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                                                                      2009 EVENTS                                                                            

The Society Conference 2009 

The Hand Hotel, Llangollen

Friday 21st August to Sunday 23rd August

“Ravishing Limbo”

The last Conference double DVD, Llangollen 2009, is available.

[Discussing the stage adaptation of Dostoievsky’s “The Idiot” at Llangollen]  

2009 Conference webpage

CONFERENCE WALKS TO VALLE CRUCIS AND MYNYDD Y GAER

VALLE CRUCIS

“Twas in this Chapter-House I wrote the first sentences of my own Owen Glendower and left it uncorrected because the spirits of those Cistercian monks were inspiring it....”

On Saturday afternoon a group of Conference-goers followed the towpath, a short distance, beside the still waters of the Llangollen canal as far as Pontefrelin and then by field paths with fine views of Bryn Hyfryd and glimpses of the buttresses and arches of the Abbey seen through the trees, to reach the well preserved remains of JCP‘s “scholastic sanctuary in the mountains.”

Links with JCP are very strong here. He visited the Abbey in 1935 with Phyllis and wrote in his diary that he wished to be buried here, beside Glendower’s bard, Iolo Goch. He came here again in 1945 on a holiday with his son, Littleton, who had just been ordained in the Roman Catholic faith. JCP loved the cool interior of the chapter house, and must have found the tranquil riverside location, and the historical connections of the place, as well as its associations with the mother church of St Mael and St Sulien in Corwen very appealing. It was thus here on 24 April 1937 that he began to write Owen Glendower.

The Vale of Llangollen, and the area around Valle Crucis, with its local traditions, myths and stories about King Arthur, and a Grail castle on top of Dinas Bran reminded JCP of Avalon and the Glastonbury legends, just as the monk’s fishpond in the Abbey grounds, the beautiful west front, circular window and rib vaulting of the Chapter House also reminded him of Glastonbury Abbey and the remains of a once prosperous Cistercian abbey in Montacute,

On the way to Valle Crucis green fields and flower filled meadows could be seen reaching down to the edges of the canal leaving space for sheep and cattle to roam freely along its muddy banks. On the other side, the towpath follows the route of the steam railway and the river Dee, connecting, at a point beyond the motor museum, with the Horseshoe Falls and the Chainbridge Hotel, where the river plunges dramatically and noisily over fallen trees and massive boulders. Gaily painted leisure barges, some drawn by horses, now occupy part of the route to Valle Crucis which was once crowded with vessels carrying raw materials to the industrial centres of England.

The views of Dinas Bran, with its foundations “sunk in the mysterious underworld of beyond reality” seen from the two path, or, more prominently, from Coed Hyrddin, the hill on the other side of the road opposite the entrance to the Abbey, leave the visitor with no doubt why JCP thought that this was a very special place. In an essay in Obstinate Cymric, Wales and America, JCP recalled  that: “...never...not even in Glastonbury – have I felt the spirit of what Spengler would call the Spring time of our Faustian culture as powerfully as in this holy ground.”

MYNYDD Y GAER

A small fleet of cars transported other conference-goers further afield to Corwen where our ‘ael’ and goal was the summit of Caer Drewyn -- the impressive Iron Age fortress called by Powys Mynyd Y Gaer – a name which you can also see on a local sign post pointing the way to the hill.

Our route to Corwen took us through a landscape made familiar by repeated readings of Owen Glendower and Porius. Leaving Llangollen we went past the tiny community of Berwyn where the gaunt peaks of the Llantysillio mountain range could be seen in the distance, till we reached the picturesque villages of Glyndyfrdwy and Carrog, passing the heather and bracken filled hilltops of Coed Pen Y Garth, Craig Y Rhos and Coed Bwlch Coch.  Entering Corwen, which JCP in Porius frequently refers to under its other names of “The White Choir” or “The White Circle” we easily found good parking in the middle of town in the rather grandly named Corwen Interchange (a car park with facilities and a bus stop!). We crossed the Dee by a modern bridge. At this point the river is broad and deep. Willows bend low over the surface of the Dee creating shady spots, like the “pools of Cybele”, where lamprey, Atlantic salmon, brown trout and grayling can sometimes be seen. On the clay banks we looked for green woodpeckers and kingfishers that are frequent visitors here. Perhaps further down stream where the river is shallower there might be found a possible location for JCP’s “Ford of Mithras” which Porius uses to get to St Julian’s fountain on the other side.

