Blest is the Eye, twixt Severn and Wye

It’s cold in the Forest of Dean. It was bitter yesterday and usually is, in my memory. When as a child I would visit my grandfather in Cinderford at Christmas, my father would, with weary resignation, announce that we were off to Cinderberia. Bed-sheets were like ice-sheets and I would awake to Jack Frost’s crystal etchings upon the window panes.

Yesterday, winter had yet to come to the Wye Valley. The leaves were still on the trees, in all shades of red and brown, yellow and evergreen. The first landmark north of Chepstow is Tintern Abbey, the first of 15 Cistercian houses in Wales. It was the remote and rugged world the Cistercians were seeking and they were what Wales needed at the time. Their austere piety harked back to the world of saintly hermits who had inhabited the post-Roman twilight; their political skills were soon at the disposal of Welsh princes and marcher lords in their struggles against each other and against the Anglo-Norman kings. And they suffered in the process. It was a Cistercian monastery at Aberconwy, burial-place of the princes of Gwynedd, that Edward I removed to build the castle and walled town of Conway (though he did pay for a replacement).

One of those buried at Tintern Abbey was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the lord of Raglan Castle, beheaded in 1469 for siding the wrong way in the Wars of the Roses. It was his descendant, the 9th Duke of Beaufort, of Badminton in south Gloucestershire, who, to pay death duties, in 1901 sold the Abbey and its lands back to the Crown in the shape of His Majesty’s Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, today represented by the Forestry Commission.

Crossing into England, one soon reaches St Briavels. The village castle (left) has much older links with the Crown, having been for centuries the administrative and judicial headquarters of the Royal Forest of Dean. The stone hunting horn that sits atop a chimney (below) reminds all who pass by.

In mediæval times, the miners of the Forest served in the Scots wars of Edward I (him again), doing good service in undermining the walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed during a siege. This may have been the occasion for a grant of mining rights in the Forest still maintained today, though it is also claimed that the rights exist “tyme out of mynde”. To be a freeminer it is necessary to be born in the Hundred of St Briavels and to have worked underground there for a year and a day. It is no easy qualification, now that the local maternity unit has been removed to Gloucester, far beyond the hundredal boundary. The freeminers vigorously defend their rights, which have persisted before, during and after nationalisation. The first Chief Executive of the Coal Authority had a rough time of it on visiting the Forest in 1996 when the freeminers protested, strongly but unsuccessfully, against the imposition of new licences and regulations they had managed well without.

The church at St Briavels is dedicated to St Mary. No doubt the Celtic saint was there first, ousted by the Norman abbey of Lire who took over after the Conquest and rebuilt the church in the late 12th century. One of the mouldings over an arched doorway ends in a primitive, snarling dragon’s head. The village pub is the George, its blazing log fire a welcome respite from the weather.

The next place to St Briavels is called Mork. No sign of Mindy though.

North of St Briavels lies Newland. It was new around the 12th century, when land was being assarted out of the primæval woodland. If St Briavels was the secular heart of the mediæval Forest regime, then Newland was its sacred counterpart. The church (below) is known as ‘the cathedral of the Forest’, an apt description for a vast interior that is a heavy burden for a now tiny parish. The mediæval Forest had no churches of its own, being extra-parochial, and it was from Newland that priests would set out into the clearings to minister to mining communities in the form of the ‘Morrow Mass’. All Saints, Newland houses the memorials of the royal officials whose job it was to protect the ‘vert and venison’ from the covetous common folk, whose ancestors no doubt once helped themselves to nature’s bounty without fear of challenge.

The range of unusual monuments to unusual people is the chief charm of All Saints. A forester, a bowman, a miner. Knights and their ladies. Priests in their vestments. Marble plaques, extolling the virtues of later gentry and judges, occupy a chantry chapel founded by Edward I (him yet again). Nearby, hatchments hang on the walls. The churchyard is peppered with the fine stone tombs of yeoman farmers.

A board lists the headmasters of the local grammar school, from 1447 until its closure in 1968. How could one decade, between 1965 and 1975, have witnessed such an orgy of institutional destruction? Ancient schools, ancient boroughs, ancient courts, ancient counties, all swept away with many a plea to retain even the most harmless links with the past rebuffed. This was the cross-party handiwork of a generation born between wars that were fought for an England considered worth defending. This is how they did it and now so many ask where society has gone. The search for novelty seems, bizarrely, a peculiar affliction of secondary education, hallowed ethos regularly sacrificed to zealous reorganisation at the drop of a White Paper.

The school’s first founders were local landowners, the Greyndours. J.K. Rowling, growing up in these parts, perhaps passed this way. Is Greyndour the inspiration for Griffindor? It seems too good to be coincidence.

Opposite the church door stands a row of 17th century almshouses, now empty and undergoing severe renovation. After nearly 400 years, the sole trustee of the charity, the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, put them up for sale, to re-invest the proceeds in another charity they manage in Monmouth. You just can’t trust those City types with anything these days.

Last call of the day was Ross-on-Wye. The town’s grandest buildings are quintessential Herefordshire – pink sandstone, black-and-white half-timber. Its more modest buildings and streets though could be anywhere in the Welsh marches – Chepstow, Abergavenny, Monmouth, and on up to Ludlow and Shrewsbury – little towns little altered since the 18th century.

The A40 leads, through a string of unchanging villages, to Gloucester and the unquestionable modernity of the M5. Despite all the devastation that has befallen the city in recent decades, the cathedral tower of the one-time St Peter’s Abbey still dominates the skyline, as sure a landmark today as for merchants and pilgrims in centuries past. Controlling what was long the land route to south Wales, Gloucester has been a pivotal city since Roman times, its earls and dukes the close advisers and often relatives of kings and queens. It was at Gloucester in 1085 that William the Bastard held court and commissioned the Domesday Book. At such a crossroads of the kingdom it is easy to see why. Conquerors come and go but geography persists and analysing it is the key to success of many kinds.