THE MARCHES
This is the first in a series of lithographs by Alan Powers showing the Welsh borders, accompanied by sonnets from a series by Peter Levi.
LIKE the Lake District, the borders of England and Wales are filled with memories of the early Romantic movement and its travellers in search of the picturesque. They found in the marvels of man and nature subjects for poetic reflection: ruins of castles and abbeys, distant views of sublime mountains and waterfalls.
This series is conceived as a tour, finishing at the northernmost extremity at Flint Castle, melancholy amidst the mud flats of the Dee estuary and memories of the death of kings. The subjects are selected for variety — what they have in common is that none is more than five miles from the border, while some even straddle it.
CAPEL-Y-FINN is the highest settlement in the Honddu valley, above Llanthony Abbey. The monastery was built from 1870 at the instigation of Father Ignatius (the Revd Joseph Lyne) whose ambition was to revive Benedictine orders in the Anglican Church. He was frustrated in his attempt to restore Llanthony itself, and proposed to build a replica, to the designs of Charles Buckeridge (1832-73), a pupil of Gilbert Scott. The choir of the new abbey church was completed, but its vault became dangerous and was taken down in the 1930s. The austerity of the monastic buildings suits the landscape. Although all the windows were designed to face north and admit no sunlight, Father Ignatius gave himself a comfortable sitting-room with an oriel window looking down the valley. The monastery passed into the possession of the Anglican Benedictines of Caldey Island, from whom it was leased, and later purchased by Eric Gill, who moved his family and entourage there from Ditchling in 1924, creating the chapel which still exists in the • low north wing.
A portfolio edition of Alan Powers's original lithographs for The Marches, accompanied by Peter Levi's poems, is being published by Merivale Editions, 14 Merivale Road, London SW15, (01-785 9034).
Capel-y-finn
(In memory of David Jones, Rene Hague and Reynolds Stone) The landscape is the shaving of the stone by the wind, by the rain, the grass on it shaved with the scythe, sheep-cropped, the hill alone survives the steel and the steel tongue of wit, unspoiled and unexhausted and its own.
Suns dive into their west, and bit by bit the Black Mountain calls for another tone, whose shadows swallow lamps that had been lit in valleys where there was no telephone (pure art was clinging there like a limpet).
Freshness then, now the long, secular moon, landscape betrayed, the whisper from the grit: and yet something clings to the hill, and we drink hill water in pure sobriety.
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