Ahead the great round mass of Caer Drewyn confronted us. Early fruiting blackberries in the hedgerows suggested Autumn was on its way. The ever-changing late summer light and muted chiaroscuro effect of the variegated colours of yellow, green and purple that covered the surface of the hill refreshed our eyes. The colour schemes of JCP’s Welsh novels devised by Wilson Knight came to mind -- red and gold for Owen Glendower, and silver, grey and dark brown earth colours for Porius.

Beside Corwen Leisure Centre we followed the course of a disused railway path where oak and elms grow thickly and the sound of blackcaps and warblers fill the air with their song, then skirted the edge of Caer Drewyn untill we began to climb steadily up the north side of the hill to a spot near the summit surrounded by the stone walls of the Gaer. Standing on a carpet of bracken, fern and gorse, we surveyed the spreading valley below trying to identify some of the locations in JCP’s novel Porius, in the panoramic view spread out before us. The Dee itself could easily be identified twisting round the town.  We spotted Cae Coed, which JCP explained means “the clearing in the forest” and the meadow he refers to in his abandoned novel Edeyrnion, known locally as “Dol-pur-gresyn” or “the field of unbearable pity” situated beside the original Pont Corwen, constructed in the eighteenth century, and perhaps  another possible location for the “Ford of Mithras”. Could the gap between the trees in the “greenish black” ancient forest opposite us be the Path of the Dead leading to Y Grug, or “The Mound” - the burial place of Iscovan in Porius? Turning north we could see the “Swamp of the Gwyddyl Ffichti”, the village of Gwyddylwern,  and looking down again at Corwen, on the other side of the river, its buildings seemed more like JCP’s “Brythonic dwellings” than modern houses, we could  pick out  Coed Pen Y Pigyn, the hill behind Corwen church, and a favourite destination for JCP on his daily “round” and walk amidst the thick oak woodland above the town.

We debated the location of Snowdon but dark purple edged clouds had suddenly descended and the tops of the mountains were no longer visible, so we could only discern its general direction.  

As we spoke our voices were lost in the vast open space of the Gaer. Approaching the very top of the hill the cry of a buzzard startled me. A raven flapped its wings nearby.  I thought of the croaking raven of Llangar, of Sycarth, Mithrafael and the descent of the Kings of Powys Fadog. I thought of Powys himself, for whom Caer Drewyn never lost its fascination, the omphalos of his imagination. I thought of Powys newly arrived in Corwen, “ a wayfarer from Dorset”, ascending the “purgatorial mount”, situated high above the Dee Valley, and making his way to the ruins of an abandoned shooting lodge, called Liberty Hall, built in the early twentieth century by a local landowner, Lord Northborough. Here JCP erected stone “stele” – memorials for family and friends  - “a regular burying ground of my Dead Heroes and Glory Ground of my Living Ones!” he told Katie.  From here JCP looked back across the river at the Gaer. In his mind he had already filled “the absolute blank” of Dark Age history with his own self-created stories and invented characters.

The Gaer, empty now, felt however preternaturally alive. The buzzard and the raven had fallen silent. The sound of the wind in the thorn trees and bracken was all that accompanied our descent to the car park. Somehow I felt that the past and the present were not so far apart. The image of the Mithraic Sun God, the lion headed figure encircled by a serpent, the deos leontocephalus, the god of time and eternity worshipped in the Hellenic mystery religions, whose statue Porius glimpses in the Cave of Mithras, but which left his “religious sensibility” quite cold, rose up, fleetingly, in my mind, then disappeared, and I thought I understood what Powys had meant: “As the old gods were departing then so the old gods are departing now.”

Chris Thomas

---

POWYS DAY

Saturday 9 May, Dorset County Museum, 11.00am

“HARDY, POWYS AND WEYMOUTH”. 

All members of both The Powys Society and The Hardy Society were welcome to join this event and participated in a day of literary discussion combined with an easy ramble beside the Frome and the Cerne.

John Cowper Powys was intimately associated with many of the places mentioned by Hardy in his novels, especially the landscape of the Dorset and Somerset borders, and the hills and valleys and chalk downs around Weymouth and Dorchester.  Powys shared with Hardy similar obsessions about Fate, Destiny and Chance as well as the invisible powers of an unseen First Cause. He took from Hardy his understanding of the interpenetration of character and landscape and especially admired his pessimism, his “imaginitive grandeur”, and ability to render in prose the physical quality of things.

