Soft breezes sift through last year’s leaves. Beech-mast crackles underfoot. By the strait gate I enter Soar y Mynydd’s chapel-yard. This is Yr Elenydd’s focal point, at the heart of Wales’s depopulated moorland, ever-threatened by reservoirs, off-roaders, conifer plantation, wind turbine “farms”, or even, in former years, depredations visited on its spacious high landscape in what’s now for Britain a historical common agricultural policy.
Down a side-turning from the wild road between Tregaron and Abergwesyn, by Afon Camddwr, you’ll find chapel and house. It’s a place of pilgrimage. Snipe jag among rushes. Hill farmers on ponies gather sheep. I come each year to this heartening relic from the age of dissent to sit among the devout and listen to their eloquent, impassioned itinerant ministers from Gorseinon, Bae Colwyn, Gwaun Cae Gurwen, discoursing in yr hen iaith (“the old language”) on predestination and Calvinist Methodist articles of faith. It gives a distant sense of how it might have been to hear John Bunyan – Bedford brazier’s son, “tinker and poor man”, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress and pre-eminent demotic figure in 17th-century English religious literary culture – preaching to his wayside assemblies of faithful followers. But it’s not for the doctrinal disputation that I’m at Soar y Mynydd today.
Closed throughout the pandemic, the chapel opened again this year in time to see “the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, / Delicate filmed as new spun silk” (Thomas Hardy). From my pew I look through clear windows and watch the treecreepers – one of our smallest, dowdiest, most inconspicuous birds – working their way up rough-barked boles of elderly Scots pine, planted centuries ago by drovers who brought their herds along this route to the smithfields of England.
Treecreepers probe slender curved bills into each bark-crevice for mites and grubs, working their way up to the smoother heights, whence with three or four shrill notes, they glide down to the next tree and, mouse-like, scuttle upwards in spiral ascents. Attentive, industrious, unshowy, stooped to their task, these small avian pilgrims are perfect embodiments of this revered place. I hark to their alarm call. As those along my pew kneel to pray, so do I for the birds’ long survival here.
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