Welsh Landscapes
Welsh Landscapes Especially Ceredigion:
I recently re-read ‘On the Black Hill’ by Bruce Chatwin. How little the hills of Wales have changed throughout the decades and centuries but how much easier it has become to navigate, especially these once bleak and unforgiving hills where these images were taken.
Before the motor car to travel to Bont Elan (the meandering river Elan) from Hafod would have been a days travel or up to Nant Rhys farmhouse (now a bothy), past the giant wind turbines and high into the forest above the monks mountain road from Cwmyswyth to Rhayader/Rhaedre. But roads have been upgraded, pathfinder maps modernised and, as I do, many more walkers are enjoying the remoteness of Mid Wales
A PLACE DESERTED:
Welsh Ruins and Landscapes:
These are photographs of old wild Wales; its varied landscapes and ruins that scatter its green hills and valleys, its highways and byways, throughout the former county of Dyfed.
Included are vernacular farmhouses and cottages, ruined, dark and lowly, in remote locations or alongside major roads – their doors rotted, windows smashed – the remnants and belongings of previous occupants, their past lives, left to dust and dampen to fade, wither and decay.
The landscape itself reveals explicit visual records of former industries, particularly mining areas such as Cwmystwyth, Cwmsymlog and Cwmrheidol as well as scores of other smaller workings, have all had a profound influence on the landscape of Wales. Driving through Cwmyswyth lead mines one can not help but be moved by the grey slag heaps and stone ruins, the surrounding steep hills cut with deep seams and open caverns, the veins and scars of extensive and well trodden workings.
So many times I have found myself off the beaten track with my camera and tripod, high up in the hills of the Cambrian Mountains believing few could have walked these hills before me and then to discover, quite unexpectedly, perhaps beneath a small cluster of Scots’ Pine trees the few barren walls of a shepherd’s dwelling or alongside a mountain stream the remnants of machinery, abandoned and left to rust, once the mining industry had become unprofitable.
This collection is not intended as an extensive or conclusive record of Dyfeds’ lost heritage but as a visual excuse for the viewer to stand back and aside briefly and allow some time to remember our past in these once hostile counties. A time before roads were built and communication from village to village took days rather than seconds.