Insufficiently Welsh (15 page)

He pushed his throttle forward and we roared back to Beaumaris where he put me ashore alongside a flotilla of visiting yachts that seemed to have come from Northern Ireland. “What are you up to, eh?” they shouted.

“Nothing,” I shouted back through fixed teeth, trying to remain disengaged for the camera.

There is something satisfying about landing in a seaside town from a boat, as long as you manage to do so safely. On the way back, Charles pointed out the sites of various wrecks that had failed to make the entrance to the strait and come a cropper on the great shallow expanses of sand that ran away towards Bangor. Somewhere out there were the three wrecks that all went down on the same day, December 5th, though separated by many hundreds of years. All these ships lost all hands, save for one person. And that one survivor, spookily, was called Hugh Williams, in each case.

The only Hugh Williams I know changed his name to Hugh Bonneville, and went on to skipper Downton Abbey. I hope Hugh has the good sense to remember who he really is if he ever finds himself in a winter storm in the Menai Straits.

The pier where we landed once greeted paddle steamers from the Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company, bringing tourists from the Mersey. I strolled down the springy planks, past the day-trippers and the ice cream guzzlers, and into Beaumaris itself.

This was my first real encounter with Anglesey on this trip. The town appeared to be a neat Georgian-looking box, but it was built in 1295 to accompany the castle, regarded by many as the pinnacle of James of St George's career and the low point of Welsh independence. It was part of the ring of iron, the circle of fortresses designed to put us Welsh in our place. Beaumaris Castle is described by many as the most technically perfect castle in Britain.

Strolling amongst the Lancashire accents, I wondered how many realised that Welsh people themselves were once banned from the town: a sort of outpost in the injun territory, like a cowboy fort. For centuries the Welsh were not allowed to buy property in the borough. Perhaps that's why they still seemed to keep a low profile.

A paper poster outside a newsagent's informed me of the “N.WAKE QUAKE”: a reference I think to the earthquake that had recently rocked Ll
y
ˆ
n in N. Wales. Inside I picked up a glossy magazine that boasted (on its cover) that one of the best places to find puffins in Britain was on South Stack in Anglesey, and I chatted with the proprietress. Olwen happily corrected me on my would-be French pronunciation. The Welsh call it “Bew-mariss” she told me. This was despite the fact that it got its name from the Norman occupiers who in 1300 had thought the site was a rather attractive bog, or “beau marais”.

Olwen explained that Welsh was her first language. That, despite appearances, and despite the tourists, the incomers and the holiday cottages and English entrepreneurs running power-ribs, restaurants and antique shops, the heart of Anglesey was deeply Welsh. She herself lived outside the town. I don't think this was because of any old medieval rules, but old habits linger on in rural Wales. The conquest of the late thirteenth century is talked about as if it happened a few months ago. The English are still held to account. Mind you, I would have thought that the French origins of the town's name might have fingered the real villains: those blasted, avaricious, bastard Normans.

Olwen was happy to tell me that the only Welsh word I regularly heard in my house: “bach” as in “Griffith bach!” expressed usually in tones of huge sorrow, meant “little”, (I always assume it meant “darling”.) So I was little Griffith whenever I cut the heads off the tulips or broke those windows round the back of my friend's farm or hit my sister. But I also discovered that if I wanted to find South Stack I would have to follow the coast along the southerly side.

–
SALT-WATER TAFFY
–

I retraced my route, but this time on land, skirting the south shore of the island and taking a bus through the leafy parkland round the back of Plas Newydd – “At the house there is also a Military Museum which contains campaign relics belonging to the first Marquess of Anglesey, mementos of the Battle of Waterloo and the Anglesey leg, ” I read.

Lord Uxbridge's famous articulated false leg on show in Anglesey's stately home was built to replace the original, which became a tourist attraction in Belgium after it was amputated and buried under a willow tree. I would rather have liked to see the hallowed fake limb but we had no time. ITV wouldn't pay for visits to great houses and, besides, I was meeting a man about some salt.

