Some Miraculous Promised Land by Richard Gwyn

In July 2021, I finally climbed Arenig Fawr. I was staying in a rented cottage near the village of Cemaes, an hour’s drive to the south, and set out at six in the morning in order to get an early start up the mountain. I parked the car by the derelict site of the Rhyd-y-fen station, opposite the quarry. The ascent began in pelting rain, but within an hour or so the clouds parted and the day unfolded in limpid sunshine, leavened by a fresh breeze. The walk offered an intoxicating and slightly confusing introduction to the painter James Dickson Innes’ favourite mountain. The angle from which he most often chose to paint Arenig, once he had moved to Nant-ddu, is from the southwest, and clearly delineates the mountain’s doubleness, its twin peaks being shown to best advantage. But I set out from the other side, the north-east, and at first I took the double escarpment that appears across the waters of Llyn Arenig to be the rear of the mountain’s summit; in fact they are the cliffs of Y Castell and Simdde ddu, which buttress onto Arenig itself. Thus the landscape, as it were, tricked me. My first meeting with Arenig was with an impostor, or shadow mountain. I felt foolish, as though I should have known better, especially after all my preparation.

Another aspect of the mountain that took me by surprise, when eventually I gained the right perspective, was the pinkness of the peaks. Augustus John refers to Arenig as ‘a rock of porphyry’. In the images I had studied online or in John Hoole’s lavishly illustrated book, I had assumed Innes’ striking pinks and blues to be an exaggeration, but there is a quality to the peaks that is indeed pink, due to the copper content of the rocks.

I wondered how much had changed since Dick Innes roamed upon the mountain; what configurations of the landscape were visible to me that would not have been here one hundred and ten years ago. The patches of coniferous forest, for one thing, planted in recent decades; the now decommissioned nuclear power station at Trawsfynydd, which can be seen on the western horizon from the summit, and of course the absence of the railway line, which Innes had in any case disappeared from nearly all his works. The track itself was gone, but the ghost of it remained, a trail of luminescent green, running in a straight line through a landscape of enfolding curves. Beyond the phantom railway track lay the main road from Bala to Trawsfynydd, its sporadic stream of traffic soundless from the summit.

According to Augustus John, Dick buried a silver casket containing ‘certain correspondence’ —his letters from Euphemia — near the cairn at the peak of Arenig. I wonder if many have set out to look for it. I have no desire to search for it, however. Dick buried it for a reason. And in any case, it might already have been dislodged, dug up by some treasure hunter with a metal detector, cast to the winds, blown away by a gale, or for another, more obvious reason.

On 4 August 1943 an American B17 Flying Fortress crashed into the mountain, when the pilot lost his way back to Mossley air base in Cambridgeshire after a night-time training mission. All eight crewmen perished when the plane collided with the hillside. Great chunks of rock were dislodged by the impact of the crash and to this day scraps of aircraft can be found near the summit. In 1945 a memorial to the dead airmen was set up inside the cairn that crowns the mountain, but it degraded over time and a new, silicon bronze plaque was installed in 2019, along with a framed photograph of the young men who died.

I knelt by the cairn, pondering the loss and bewilderment endured by the distant families of those young men, lost not in combat but on an exercise, from a list of places that reads like a map of the United States: Boise, Idaho; Tinky Park, Illinois; Covington, Kentucky; Queens, New York; Fayette, Ohio; Sacramento, California; Highland Park, Michigan, and Brookville, Pennsylvania. Just as I got to my feet, a pair of Hawk T2 jets screamed past, scarcely clearing the summit before diving with a roar towards Llyn Arenig, the lake I had passed an hour before. These planes fly out from the RAF base at Valley, Anglesey and are a source of incessant irritation to local people, especially the livestock farmers, whose animals are panicked and even miscarry as a result of the terror induced by their noisy passage overhead.

From the peak of Arenig, I was able to look down on Llyn Celyn, to the north. This manmade lake did not exist when Innes was here; in its place would have stood the hamlet of Capel Celyn, which was drowned, wiped out, in 1965, its sixty-seven inhabitants forced to move elsewhere.  It is a well known story, at least in Wales. Liverpool City Council needed a new reservoir to supply the city, and knowing that they would be obliged to obtain planning permission from the relevant Welsh authorities, they by-passed this obstacle and instead sought authority at a higher level, through an Act of Parliament at Westminster. The inhabitants of this Welsh-speaking community launched a campaign to save their homes, but failed, and in the end the village was destroyed. All but one of the thirty-six Welsh MPs opposed the bill in Parliament (and the thirty-sixth abstained). So much for democracy.  Cofiwch Dryweryn (‘Remember Tryweryn’) is a famous slogan, originally daubed on a rock near Llanrhystud, Ceredigion, where it became an icon of resistance for those seeking independence from English rule, and versions of the graffiti have since popped up across Wales, most recently near the A4212 above Rhyd-y-fen itself.

