Insufficiently Welsh (19 page)

On the side of a steep hill where a landowner had planted a stand of Douglas fir to provide emergency pit-props for an industry that no longer needs such things, an ex-marine has finally found another use for them. He has built a tree-top training circuit.

The towering pines stand on a steep slope. Douglas firs are known for their height; indeed the tallest tree in Wales used to be a Douglas fir standing at 60 metres tall in a forest in Powys. I climbed a ladder and got myself up onto a platform. A series of interlinking bridges, ropes and beams took a level route away through the uniform field of trunks. The first platform was not very high. This was cunning. It gave a false sense of limited insecurity.

Having been strapped into a safety harness (with a line on my back attached to a wire, to hold me from falling a few feet, no great distance anyway), I clumsily followed a bunch of twelve year olds as they scampered across the beam, swung out on a rope and skipped across a swinging, battened bridge. They went at agitated lemur speed. I was the sloth. I clambered after them, hanging on to every handhold with a steely grip, and very slowly wobbling across a prostrate log. It was a small circuit and it brought me back to where I had started. Not too demanding. This was clever.

It was just a test: a mere trial. The real course set off in another direction altogether. Any guidance I might have got from those in front of me disappeared with a giggle and a patter of training shoes somewhere in the gloom of the trunks ahead. I turned. The boy following me was looking resigned. He couldn't overtake. He was doomed to follow a terrified old man who had lost his sense of balance. He had to wait as this feeble, cautious, cowardly, cack-handed, hesitant, weak-kneed crock wobbled his way across the course.

It was ghastly. I knew I was tied on. I knew that a slip would have merely resulted in an uncomfortable wallop to an undignified trussing, but my brain didn't appreciate that. Each step felt entirely wrong. And there were some complicated steps.

There was the row of hanging tyres. I had to place each foot in one loosely dangling tyre after another and step across. There was the slack rope, with just two dangling bits of string with which to support myself. There was the straight narrow beam that I had to cross like a tightrope. There was the row of free swinging logs. These were in the horizontal position, and then, wait a minute, the row of free swinging logs in the vertical position. And then… How long was this course?

There were an estimated 86,000,000 visits to woodlands in Wales in 2011, and walking was the main activity undertaken by these visitors. None of them walked as slowly as me and I began to realise that the obstacles ahead stretched away to the crack of doom, somewhere on the other side of the plantation. Each stage was taking me about 10 minutes.

The little boy behind me was looking increasingly rueful. Each obstacle was getting higher. Or rather, the ground was getting further away, because we were effectively traversing out across the slope and by now the ground was 30 feet below and the slack wires that had to be negotiated were slacker.

Jason the ex-marine was standing way below me. His massive hams of shoulders had become mere quail legs surmounted by a shaven pimple. This was his head from which emanated advice. “Lean out!!” he called.

Lean out? I couldn't release the hold on the branch I was next to. If you ever wondered whether you were a tree-hugger, try this assault course. You will embrace trees far more fervently than you have ever hugged your children. Never has a warm, red, fat trunk seemed so comforting and cosy.

“Reach out for the next rope beyond!!” That was another favourite instruction, hollered up from somewhere in the void, and not bad advice when the grip on the rope I had in my hand was faltering so badly.

“I think I may be having a heart attack.”

“No, no, you're doing fine!”

Well, what the hell did he know? Jason was barely visible now. And I wasn't going to look down anyway.

I had the presence of mind, if not to bleat, then at the least to address my director in a hollow tone. “I do think we have probably got enough of this by now,” I croaked.

“Oh yes, undoubtedly,” Chris shouted back.

“Shall I come down?”

“There's no way down,” Jason shouted. “You have to go on to the end to get down.”

“You are quite right, though,” Chris shouted. “We'll get the camera up to the end. Hang on there.”

This was a fairly redundant instruction. I was hanging already. Whether I could sustain my dangling was mere conjecture on his part. I pressed on, with the lemur behind me skipping across in seconds, and finally, after three impossible bridges and two suicidal ones, I reached a final platform high in the upper branches of a straight Douglas fir that was now swaying perceptibly in the breeze.

Francesca, the course instructor, was waiting for me. She could have taken a course in advanced astrophysics and a PhD while she did so. “OK. So the way down is very quick,” she explained. We were standing on a minute wooden platform. “I am just attaching this cable to your harness. You can't feel it but it comes into action as you fall and slows your descent.”

“What descent?”

“You just have to step off.”

I looked down. The forest floor was a long way below. This was a demanding “step”. A number of people were looking up at me. They were barely discernible.

“I'm not sure I can.”

“Yes, it's easy,” said Francesca firmly.

I intrinsically believed her. My operational intelligence understood that this well-respected tourist attraction would be shut down if their automatic descent-arresting wire failed on a regular basis. But my body was now beyond rationality. I was required to step off into the void. I couldn't do it. I have lowered myself off skyscrapers, climbed north faces and abseiled down ventilation shafts, all in the name of television “jeopardy”, but this was one small step for a man and one giant step for an abject coward. Not since the top board at High Beech swimming pool at the age of eight had I felt so challenged in my bowels.

And then from some 60 feet I sensed a growing impatience somewhere down below. Well, bugger that. I went.

I don't believe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or that “Geronimo!” stuff. I didn't make a great whoop. I might have whimpered. I walked off like a man on the scaffold. Whoosh. Clunk. And I fell to my instant death.

Er… no. In truth, I whizzed down to land perfectly safely just like everybody else. An unseen hand grabbed me from behind and slowed my descent. Not so slow, however, that I didn't feel an appreciable jar when I hit the ground. I forgot to bend my knees.

