Here Be Dragons

As you would expect, I take quite a few photographs whenever we're away, although probably nowhere near as many as the typical keen and committed photographer: this time about 250 in all, spread over seven days in mid-Wales, using two cameras. This is unusually low, even for me, but it was in part due to the weather. April in these parts is supposed to be unsettled, unpredictable, and notoriously wet – "April showers" are proverbial, and snow is not unexpected in upland areas – which leads to interesting atmospheric conditions, which creates interesting light, which means interesting photographs. Instead, we've had the driest April since the Triassic, and steady bright sunshine. Which means boring photographs. The shot above shows our residence for the week: detailed and informative, like a well-lit film set, which is excellent if you're an estate agent selling the place, but not otherwise. However, we do what we can. In some ways it's been an interesting challenge, photographing the Welsh Borders as if we were in the Dordogne.

A favourite walk is a curious valley near Llandrindod Wells known as Shaky Bridge. The original shaky bridge over the river Ithon is long gone – from old photos, it seems to have been on of those lashups of cable and planks that you see spanning gorges in the Andes – but it's a beautiful and haunting spot, once dominated by Cefnllys Castle, now just some grassy bumps at the top of a very steep climb. In the valley below lies St. Michael's church (Llanfihangel Cefnllys), also ancient, situated on a small hill and surrounded by a circle of yews thought to be at least 1000 years old. Llanfihangel in Welsh is "St. Michael's", and a local legend maintains that this is one of four churches dedicated to that Satan-stomping archangel set in a protective circle around the Radnor Forest [1] (Llanfihangel Cefnllys, Llanfihangel Rhydithon, Llanfihangel Nant Melan, and Llanfihangel Cascob) in order to contain the last dragon in Wales, lying asleep beneath the hills. The legend states that the dragon will awake if any of the four churches were to be destroyed. There has to be a Netflix mini-series there, wouldn't you say? And, no, M & S did not label their underwear "Llanfihangel" in Wales [2].

In the churchyard at Llanfinhangel Cefnllys are some lovely old gravestones, with inscriptions ranging from exquisitely engraved lettering to cartoonishly folksy representations of angels and, on the one below, a resurrected body rising from its coffin like Superman. An interesting detail I'd never noticed before is that a number of the stones are signed at the bottom by (I presume) their maker, but at a level that would be beneath ground in the usual upright configuration.

Another customary walk goes up to this recumbent stone lying near the summit of a hill, Bryn y Maen, close by the lake at Llandeilo. Unusually, despite its obvious antiquity, it is not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps, although an alignment of four upright stones in the valley beneath is marked and named as "Four Stones". This is possibly because it cannot be seen from the most obvious paths: mapping these upland areas in the 19th century must have been a thankless task, and the accuracy of even the oldest OS sheets is generally nothing less than astonishing. One of these days I must get around to reading a book we have describing how it was done (Map of a Nation: a biography of the Ordnance Survey, by Rachel Hewitt).

Towards the end of the week the weather did not so much break as crumble. The air trapped near ground-level by high pressure gradually became more murky – I've never seen so much dust kicked up at this time of year – and obscured the clear sunshine, filling the valleys with pearly mist. That bump on the faint horizon in the shot below is The Whimble, a small peak in the Radnor Forest. Who knows, that may even be where the legendary last dragon sleeps. Certainly, odd dragonish stuff goes on round here: mid-Wales, the Brecon Beacons, and Herefordshire are the playgrounds of Britain's special forces. Near this particular spot, some years ago, we saw an unmarked black Dakota flying low and slow through the valley. This time, we saw two peculiar-looking military craft flying close together and extremely low, which I later identified as V-22 Ospreys.

One notable absence, though, was the heart-stopping roar of low-flying fighter-jets, which used to regularly pop up out of nowhere: perhaps they're busy scattering livestock or worse elsewhere in the world. Certainly, one constant sight all week – much more noticeable in these days of minimal civilian air traffic – was a steady procession of parallel con-trails, aircraft flying in pairs and threes, all heading west at high altitude and at a slow, steady speed. Socially-distanced, of course.

1. The Radnor Forest is not an area of woodland, but a bleak, treeless bump of upland.

2. Marks & Spencer is a chain-store in the UK, whose own-brand goods used to be labelled "St. Michael", leading to various jokes about nocturnal visitations from a self-declared angel with his name sewn into his underpants.