In the wracks of Walsingham
Whom should I choose
But the Queen of Walsingham
to be my guide and muse.

Then, thou Prince of Walsingham,
Grant me to frame
Bitter plaints to rue thy wrong,
Bitter woe for thy name.

Bitter was it so to see
The seely sheep
Murdered by the ravenous wolves
While the shepherds did sleep.

Bitter was it, O to view
The sacred vine,
Whilst the gardeners played all close,
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter, O to behold
The grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham
So stately did show.

Such were the worth of Walsingham
While she did stand,
Such are the wracks as now do show
Of that Holy Land.

Level, level, with the ground
The towers do lie,
Which, with their golden glittering tops,
Pierced once to the sky.

Where were gates are no gates now,
The ways unknown
Where the press of peers did pass
While her fame was blown.

Owls do scrike where the sweetest hymns
Lately were sung,
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep, O Walsingham,
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven is turned to hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway —
Walsingham, O farewell!

Last graduation day on campus. Office empty, library almost empty. Tearful students. The ceremony featured what I can only call the B team – pro-Chancellor, pro-Vice Chancellor, reading speeches clearly written for them by Marketing and Communications. That would be the same Marketing and Communications team that told us all we weren’t to comment on the plans for disposal of the campus – apparently we were supposed to say “Sorry, I’m not really involved in the campus changes programme. Let me find and / introduce you to my colleague who knows more about it all.” [then introduce to a member of the Corporate Communications team]

Some of us felt we had to try to explain to them as gently as possible the many ways that could have gone wrong. I mean, suppose we had forgotten our words? Or written them down, then couldn’t find our reading glasses?  What would they do to us?

Of course, there was no reference to the campus closure in the speeches. They were generic, not geared to the actual subjects that were graduating, they edged up to the problem with a few words about the necessity for change and development then bottled it.

To get myself through it I started thinking about the parallels with the events in the past that I study. Some of my learned colleagues have been speculating about the parallels between Brexit and Henry VIII’s declaration of independence from the Pope in the 1530s. Part of the fallout from that was the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the destruction of shrines like Walsingham and our own Penrhys. So how did people deal with that? We know about the few brave rebels who died for their beliefs, but what about everyone else? Should we assume (as traditional histories of the Reformation did) that non-resistance meant approval, that the late medieval church was so corrupt and unpopular that it only took one push to overthrow it? Was the low recruitment in the last years of the monasteries, and the drying-up of bequests to some of the shrines, an indication that people had lost interest in them?

I don’t think anyone will be chaining themselves to the gates of my university campus, or lying down in front of the bulldozers. That doesn’t mean that people like what has happened. Ironically, there has been more of a campaign to save the building than there was to save the institution. That in itself is telling. When we were told we were being closed down, we soon realised there was very little we could do to fight it. After all, if the University management said they were reprieving us for a trial period, who would have wanted to sign up for courses on a campus that was at imminent risk of closure? The more our supporters tried to keep us open (and they did try), the more publicity the closure got. So of course we recruited badly the next year.

Might the same have been true of religious houses and shrines in the 1530s? After the closure of the smaller houses – and probably after the great survey of church property in 1535 – it must have been obvious what was going to happen. There were a few very brave men like John Houghton and his fellow Carthusian monks who resisted on a point of principle and died slowly and horribly for it. Then there were men like the abbots of Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester, who thought they could play who blinks first with Thomas Cromwell. We had a vice-chancellor like that. It ended badly. It generally does.

But for most of us it has been a case of salvaging what we can and getting on with things. When monastic lands were sold off, some devout Catholics were prepared to buy them, saying ‘Might I not as well as others have some profit of the spoil of the abbey? For I did see all would away; and therefore I did as others did.’ Some, indeed, bought the ornaments of monastic churches to look after them in case the monasteries were ever restored, but for most it was an investment, salvaging some small profit from the mess. In the same way I took boxes of books from the University library, including a near-complete set of Archaeologia Cambrensis which now sits on my study shelves.

In 1536, monks and nuns were expected to  move from the smaller religious houses to larger and theoretically better-run ones. Only the heads of houses were pensioned off. Then as the larger houses were picked off one by one, all their inmates were pensioned. It was the other way round for us. There was an initial offer of voluntary severance but now people are just being made redundant.

There’s a bit of irony in some of the pop-up posters on campus for the day:

Now the corridors are empty again and at the end of the month the site will finally be locked down.

Weep, weep, o Walsingham.

First post on the new (renamed) site – there wasn’t enough room for all the blog posts and photos on the web site. So the wonderful Sarah Chong is going to reorganise my blogs, keep this one for the Cistercian Way, create another one for tomb carvings and related matters, and keep everything else on the web site. Two project blogs and three web sites – will I ever keep track of it all?

So instead I went walking. Last summer with the Rhondda Cynon Taf tourism and footpaths team I spent some time looking at routes from Penrhys up the ridge and down into Ton Pentre (it’s all on the blog but I can’t put links in just yet). The plan was to get the footpath down the slope from the wind farm to the lane above Ton Pentre waymarked in order to reinstate the footpath which had been damaged by a landslip. Unfortunately we then learned that the area of the landslip hadn’t quite settled yet – so walking through it might not be recommended.

