visitor to explore this gilded countryside, to obtain breath-taking vistas of
the monastic ruins in their seemingly timeless frame. These very by-ways are
themselves an unheralded living relic of the monkish centuries, their
significance habitually unfathomed even as the walker adds to the footfall of
the years. These well-trodden arteries once hummed with great waves of traffic
keeping the monastic economy on the move before – like those of the Romans
before them – declining into a long ‘Dark Age’ of neglected forgetting, as the
realms of the monastery reverted to out-of-the-way backwaters once more; no
longer pivots of travel and commerce.
In some cases, as with
the overgrown, stream-hollowed Old Roadway down from the Hatterall ridge to
Llanthony and the serpentine Long Way snaking southwards from Tintern above the
Wye, these routes have fallen out of the remembered landscape. Or, as with
Grange Road, once the approach to Llantarnam’s Gelli-las grange, now a prosaic
urban supermarket access road, morphed into faint memories.
Individual features
within this landscape patchwork are often even more forgotten, neglected or
remote. A determined landscape researcher may be able to clamber and struggle
through brambles and down muddy inclines to find the overgrown remains of
Tintern’s Stoweir fish-house or the old walls of the lost Secular Firmary
grange, but the casual passer-by is unlikely to realise that they are even
there.
It may seem curious that
in places such as Llanthony and Tintern, designated and much frequented for
their historic value and scenic beauty, this wider monastic landscape
inheritance can be so seemingly overlooked. It is certainly the case that they
have been well represented as landmarks in touristic guides to regional identities
such as the Brecon Beacons, Wye Valley, Welsh Border Country and so forth. The
monastic ruins are frequently the centre-point or a thematic feature of walks,
driving tours and cycle routes. Accounts of their architecture, archaeology and
history often, though, seem abstracted or detached from any sense of passing
through a landscape that was also deeply infused with monastic influence. A
narrative of the enwrapping historic environment beyond the precinct walls –
the web of monastic granges and agricultural estates, of forged or co-opted
trackways – is generally absent.
That much of the cultural
landscape advanced here so often passes under the radar is not just a question
of the public missing out on opportunities to experience heritage monuments in
a richer context. As the case study gazetteers which accompany this analysis
demonstrate, many of these landscape features are absent from historic
environment records, or only appear in an unconnected and ad-hoc manner. This paucity of formal evidence puts unrecorded
everyday elements of the landscape at risk of potential despoliation and
damage.
For instance, the
development squeeze around Llantarnam has seen much of the historic fabric of
the abbey precinct and its home granges built upon without archaeological
assessment, whilst other under-recorded features nearby are also under threat
or lack conservation plans. More positively, interest in the pilgrim trail from
the abbey to Penrhys in recent years has seen a coalition of residents,
archaeologists and historians walking and examining the conjectured route,
largely under the umbrella of the HLC-funded Ancient Cwmbrân & The
Cistercians project. As a result, a linear piece of history stubbornly
retaining its place in the modern-day topography of Cwmbrân has been
foregrounded and chronicled. Such community engagement and media exposure has
also been a central motif of the Strata Florida Project, where a Trust has
recently been established to manage the abbey ruins and the surrounding
post-medieval farm as a long-term research and heritage enterprise.
The walking trail (and
circuits for cycling or other forms of transport) is a self-evident way that the
monastic biography of these landscapes can be brought to life and experienced.
Obvious perhaps, but surprisingly little implemented. Where walks have been
promoted they tend to remain very much site-focused rather than engaging with
the story of the wider landscape. Echoes of the monastic landscape appear
incidentally and unheralded. This is even the case with
initiatives such as the Cistercian Way (a long-distance itinerary linking all
the monasteries of that order across Wales) and St. Thomas Way (recreating a
medieval pilgrimage from Swansea to Hereford) which, to this observer, seem not
to take full advantage of or promote the monastic trackways and geographies
that they pass along and through between heritage ‘sites’.
The routes followed in
the landscape walks designed for this thesis could provide a blue-print for
more immersive guided experiences, anchored to the memory of monastic ways,
landscapes and locations, and I have been involved in organising such themed
walks for the Llanthony Valley and District History Group. At Llanthony there
are additional opportunities to integrate the monastic landscape narrative into
the Landmark Trust’s restoration of the late-medieval farmstead at Llwyn-celyn
(where a threshing barn is becoming a HLF-funded visitor and education centre,
a new gateway for visitors to the valley).
Innovative techniques increasingly used in heritage
management can, moreover, be harnessed to complement and enhance walking-based
experiences. Democratisation of access to GPS, high-resolution mapping and so
forth through mobile technology and social media can enable a much more
immersive and participatory engagement with the archaeology of landscape. Guided walks, online promotion
and mobile apps that integrate time-depth representations and rememberings
could do much to raise awareness of the wider monastic legacy in the landscape.
To sum up, many elements of the monastic landscape identified here adorn
today’s historic environment: embedded topographical memory often unseen or
unheralded, hidden in plain sight. The formulation, consolidation or pivotal
evolution of estate unit boundaries, land-use patterns, exploited marginal
terrain, farmsteads, field systems, field- and place-names and many individual
features layering present-day landscape character can be traced to the
transformations engineered by these monastic agents of change. Perhaps most
strikingly, networks of communication routes remain grooved into the landscape,
their continued navigation a symbol of monastic durability. Once unearthed,
such evidence unlocks ‘landscape history’ so often stranded, in Graham
Fairclough’s words, in ‘anachronistic “periods”’, folding the historic
dimension more clearly into the contemporary landscape.
A manifesto has been sketched out here for
highlighting and encountering often under-appreciated elements of the landscape
and medieval life anew, their meaning rediscovered and repurposed. There is considerable scope and potential to
complement and enrich the public’s experience of medieval monastic ‘heritage
sites’, contextualising the remains of the abbey or priory in their holistic
monastic (and successor) landscape setting, moving beyond a reductive
presentation framing such sites with a backdrop of generic ‘natural beauty’.
A more productive reckoning with landscape through an
‘intertwining of past, present and future’ is advocated, moving the frame of
reference away from elite site history to an engagement, immersive or more
ephemeral, with the everyday elements that populate an enriched topophilia and
sense of place. ‘We are surrounded by the greatest of free shows.
Places. Most of them made by man, remade by man’, proclaimed Jonathan Meades in
his topographical compendium, Museum
Without Walls. This study has illuminated a rich but often ill-lit or
concealed component of this treasury, landscapes shaped on the ground and in
the mind by the medieval monastery.
