From a recent visit to Wales.
Last night I walked with my friends to the boundary of this Welsh village, where I noticed a signpost for ‘Path’, a little yellow arrow on green background, but it only seemed to lead to two driveways to houses – one Is y Coed (below the trees), the other, RAINBOWS END (in capitals). The only other possible way that I could see, was through a field, but it had a fence around it, no stile, not even a gate to enter it.
So we walk back, discuss the possibilities of the house name. Obligingly, a rainbow appears above the estuary, or rather, a piece of a rainbow, a thick chunk, with several rainbow echoes or ripples alongside the main chunk, a wedge of disembodied colours among the clouds.
The place where all rainbows end perhaps? Like a sanctuary for stubs, tag-ends, frayed or faint ends, lost ends, or robust ends, grounded on the mud-flats of the estuary with nowhere else to go?
Or – a philosophical statement, as in ‘all things come to an end, even rainbows’.
Super-realists might live there. No illusions harboured here.
We hardly like to say they may be grammatically challenged, missing out the apostrophe, if a single rainbow is referred to.
Then again, as M says, there may not have been room on the wooden board for the lost apostrophe.
*
Today I walk on my own, uphill from the village, turn left through another village, Wind Mill, then right along the narrow road. Because there is such a view way into the distance.
An information board tells me that lead used to be mined here on Halkyn mountain and beneath my feet there is a network of tunnels.
site of the lead mines just visible on the left
In front of me, misty sunlight makes the distant mountains glow. Skylarks carouse in upper air.
I walk back through the Wind Mill village, perched on its plain, with views – mountains on one side, the ebbing estuary, mud-coloured, on the other. Another yellow arrow pathway sign. A gate to go through. I open and close it. In the next field, two horses standing. Quite still, one behind the other. At the field’s end, a stile, but it’s not a real stile, no step up and there’s a fence, to make it harder to climb over. It’s also grouped around with eager nettles. A view into the field beyond, wild grass, thistles – and a tractor spraying something in the field. The nettles, I can pass through them (I’ve befriended nettles now) it’s the spraying tractor that puts me off. I see no exit too, at the far end of the field so I retrace my steps back to the road and the houses standing by the road.
And beyond the farm house a man stands, a little off the road, looking down the hill, at something I can’t see. His gaze swivels – from the unseen something – back to me. He wears an earth-brown baseball cap. Even from a distance, I can see his face is tanned, an outdoor person, he stands in front of his landrover. Again, his gaze shifts – from what he’s watching down the hill, to me. I’m quite prepared to meet his gaze – in fact, I relish making contact with a local – but as I approach, he speaks first – you can go down the path now, the tractor’s finished in that field, and left it.
I come closer. I’ve been spotted, spied on, watched in my wanderings. I can’t imagine how he could have seen me, with the farmhouse in front of him. But then – across fields, there’s nothing to prevent the view from tumbling down the hillside, marking tractor and a figure with rucksack, grey jacket (I like to blend in) and umbrella, in case the weather forecast (cloudy, but no rain) failed to fulfil its promise that no rain would pass this way, tripping on the distant mountains, downhill to the estuary.
I come closer and his tanned face is friendly, he smiles, up to the shade of his cap’s peak, and his bright brown eyes. The tractor’s finished now, he says.
It must have been the tractor’s progress he was watching.
What was it spraying? I ask.
Just the thistles in the field.
I hadn’t meant the target of the tractor spray, but rather – the substance that was sprayed. But I concede, to myself, the ambiguity my question held.
Thing is I say, I haven’t walked this path before, I don’t know – where does it come out?
Well, he says, there may not be a stile, a proper gate, but – the path goes on and when you come out onto the road you go left to Halkyn –
That’s where I want to go! I say. I’d wondered if it might come out at the road we’d walked along, last night. And I did, I really did want to go down that path, rather than back the way I came, along the road.
And so I thank him and he smiles again, this helper of Hermes, guide to faltering, uncertain travellers and I head back – back to the path, back past the immobile horses, back to the nettle cluster round the wooden stile-without-a-step (and draped in wire) and climb over, thanking the nettles for not stinging me.
Into the newly-dusted fields of thistles. I put on my covid mask, as a gesture of protection from whatever substance (best not to think of what it was) was designed to curb the thistle growth. And where was the exit? I walk from one end of the field to the other, then, just beyond a gate, I see the long grass on the other side has been disturbed, pressed down a little. Someone had been here before me and I follow the bent grass, to a tiny lane, screened by a high wooden fence beside a house on one side, trees on the other.
Another brown pony in the next field.
There are nettles here but not too many. The path continues, (with a proper stile)
and it comes out at the two houses, Is y Coed and Rainbows End. It had been so screened by bushes, trees and undergrowth, last night, I had seen nothing. Truly, all paths do lead to this rest-home for rainbows. And – despite the low grey clouds and the damp air – it hadn’t rained at all.
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