Once there was only one wolf left in Wales. By chance or cunning it found the quietest place to live. It did not haunt the wild coasts of Ceredigion, nor the mountain fastnesses of Berwyn and Eryri – the wolves had long been cleared from there. Instead, it roamed the hills above Cregrina, coming down to drink at the gentle Edw stream. But this couldn’t last. In the modern, post-medieval world, with a new Tudor dynasty and the Reformation round the corner, there was no place for wolves even in Radnorshire and so it was killed, five hundred years ago. They brought the body down from Penarth woods, cut off its forepaws and nailed them to the door of St David’s church.
Well, that was half a millennium ago. At Penarth, where the wolf was killed, there is, as is now the custom in mid-Wales, a barn holding sixteen thousand chickens, almost a thousand for every human inhabitant of the village. But otherwise, it’s still quiet. Every few minutes, a van goes by, couriers or utility companies, sometimes a tractor. The road is the route to the wider world for the people of the next village, Rhulen – but only ten people live there. Once, the cattle drovers came through Cregrina, bringing news from Tregaron or Leominster, even London. Three huge pines signal a drovers’ inn, but the Black Lion closed in 1906 and the smithy next door soon after. Now there’s a short sprawl of pragmatically unlovely new houses along the road. As I walked by, an old man in football shirt and baseball cap was carefully watering his tarmac.
Cregrina is quiet. In Hay, the town barely ten miles south, few have heard of it. When I told a friend there I was going to Cregrina (and explained where it was), she said, not unappreciatively, it was ‘miles and miles of nothingness’...
...but when I arrived there were hops and honeysuckle, wild roses, sloes and blackberries in the hedges; and below them in the scrubby verge tormentil, hawkbits, hogweed and foxgloves; cranesbills, stitchwort, herb robert and yarrow; loosestrife, lungwort, lords and ladies; willows, willowherb and grass, and meadowsweet and nipplewort; rough chervil, wild basil, knapweed, betony, goose grass, campion; cat’s ear and stonecrop, St John’s wort and woundwort, tufted vetch, kidney vetch and scores of other flowers I’m much too dull to know.
This is not nothingness; it’s a sliver of everythingness, which is why Cregrina is there. Origins show through. Oxford grew around the idea of learning, Birmingham trade, Bristol the sea – even centuries later as you walk the streets, you can feel that essence linger. Cregrina grew out of holiness, and that still lingers too.
In early medieval England, a settlement would form and gradually the elements of village life, including the church, accrue. Here in Wales the pattern was different. Some nameless saint or other would pick his spot. It wasn’t hard to find somewhere quiet – there weren’t any noisy options. Long departed pagan druids had already, after their fashion, sanctified llannau, enclosures steeped in the holiness bestowed by hills and rocks and trees, and equally serviceable to the saint and his new faith. He needed consecrated ground for burials, with water (but raised above the flood-line). Somewhere out of the wind might be nice (or not, depending on his ascetic temperament). There he could live and pray, worshipping God in all he did. He would baptise, bury and minister to the scattered population, migrating from hafod to hendref in their summer and winter pastures. His hermitage in time became a church, mud and timber giving place to stone and, by 1300 or so, to the building still quietly hidden among the ancient yews above the river. There the people would come from their distant farms to worship, celebrate the Christian feasts, and by these weekly meetings slowly become some sort of community.
These churches have no aspirational spire or tower, just a little bell-loft; they did not celebrate the glory of God. What could Cregrina know of glory? They were built to honour a God who made us in His image and sent every storm or sunbeam, blight or harvest, an awesome but intimate presence in our lives. Historians find it difficult to date them even within a century, because the local builders weren’t interested in trends. The thing just needed to work, and they’d no more think of changing a church to follow a fashion, than change the way they swung a scythe or killed a pig. God was the same yesterday, today and always, so were practicalities. But each church has evolved its own particular atmosphere. Rhulen feels like God’s study, silent, holy, a place you can linger for hours. Llanbadarn-y-Garreg is as simple but with a vaguely alarming austerity.
Cregrina feels domestic, a place where the people come on Sunday and hope that God will come too. Architectural historians miss all this: ‘The nave, which may be C13, was much restored in 1903, and not very well,’ writes one. It wasn’t made with his approval in mind; it was made for the land out of which it grows, for God and for the local people. So, it is no coincidence that it has a slight air of farmhouse kitchen; sockets and heaters, random tables, empty cupboards, with good farming commonsense and no ecclesiastical chic: a cheap desk lamp sits atop the pulpit, another on the organ. Between (monthly) services a poly bag is popped over the cross in the East window to keep it untainted by the bat-shit that lightly dusts all other surfaces.
The chancel doesn’t align with the nave – that’s often the case, perhaps representing Christ on the cross, his head lolled to one side – but it doesn’t quite align with the altar either. Everything is askew, but perhaps that is appropriate. I haven’t much idea of what heaven is like, but down here life depends on inexactitude. Without what scientists call ‘mutations’ or ‘failures’ of the DNA molecule to replicate itself precisely, it would certainly be a very dull world, and possibly by now a lifeless one. If we’re happy to walk, talk, think, have sex, in short, be more than single-celled organisms, we have inexactitude to thank. ‘Error’ is the pulse of the living world, precision a human fad. The divine delights in near misses. Deliberately or not, Cregrina’s wonkiness is a fitting offering to God.