I found him waist-deep on an unprepossessing beach. He was peering into an instrument that measured the salinity of the water in his inlet pipe. “Halen Môn” produces an upmarket condiment extracted from the strait. I was a little surprised by this news.

“Surely, I said, swinging a hand over the horizon, “that's Caernarfon over there”. They have pipes leading down to the water too, don't they? Aren't they, ahem, putting stuff in as opposed to taking it out.”

David was not fazed. “The water here is exceptionally pure, salty Welsh seawater,” he assured me, “and the action of the strait and the tide rushing through it effectively…” he chose his words carefully “…flushes it out, on a daily basis.”

We strolled back towards his factory premises. Not bad, considering he originally started with a saucepan on the Aga. Fifteen years before, he had boiled down a pint or so of local seawater to produce some particularly fine-looking crystals; he sold them to a local butcher and now exports to twenty-two countries. David was another incomer. He originally studied at Bangor University across on the mainland, and I congratulated him on staying over to exploit the wild freedoms of Wales.

“Not so free.” He explained. “In fact my pipe crosses the tidal regions to get into deep water and that is the property of the crown. They charge me for extracting the water.”

The Crown Commissioners have become rather commercially minded of late. The water in the sea is not owned by Her Majesty, but a pipe to get at it has to cross the intertidal foreshore and that is.

Nonetheless, seawater was a minor part of David's costs. Inside the sheds was a sequence of evaporating pans. I had to encase myself in a beard snood, a blue net that promised to contain my facial hair as I watched the snowy crystals being shovelled into buckets.

Whether as a result of secret processes or extra salinity, the long white fragile flakes had a crunchy purity that far outshone salt from the mines of Chester, or Siberia, or wherever else we get it these days. I stood quietly to one side in a palely lit enclosure while a member of staff, almost unidentifiable in his snoods, gently lifted crumbling and fragile cascades of the crystals out of the evaporating pans with a shovel.

Môn is part of the Welsh name for Anglesey: “Ynys Môn”, and the syllable derives from the Roman name for the island: Mona. Here they are again, those Romans. They seem to be part of every story round here. Of course, the Romans made salt in their pans by similar methods. Perhaps they had a yen for crunchy condiments too, but I have read that salt is salt. Despite the foodie's delight in Japanese smoked salt or Arctic salt or even Welsh sea salt, it is, essentially, sodium chloride. Or is it?

While we waited to move on towards South Stack, we spent a few minutes in the “showroom”, admiring the pure white pottery jars and the bright blue labels, brilliantly designed to capture the tang of the sea. But it's the crisp and gleaming crystals of the product itself that are really attractive. This is salt with crunch, salt with texture, sodium chloride with some of the magic of natural geometry built into its creation. Halen Môn was taking something industrial and repackaging it for a new upmarket, discerning, sophisticated world here on Anglesey. They even provide a recipe for a pigeon dish, accompanied with chocolate, vanilla Halen Môn and fig marmalade – no help cooking puffins though.

–
JESUS WANTS ME
–

David had offered to take me on to my next appointment and get me that bit closer to South Stack. He started up his 1920s Austin Sunbeam. Jimmy the Jack Russell jumped up on the dickie seat and barked whimpering approval as we rumbled off, through the close-hedged country lanes, across the great flat interior plateau of the island. David extolled his lifestyle. He felt himself lucky to be able to live in such rural bliss, and run a business, cut off from some of the pressures of the mainland.

We pootled on at 20 miles an hour and stopped by a farm gate to make contact with our cameraman. As we stood in the road, some five of us, talking with the owner of the farm, a big black BMW shot round a corner at speed. Far from slowing down, it accelerated towards us, threading its way though us with inches to spare at nearly 50 miles an hour.

“Probably lost tourists,” someone said.