Jason slapped me on the back. But, as I smiled weakly and nodded pathetically, in my peripheral vision I could just make out that six year old who had followed me. He was giving me a surprisingly adult look.

–
ANTIQUE SHOPS
–

The village of Llangernyw straddles the main A548 between Llanrwst and Llanfair Talhaiarn. There's a church and a big, busy pub, a tiny shop and a few houses scattered at the crossroads. The river Elwy glides through quietly and the road noisily. I was there to look at another tree, but as I passed I noticed that there was an unusually discreet antique shop tucked a little way up the southern road. At last, some chance of making contact with north Walian furniture. I was almost trembling as I pushed the door open.

It was a small room and a crowded one. A good moment, when the gloom settles and the eye ranges around: a quick assessment followed by a longer careful trawl.

Perhaps the real antiques have all gone by now. These days junk seems to get offloaded from an Eastern Europe Euro-Antique frontier. Beaten-up, wormy, crudely-painted boxes that look as if they might have been for the house pig are stacked on tables with oddly short legs, sawn down because the bottoms had rotted away with endless sluicing of some hovel's floor.

What I was looking for is called “country furniture” by the trade: the plainer the better. I was seeking straightforward Welsh objects made with good oak or fruitwood, with a strong, warm colour acquired over many years. It would be heavy; if there was imperfection, so much the better. One of the experts we spoke to about Welsh dressers told us that you can often tell if a dresser is authentic by the back panelling. When they were first made, craftsmen used any scrap of wood they could get and, as such, the panels were not uniform. Mass production of course changed all this and many back panels were replaced with new mass-produced planks as damp cottage and farmhouse walls rotted the wood over the years.

I doubt very much that the average Welsh farmhouse was furnished to look like “World of Interiors”, with beautiful spare pieces in a shaft of light on a worn stone floor. Photographs taken at the beginning of the twentieth-century show kitchens that look like chaotic, dirty pubs. Hundreds of jugs hang from the ceiling and wild, gap-toothed inhabitants are crouched down amongst highly polished pieces of copper in dark, almost black caves. The furniture can barely be glimpsed in the gloom. And yet they had it. And they bought it locally.

Here in Llangernyw, I immediately noticed that there was no dresser on display. I was struck, however, by two eighteenth-century, long-case clocks, sometimes called “grandfather clocks”. They were standing against the wall. The usual cumbersome large “head” holding the clock-face was balanced on a coffin-sized box, with a door in front, where the pendulum swung.

I knew the type well, because, naturally enough, we have a similar one in my family. It is in my Pembrokeshire dining room. My mother had presented it to me with the usual forceful ritual. It came from my father's “side” and bore the legend “Cardigan” on its decorated face. I was proud to have it in Wales. Like myself, it had come home. After all, Cardigan was only 25 miles from my little farmhouse.

I peered closely at the face of the clock in the shop. It had “Llanrwst” painted on it. “That's close to here, isn't it?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” said Bethan, the owner, from behind her counter, barricaded into the corner by stacked furniture. “It's the next village up the road.”

I was impressed. “And the other one?”

“That's from Abergele. Just down the other way.”

This was truly local. Here were two pieces of relatively complicated furniture, the same basic idea, but with individual and identifiable personal variations, made within a few miles of where I was standing.

“So did you go to auctions to retrieve these and bring them back to the district?” I asked.

“Oh no.” She seemed amused by the notion. “They both came from local farmhouses.”

Bethan and her husband, who repaired the stuff they sold, rarely visited auctions and certainly never got on the road to go trawling through Romanian or Montpellier markets. Both of the clocks came from local families who had passed them down by inheritance and now found that they really had no need or perhaps space for them. Bethan had been asked to sell them. She acquired all her stock by similar methods.

I was excited. This was the vindication of the Welsh furniture story. Not only were the pieces proper heirlooms, which had stayed and been polished in the locality, they were made by local cabinet-makers.

“There were seven clockmakers at one time in Llanrwst,” Bethan pointed out. It was a tiny place. “There was one in this village too.” Llangernyw was even tinier.

We speculated on how the system worked. They had probably sent off to Birmingham for the clock mechanism, which was painted up in some little slum factory. Perhaps that factory provided, as a service, the name of the village of origin under the views of castles or roses (or, for the more elaborate mechanisms, entire seascapes with square rigged ships flying flags under rotating mechanical moons.) The local man then sawed the planks of oak and constructed the case. And of course every modern, model farmhouse, with staff to set to work and cows to milk, needed a clock in their parlour.

They probably needed a fine heavy “coffer” or chest to keep blankets in too. She had one from a local farm. And they might have needed a strong “carver”, or well-made armchair, in heavy sawn (not turned) oak. She had one of those. The farmers would have needed a court cupboard, possibly something fine and highly carved. There was one against the back wall, though we both shook our heads over that, because it was a little too refined. There were lustre jugs, which went on shelves to twinkle in the fire and Staffordshire dogs, often won at fairs (and called fairings as a result) which would have added to the shiny clutter. All these things I noted and rather wanted, but there wasn't any sign of that other staple, the dresser.

“Oh, we do get them,” said Bethan, reassuringly, implying that, if I just hung around for a few years, some nearby family would tire of theirs and call her in.

She didn't really want to discuss prices. It was a bad time. Five years before, the market had been strong, but during the recession it had collapsed. In truth she wondered whether the demand would ever come back. Black oak was not as fashionable as it had been. Most people weren't trying to fake up a romantic olde-worlde atmosphere like me. They preferred wipe-clean Ikea. She was perfectly aware, though, that there were still collectors who honed in on really good items. And I knew what she meant. The authentic, sturdily-made piece of country furniture is a lovesome thing. I have no doubt that when Bethan gets her dresser it will be the real thing. But I didn't have years to wait.