I know, of course, what my friend meant by ‘nothingness’; she had worked for some years in London. Cregrina may have twice the acreage of the City but it lacks its 600,000 workers. It’s always been insignificant from a social, hierarchical and anthropocentric view, but that is a perspective that never seemed relevant here, where labour is physical and unconceptual, where lambs and cattle and bracken and grass are more vitally alive than distant politicians. Why would anyone think they lived in a backwater when every week they shared a house with God, who cared for the fowls of the air, the lilies of the field and, they must hope, for them?
The early church was urban too, bishops in their cities making proclamations, but here the plashing of the Edw and the wind in the woods drowned out episcopal decrees. Even now, St David’s Cregrina doesn’t feel like a branch of some multinational concern. Doubtless the bishop has paid a visit but Cregrina has always existed for the place, the community and God. Its loyalties are local and cosmic, to elemental realities and not to institutions which are only man-made things.
The poet Patrick Kavanagh explains the importance of this local attentiveness:
Parochialism and provincialism are opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis - towards which his eyes are turned - has to say on any subject. This runs through all activities. The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals.
We are all provincial now, all hearkening for news from elsewhere, what the influencers say. We live through our phones, where community means ‘friends’ we have never met but who ‘like’ us by pressing a key, where landscape is something for Instagram, and God.......well, God is obsolete as a landline.
So, is it provocative to invoke holiness in this ‘post-everything’ age? According to Ruskin, the word’s roots lie in health and wholeness, both abundantly present here, now as they have always been. The congregation and every creature from the bats to the tormentil in some way understand this. Perhaps the farmers, the walkers, the tarmac-waterer too? No one imagines that Anglicanism is the only valid approach: ‘However people come to me, even so do I welcome them, for the path they take from every side is mine,’ says Krishna.
At the funeral of one Cregrina priest in 1894, a weary fellow vicar preached,
‘The Church has her work to perform in the quiet, almost unheard of country districts, as well as in the busy towns. It is a work lacking all romance and excitement. Yet there are souls to be fed, to be cared for, and thither the Church sends her priests, where, oftentimes misunderstood. oftentimes disheartened, they live and die.’
There’s a retrenchment now, an understanding that religious revival isn’t coming. There’s no need to shift the defunct harmonium; it isn’t in the way. Shiny super-slickness isn’t going to fill the place; even if the entire village came, there’d be lots of empty pews. The current curators just need (and they know the importance of the duty) to keep the thing going and trust the rest to God. So, the pulpit needs a desk lamp, visitors need warning that the door can jam, the bat-shit must be hoovered and there must be flowers, wild ones and garden ones to speak of the sacred land that sustains us all. Everywhere there is the sign of work – from medieval chisel marks on the tie-beams to the smell of the newly mown grass in the churchyard – ceaseless centuries of dedication. It is a deeply human place.
‘But thou Bethlehem, though thou be little...’ Old Testament prophets knew that size didn’t matter, that this isn’t a numbers game. The artist Christopher Neve, writing of Sickert’s habit of setting up his easel anywhere and painting whatever was in front of him, wrote
‘The ordinary landscape, the ordinary street seen like any street as though from a bus stop at no particular time of day or time of year, is suddenly recognisable as being significant, as significant in a way as the chosen view, the particular place, the exceptional building. It is not a point of view that, in the normal course of life, is at all easy to grasp: the realization that the world bears down equally on everything and everyone, that the most everyday landscape and the most predictable tree or hill or patch of sky are in some mysterious way good and tragic and amusing and entirely worthy of celebration.’
Cregrina is not the middle of nowhere; on the contrary, it is the middle of everywhere, and so is everywhere else. Each of us is the centre of this polycentric universe. Other animals know this: the sparrows in the hedge are not provincial, nor do dippers think they’d make more of their lives if they relocated to the Thames. The hierarchies we like to invent are just divisive fantasies. The grace of God (if such a thing exists), the sun, the rain, the truths of life – and death – fall equally upon us. We are all related and each of us is unique. London could be described as ‘miles and miles of nothingness’ if an obsession with meaningless economic activity can be called ‘nothingness’ as perhaps it can, but there’s no point in being combative – it’s not a competition, and there’s more to London than noise as there’s more than quiet in Cregrina. The Londoner, like the rest of us, needs to know that their validity is rooted in who they are and not the borrowed glamour of their metropolitan environment, well-paid job, contacts list, possessions or any exterior attribute. Wherever we live, it is our witness to the world that matters. Significance is not something we accumulate by influencing others; it is a quality we all receive at birth.
The air is so clear here that lichen obliterate the names on the graves within a century or so. How much better to persist as a living artwork than as a chiselled name long forgotten. The uniqueness of our lives, each of us finding a different way of meeting our common needs, gives an ever-varied continuity to our witness. The door which 500 years ago dripped with lupine gore, today bears an official notice ‘Ministry Area of Irfon, Wye and Edw: Preparation of New Electoral Roll’. The severed paws were not nailed there in some spirit of Celtic voodoo; they were a message to an illiterate population that the big, bad wolf was dead, that their children and flocks would be safe now. The fading piece of paper is the same information service in our more bureaucratic age. Community, God and the land.
I enjoyed this piece, thank you! I was very interested in your story of the last wolf in Wales: there is also a story, or legend or myth, of the last wolf in England. I've tried to copy an image of the book but haven't yet attained that level of IT know-how....you may be able to find The Last Wolf by Mrs.(!) Jerome Mercier online somewhere. I share your appreciation for Cregrina with my own for the setting of Mrs Mercier's adventure.
I look forward to reading your substacks very much, thanks again.