In his earlier book Welsh Food Stories, Carwyn Graves took nine familiar foods, from cheese and salt to apples and bread, and traced their origins back through history, revealing a richness to our food culture that goes far beyond the cliches of Welsh cakes, cawl and laverbread.
Now, with Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape, he starts at the other end of the food chain, looking at land use and tracing how it has evolved since humans began to cultivate the soils of what is now Wales. He takes seven types of landscape and describes how the constraints of geology and climate have shaped their use, co-evolving with human society and culture.
Retaining the Welsh terms for their subtleties of meaning, he has chapters on coed (woodland), cloddiau (the plural of clawdd, a hedgerow or earth bank), cae (fields for grazing), ffridd (the shrubby area between hill and lowland), mynydd (‘mountain’, but also dry rough grazing), rhos (heath, wetter moor and bog) and perllan (orchards, with grazing). For each one he describes their development, delving into sources as diverse as archaeology, lives of the saints, monastery records, legal documents, poetry and interviews with people who remember the traditional methods.
This book is about science and geography as much as history. There was wisdom in the old ways which met human needs for food, timber, clothing, fuel, medicine and much else, while also supporting a rich wildlife. Much of this biodiversity is now tragically lost, along with the human communities that kept it all going. Fragments do remain however, such as the very few hay meadows to have escaped ‘improvement’ into ryegrass monoculture, and he meets farmers who do what they can to preserve them, as well as incomers who have reinvented traditional methods in the modern context.
The chapter on ffridd is particularly intriguing. This is the transitional zone between the intensively farmed lowland fields around the farm and the summer-grazed mountain in mid and north Wales. Often following the snowline and the springline, neither upland nor lowland, a mixture of grassland, trees and scrub, it has many agricultural functions, including early spring feed and shelter for lambs. It is also rich in wildlife; a 1980s study found that ffridd supported a higher density of tree pipits, yellowhammers, linnets, twites and whinchats than any other landscape in Wales. A liminal zone, celebrated in poetry but now obscured by government plantation of conifers and changes in farming practices, it has slipped away almost unnoticed.
Implied in this book is a powerful call for doing things differently. The past encodes a system of principles for living on the land which could give us a way through the crises that beset us now. But how do we do this? Is it even possible?
A vision of unity
Tir demonstrates through a multitude of examples the essential unity of farming and nature, people and land. In this it echoes David Elias’ book Shaping the Wild, which describes in fine-grained detail the shifting relationship between food production and wildlife on a single farm near Bala. Government policy attempts to fit them together again, but the forces of social change and global commerce work powerfully in the opposite direction, at least for now.
As we contemplate what we have lost, ideologies rip through the public consciousness like fire across a summer-scorched hillside, creating more heat than light. Rewilding is one, and it haunts the pages of the book; clearly it is intended as a refutation of the cruder forms of that approach, while sharing its vision for the return of wildlife. Decolonization and indigineity are others, and Graves is at pains not to compare the Welsh people with native Americans. Nor does he encourage Welsh exceptionalism, welcoming the contributions of many incomers. We are all in this together.
Instead he suggests an approach that finds meaning in the concrete and the particular. Start with this cae (a field for livestock, we learn, as opposed to a maes which would be ploughed, perhaps for cereals), that oak tree, those blackbirds: go outside and meet them, get to know them, as Dafydd ap Gwilym showed us back in the fourteenth century. Find out how to grow and gather a healthy and varied diet from the land, whether by farming, gardening, foraging or fishing, and put it into practice. Take inspiration from an old, unifying story of the human home which, while universal, does seem to be particularly strong in Wales, with its cynefin and hiraeth.
Sensitive territory
It will not be easy. This book probes deep cultural nerves, whether those of the native Welsh who feel variously grief and guilt for their lost language and culture, or incomers wondering whether they can ever truly belong. The modern sins of colonization, cultural appropriation and the commodification of culture loom large for tender consciences, while the tendency to blame and diagnose drives people apart, and there are hard practical problems like river pollution to solve.
On the positive side however, there is a growing understanding of the crisis of modernity and a determination to create something better, with many opportunities to be part of something good. Graves offers a story here in which everyone who cares about the Welsh countryside, wildlife and a just society can find themselves, facing the tough existential questions together.
This is the aim for instance of the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, at which Graves last year chaired sessions on language, farming and wildlife, while others discussed topics such as community gardening, growing vegetables for school meals and beekeeping. It is also the spirit that runs through the organic movement, permaculture, agroecology and regenerative farming, as well as the local food partnerships supported by the Welsh Government and Graves’s own new project, Cegin y Bobl.
Others have been bringing a more direct approach to reviving traditional farming wisdom. Besides the many examples in Tir, I’m reminded of Eryri smallholder Chris Dixon’s fusion of Welsh farming patterns with the principles of Permaculture design (see his wonderful account of ffridd). In my own patch, the Dyfi Biosphere, the Tyfu Dyfi project is building on an earlier study of mixed farming in the area to revive the practice of growing vegetables on farms, once again putting farming at the centre of community life.
Tir is a call, all the more powerful for being implied rather than spelt out, for a realignment of our food system so that it works not just for the environment and our physical nourishment but our deepest spiritual needs as well. We don’t know what that will look like yet, but we have some pointers and it is never too late to try.
Wonderful review and a hopeful vision. It reminds me of Arundhati Roy’s quote: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”