–
WILD LAND ROVERS
–

The tourists may have been looking for the nearby Tacla Taid Museum. That is where we were heading now, the Jack Russell sliding about on uncut claws as we turned into a farm and, next to it, a bare concrete courtyard littered with huge vehicles where David abandoned me. I was pointed towards a big green corrugated iron shed in search of Arfon, the owner.

Arfon was a never-throw-anything-away man, of the best sort. Charming, diffident and the second solidly Welsh person I had met so far on Anglesey, his motor museum, now a successful tourist attraction, had been the only available solution after his private collection of rescued vehicles began to outgrow his garden. Tacla Taid is the largest museum of its kind in Wales.

He started with a tractor. Having learned to drive at the age of eight, at fifteen he was given an old Massey Ferguson, which he rebuilt and then used as his personal transport. Now he greeted me warmly in the middle of a landscape of glinting chrome. We were on the ground floor of the building: a monument to the popular car. There were dozens of Morrises, Citroëns and Rovers. Most of them had been brought in by farmers or local people – nothing too fancy. These weren't Maseratis or Ferraris. There was even the brother to my dad's old Morris Oxford, in exactly the same shade of grey.

“They are essentially simple pieces of technology,” Arfon told me. “That's their great virtue. You lift a bonnet now and it is all sealed away, but in the old days you could repair any car if you had a mind to it.”

Or any vehicle, I assumed. On the upper level of the shed stood an array of tractors. “Ah yes,” I said boldly, “Tractor heaven. I have one of these at home.” I proudly slapped my hand on to the flimsy metal engine-cover of a Massey Ferguson.

“That's a 1956 petrol-driven Massey.” Arfon said.

“Oh.” I was abashed. “Mine's a diesel-driven 1963.”

‘You mean one like this,” said Arfon. He took me over to another vehicle, three tractors down the row.

But I wasn't there to admire the tractors, or the huge military cranes, or the two Vauxhall Carltons – ugly beasts from the nineties, which were developed to be the fastest full four-seater cars on the road and still brought a tear to Arfon's eye (nothing Italianate about them, I guessed). I was there to find a humble “Land Rover Series One.” Sure enough, Arfon had a fine specimen. A stout green box on wheels, standing by the shed door.

This vehicle, which revolutionised life for the British farmer, was born here in Anglesey. It started as a notion of Rover's chief engineer Maurice Wilks. He originally drew a sketch of his concept in 1947 in the sand of Red Wharf Bay, a few miles from where we stood. He took a Rover engine and stuck it into the jeep and tested the thing in Tros Yr Afon. The hybrid, all-terrain workhorse rumbled on its way. Over four million have subsequently been made. 65 percent are still working.

I was expecting the first model to be a brutish thing, ready to clamber up the 700-foot mountains of Anglesey, but it felt oddly slight.

While Arfon's helper raised the shutters for us, I guided the Land Rover out and onto the road, heading west for South Stack. The gear stick needed an element of gentlemanly negotiation, like a drunk being persuaded to go in through the door. You didn't want to push too hard. Just help it in the general direction and, yup, it got there. The cabin seemed to be a little loose on the chassis, but that was a natural wobble.

Arfon sat beside me, beaming with pleasure at the sheer excellence of the thing. He loved its straightforwardness. He revelled in its quiet purposefulness. He chuckled out loud as a man on a bicycle defiantly overtook us and he urged me on, as we came down the hill to a deserted beach, mounted over a mini dune, and slithered across a bank of stones down towards the sea.

“Are we going to do this?” I asked.

“That's what she's made for,” he said.

I stopped on the sand.

When we needed to do it all over again for the camera, several times, Arfon was happy to leap out and adjust the differential locks on the wheels. He let me dig her out of a spin and run her back and forth on the perilous descent. She still had plenty of muscle in her, but not in a showy way, just quietly capable, even if a push-bike was faster. And, clearly, that was what Arfon admired most of all. She was “proper”.

I stood back and watched as Arfon reversed her one more time and drove away up the hill: Welsh grunt.

–
LIME WASH
–