'Context' - A Blog
A detail from an upcoming painting, 'On Talley Road' ,showing the view down the valley towards LLandeilo much as D.J. Williams may have seen it on the journey to market.
Shaped by a Landscape
11/12/2020
How the author D.J. Williams became shaped by and inextricably linked with a landscape
If one wanted to find an example of a person shaped by a landscape then surely D. J. Williams, author of ‘Hen Dy Ffarm’ (‘The Old Farmhouse’), would be a good one to start with. Hen Dy Ffarm is a fabulous book where the author describes his life growing up in rural Carmarthenshire in the turn of the nineteenth century. The first time I read it was about a year before we finally managed to move here.
He describes the life and colour of his family on their farm in Llansawel and the ways of the local people, with all their quirks and charms. It tells of a way of life rooted in the landscape. Lives inextricably linked up with the inherited sense of a good way of existence, carefully and toilsomely worked out from a not overly forgiving land, over generations.
His stories are mainly of people, but in telling us these and of their motives we gather so much of the intricate web that binds a people to a landscape. A sense of cottage by cottage understanding of the locality shines through and why those who live and work in such a place have such a detailed care for every tiny aspect of their surroundings and those around them.
Although all this has an intrinsic beauty, it is no rural idyll, the sense of the changes past and to come that we can now see as history is there. We are carried back in the oral family history that sweeps back at least as far as the Rebecca Riots, in the early 1840s.
Early in the book, Williams described how as a boy of about six years old he used to ride in the family trap, starting in early morning, to get to the market in Llandeilo, where some of the farm’s produce such as butter was taken to be sold. He recounts the whole journey in great detail, telling how he used to ask his elders for stories of the places on the way and hear about so and so of this farm or of the problems of negotiating some of the steep hills on the way.
Not long after we moved, I noticed that some of the place names on our daily school run seemed strangely familiar and it took me a while to clock why. Then the penny dropped, I went and dug this book off the shelf again. I realised our daily trip to Llandeilo followed almost exactly the same route. Here and there the road has been straightened, some new houses added, but his landscape is mostly all there.
The journey was forever changed for me after that. It was populated by the friendly ghosts of farmers racing their carts to the lime kilns on the edge of the Black Mountain, awkward loads of timber pulled behind straining horses and determined men, an itinerant preacher walking out from Llandeilo, calling for brief sustenance at the various inns on the way (all turned to houses now).
We have since moved from the hills of Llansawel down to the clay lands in Talley, so we only have half the journey these days, but every time I cross the bridge at Halfway, I look over at the old bridge, still there, but part hidden in trees and undergrowth next to the current road. In my mind’s eye, I see on it still a farm trap laden with butter and other bits, and a little boy tucked under a blanket to the morning cold, staring out with wonderment at the world around him.
He describes the life and colour of his family on their farm in Llansawel and the ways of the local people, with all their quirks and charms. It tells of a way of life rooted in the landscape. Lives inextricably linked up with the inherited sense of a good way of existence, carefully and toilsomely worked out from a not overly forgiving land, over generations.
His stories are mainly of people, but in telling us these and of their motives we gather so much of the intricate web that binds a people to a landscape. A sense of cottage by cottage understanding of the locality shines through and why those who live and work in such a place have such a detailed care for every tiny aspect of their surroundings and those around them.
Although all this has an intrinsic beauty, it is no rural idyll, the sense of the changes past and to come that we can now see as history is there. We are carried back in the oral family history that sweeps back at least as far as the Rebecca Riots, in the early 1840s.
Early in the book, Williams described how as a boy of about six years old he used to ride in the family trap, starting in early morning, to get to the market in Llandeilo, where some of the farm’s produce such as butter was taken to be sold. He recounts the whole journey in great detail, telling how he used to ask his elders for stories of the places on the way and hear about so and so of this farm or of the problems of negotiating some of the steep hills on the way.
Not long after we moved, I noticed that some of the place names on our daily school run seemed strangely familiar and it took me a while to clock why. Then the penny dropped, I went and dug this book off the shelf again. I realised our daily trip to Llandeilo followed almost exactly the same route. Here and there the road has been straightened, some new houses added, but his landscape is mostly all there.
The journey was forever changed for me after that. It was populated by the friendly ghosts of farmers racing their carts to the lime kilns on the edge of the Black Mountain, awkward loads of timber pulled behind straining horses and determined men, an itinerant preacher walking out from Llandeilo, calling for brief sustenance at the various inns on the way (all turned to houses now).
We have since moved from the hills of Llansawel down to the clay lands in Talley, so we only have half the journey these days, but every time I cross the bridge at Halfway, I look over at the old bridge, still there, but part hidden in trees and undergrowth next to the current road. In my mind’s eye, I see on it still a farm trap laden with butter and other bits, and a little boy tucked under a blanket to the morning cold, staring out with wonderment at the world around him.