We began our day with a talk by Tony Fincham, Chairman of The Hardy Society, who explored the links between Hardy and Weymouth, the surrounding locations and their representation in Hardy’s work.

Before lunch there was an opportunity to visit the Writer’s Gallery and also the Powys Society Collection in the Dorset County Museum.

In the afternoon we focused on a single chapter of JCP’s novel Weymouth Sands. We studied Chapter 13, Punch and Judy, and examined Powys’s vision of the “Platonic essence” of Weymouth. Written in 1932-1933 when Powys was living in up-state New York, the novel evokes with great intensity the scenes of Powys’s childhood.  The selected chapter also evokes the darker side of Powys’s vision: there is the looming fear of madness, incarceration, and of the sinister scientific experiments that take place in “Hell’s Museum” somewhere on the margins of the town and the chalk downs.  

Our day concludes with a walk in Powys’s footsteps through the water meadows of Dorchester,

In reading Weymouth Sands with its accumulation of animate and inanimate detail we are reminded that, as George Wilson Knight once observed, “to read Powys is to explore creation”.  

Key texts: Weymouth Sands (see elsewhere on this web site for the republication of the novel by Duckworth on 30 April 2009), John Cowper Powys on Thomas Hardy (Powys Society publications).  There are also essays by Powys on Hardy in Visions and Revisions and The Pleasures of Literature.  The April 2009 Powys Society Newsletter includes a further essay by Powys on Hardy, “Thomas Hardy and his Times” reprinted for the first time since its original publication in Current History in 1928.

Powys Day, Saturday 9 May

A Walk to the Blue Bridge

John Cowper Powys dedicated his first novel, Wood and Stone, to Thomas Hardy: “the greatest poet and novelist of our age”. In fact the connections with Hardy seem to have been pivotal to JCP.  He later told Louis Wilkinson that he took from Hardy the ability to see all human feelings and actions against the inanimate background of nature. These interconnected themes provided the focus for a lively discussion of Hardy, Weymouth and Powys at this year’s Powys Day in Dorchester.

Tony Fincham, Chairman of the Hardy Society, introduced us to Hardy’s association with Weymouth and the town that JCP called “the centre of the circumference of my life” while Judith Stinton, author of books about Dorset and its literary connections, led us on a journey deep into the world of the commedia dell arte tradition and the symbolism of Mr Punch in Powys’s Weymouth Sands .

For both men Weymouth was a place of glamour, and happy childhood memories. For Powys, especially, Weymouth was an enchanted place, associated with sensations of ecstasy, and which always seemed to him to be rising magically out of the wide encircling bay - Deadman’s Bay to Hardy.

In the warm afternoon sunlight we later followed in the footsteps of JCP and his dog, The Old, on a gentle ramble beside the clear, swift moving waters of the Frome, bordered on one side by sloping gardens and on the other by a secluded woodland walk and cheery little allotments.

The route passed between Hangman’s Cottage, possibly once the habitation of the town’s public executioner, an abandoned mill stream,  a pair of dilapidated wooden sluice gates, a celandine ditch, and “John’s Pond”, mentioned in Powys’s novel Maiden Castle, and still overgrown with weeds and wild plants.

We paused at the Blue Bridge and gazed, as Powys did, at the willows bent low over the muddy banks of the river Cerne, observed the smooth surface of the pebbles and stones glisten amidst the wavering underwater weeds, saw the thin silver strips of telegraph wires in the next field sparkle in the sun, and stared intently at the spires and towers of St Peters and All Saints silhouetted against the pale blue sky.

From here the lush pastures and verduous green water meadows, filled with yellow cowslips, spread out in all directions. Further on where the path narrows to allow progress to be made only in single file little clumps of hog weed and saxifrage mingled with harebell, and bluebells.

This tranquil and pastoral scene, well known to JCP, evoked a deep sense of timelessness and intense pleasure. This must be one of the most beautiful spots in all of Dorchester. Only the bell like sound of a solitary song bird and the sudden disturbance of the water’s surface by an occasional fish rising up from the sandy bottom of the river broke the perfect stillness of this sleepy little hollow.

The sun had not yet set when we began to retrace our steps and returned to Dorchester via Hennings Gate, amidst the lengthening shadows cast by the chestnut trees, to enjoy a pint of real Dorset ale and reflect on more Powysian subjects.     

Chris Thomas

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John Cowper Powys

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