When there is little rainfall, the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn emerge from ghostly oblivion; the base of the chapel, the remnants of the bridge. In October 2005, Liverpool City Council offered a formal apology for the flooding of the village. The formal apology is very much a feature of contemporary life: prime ministers and other politicians are constantly apologising for dastardly deeds committed by their predecessors, just as the Pope apologises to victims of child abuse for the crimes committed against them. The British, it must be said, are especially prone to apologising, and of demanding apologies: it is something of a national obsession. I’m sure the members of Liverpool City Council acted in good faith when they offered an apology; the problem was that they qualified their remorse by passing the buck. They regretted the loss suffered by the people of Capel Celyn, but noted that the Government should apologise also, for allowing Liverpool to act without the consent of Welsh planning authorities and in the face of unanimous opposition from Welsh Members of Parliament. In other words: we are sorry we flooded your village and destroyed your way of life, but the fault wasn’t really ours, Westminster made us do it. It doesn’t mean much when seen in this light.

On my way down the mountain I passed through the ruins of farm buildings at Amnodd Wen, which has not been occupied for almost a century, and just beyond it, the path became a watershed, the mountain’s manganese shale and porphyry copper deposits lending the stream a rusty colouring. A miniature cliff formation appeared to the right of me, like a doubling or a fractal of the formation made by Y Castell and Simdde ddu, that I had passed earlier in the day. I was amazed by this pervasive duplication, or repetition in nature; it seemed infinite, a constant process of recursion, of mountains within mountains, worlds within worlds, a never-ending pattern that replicates itself in an ongoing loop; and I drifted into a fantasy in which I reached for the top right hand corner of the page before me —the page of the visible world— and peeled it back, revealing what lay beneath; another landscape, another world, seemingly the same as the one it had replaced, but with minute differences, so that once the page was turned an apparently identical image appeared before me, on the next page, and the next, and I began to turn the pages, slowly at first, and then faster, each page seemingly identical to the last and yet different in some small detail, every tiny difference representing another world that lay behind and beyond the last world, an impossible number of worlds superimposed one upon the other, into infinity — and we inhabit only one of them, as contingency dictates; we are granted one life, and there comes to us eventually the knowledge that we will one day leave it behind. And while there is sorrow at departure, there is also joy in the world’s unfathomable beauty. The transience of it all. Yet I feel a wave of sadness when I think of James Dickson Innes, of his passion for this mountain, and of all he might have achieved had he lived, perhaps, to my own age.

Dick Innes paints and re-paints the same image of Arenig, whereas I, one hundred and ten years later, on the same mountain (but now a slightly different mountain) in the same small country (which remains a small, almost accidental country) take a photograph on my iPhone, and am offered the chance to edit, so that I may, if I wish, enhance certain features, while eliminating others, and it occurs to me that this is precisely what Innes is doing with Arenig, finding multiple versions, multiple edits of the same image, and enhancing it, over and over again, except he doesn’t have an iPhone but instead has small wooden boards and oil paints.

Or to put it another way: in Gertrude Stein’s famous line, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’, the second rose differs slightly from the first and the third rose differs slightly from its two predecessors. Although the words are the same, they carry a slightly different semantic charge. This is the poetry of minute differences, which can be likened to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inframince (which might be translated as infrathin) to indicate those fine and barely perceptible nuances that differentiate near-identical experiences and subtly alter their meanings. Paul Matisse referred to inframince as a quality that evinces ‘the very last lastness of things . . . the frail and final minimum before reality disappears,’ to which we might add the brief pause taken between one breath and the next. When applied to time, the concept of inframince implies that the world subtly shifts with the passing of every microsecond. The idea is linked, in my mind, to the Celtic motion of ‘thin places’, which mark the confluence between the world of everyday reality and the mythical otherworld, known in Welsh as Annwn. In such places the boundary between the worlds is most fragile, and the chances of tipping into a contiguous one most likely. Coming down off the mountain, it felt as though Arenig itself were a vast nexus of thin places, host to many such points of confluence.

Dick Innes paints the mountain, trying to record it in a way that seems most apt in that moment, but with each rendition, each layering of the paint, the configuration of the visible world changes: that cloud has moved a fraction, a leaf has fallen from one of those rapidly painted trees, the bird has flown to another branch . . . a fly buzzes past, halts for a moment on the sleeve of the artist’s coat. He looks down at the fly and reality dissolves, which is to say the world stands still for as long as it takes for the fly to clean itself, rubbing its tiny hands together; and then everything starts up again, but this time it is all marginally different.

***

Richard Gwyn is a Welsh writer, author of the novels The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2005) The Blue Tent (2019) and four collections of poetry. His most recent book is the memoir Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage (2024), a sequel to The Vagabond’s Breakfast, which won Wales Book of the Year for non-ficton in 2012. He is also a translator from Spanish, notably The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (Seren, 2016) and most recently Invisible Dog, by Fabio Morábito (Carcanet, 2024).

The extract published here is from Some Miraculous Promised Land, a semi-fictionalised life of the Welsh landscape artist James Dickson Innes (1887-1914), to be published by The H’mm Foundation in November. Further extracts will be published on Richard’s Substack blog: Raids on the Underworld.

The Painting at the head of this essay is ‘Arenig Fawr’ by James Dickson Innes, courtesy of The Tate Gallery.

Photographs by the author.