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As those along my pew kneel to pray, so do I for the birds’ long survival here. Attentive, industrious, unshowy, stooped to their task, these small avian pilgrims are perfect embodiments of this revered place. 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.
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#Fall fall fall till we rise to the top windows
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. Photograph: Blickwinkel/AlamyĬlosed 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). But it’s not for the doctrinal disputation that I’m at Soar y Mynydd today.Ī common treecreeper, Certhia familiaris. 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. 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. The United States displays roughly the same trend. 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.ĭown a side-turning from the wild road between Tregaron and Abergwesyn, by Afon Camddwr, you’ll find chapel and house. In 1840, life expectancy at birth in Sweden, a much-studied nation owing to its record-keeping, was 45 years for women today it’s 83 years. By the strait gate I enter Soar y Mynydd’s chapel-yard. S oft breezes sift through last year’s leaves.