This leaves us with two possible alternatives. Up the ridge, down the bridleway from the top of the windfarm, down Cwm Bodringallt and along the track above the houses of Ystrad Rhondda; or on up the ridge and down the old Maerdy road through the forest. Both start at the statue, take the road round the west of the estate, and turn left on a roughly metalled road at the top, between the sub-station and what remains of the sports centre, at grid reference ST 00027 95074. Walk up the metalled road and bear left along the forest edge. The road becomes a  rough track along the ridge. Follow it bearing slightly west of north with the fence and the wind farm to your left. This is an exhilarating walk along the ridge between the two Rhondda rivers with larks singing and buzzards wheeling overhead. (Gwilym Tew, the poet who wrote about the shrine at Penrhys in the late fifteenth century, had a very odd image in which he described the infant Jesus in his mother’s arms, first as like a hawk then like a lark –

A’i Mab ar ei dwrn, medd swrn a sydd
Ymyl ei hadain mal ehedydd

it’s often hard to work out just what Gwilym Tew was getting at  – to be honest, he wasn’t a very good poet and the complexity of the Welsh rules of cynghanedd often seem to have defeated him – but it’s nice to see him drawing his imagery from the actual landscape round the shrine.)

At about SS 99221 96229 you cross the road to the wind farm. At SS 98589 96828 a gate in the fence to your left leads to the bridleway down Cwm Bodringallt.

For the ridge route, keep on to the right of the forest. At SS 97472 97377 the track goes through a gap in the fence ahead of you and into the forest.

At SS 97322 97446 a muddy track crosses the ridge route.

(There is a dilapidated and unmarked waymarking post to the right.) Turn left and walk through the trees along a track which has been worn into deep ruts by off-road riding. At SS 97379 97209 cross a forest road and continue on the same line, bearing a little to the left and steeply down hill.

This is the old road from Pentre to Maerdy – it could never have taken wheeled traffic but packhorses and colliers walking to work would have used it. It goes steeply down to cross a little stream, follows the stream for a bit

the bears away to the right. The woods above Pentre church are full of laurel and rhododendron – was there a big house here? The path bends back to the left then turns left at the churchyard wall. Pentre church is the ‘Cathedral of the Rhondda’, its tower dominating the valley. Walk down past the church, turn right on the main road then left on Elizabeth Street. Walk down to the river, cross the footbridge and turn left on a metalled path which takes you under the railway line and up to the main road.

Turn left and follow the main road for about .4 km then turn right at the police station and walk up The Parade. This becomes a roughly metalled road, then the track over Mynydd Maendy.

The route up the ridge is certainly the fun choice. The track is peaty, badly eroded and gets a lot of scrambler and 4×4 use. Nell liked the puddles.

Probably as well she’s peat coloured anyway.

It’s quite hard going underfoot but the views from the top are spectacular – Pen y Fan, Corn Ddu and Cribyn

round to the Black Mountains

down the Rhondda Fawr

the Maerdy valley

and the squat majesty of Tylorstown Tip.

Also old stone walls striding across the hills

and some totally unphotographable Bronze Age burial mounds.

The track down to Pentre is pretty but very rough under foot and very very steep – it’s a long pull up the ridge only to lose your height very rapidly in the woods. And it’s about 2 km longer than the route down Cwm Bodringallt. We’ll try that one again next and see how it goes.

I’ve now had another look at the ridge above Penrhys with Ceri and Ron from Rhondda Cynon Taf.

Main aim was to look at the blocked section of path around SS 972 955, just above Pleasant View. We walked up to the ridge and back along the top footpath. The blocked section (probably about 200 yards) is now completely impassable, heavily overgrown with brambles. Clearing it would be a huge job – and keeping it clear would need local effort. The stiles are there

and there’s even a waymark at the bottom but that hasn’t helped. The problem is probably that where it joins Pleasant View it runs between a house and its garage. Walking through people’s gardens is always difficult. An informal alternative (marked as a track on the online Ordnance Survey but not on the latest printed version) runs east from the blockage and down to the entrance to the quarry. From there you follow a very well-marked track down to the other end of Pleasant View. This runs through open access land but there are difficulties in waymarking routes through open access that aren’t rights of way. There is an alternative. On the way up, Ron’s pathfinding skills took us along most of the line of the lower footpath. I have tried and failed to find this in the past. It contours over some very uneven ground (the result of at least one landslip) and eventually joins the upper footpath near the top of Cwm Bodringallt. We lost the path at the end and walked up the bridleway from Cwm Bodringallt but Ron felt it would be possible to follow it down from the top using GPS then to waymark it. That looks like the best option. You would start up the ridge on the route described in https://heritagetortoise.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/on-from-penrhys/ . When you cross the stream at SS 982 959 bear slightly to the left to pick up the lower path. There are several places where the track seems to go on but you need to bear left down the slope – these will need waymarking. Eventually you join the well-walked track below the quarry and follow it down to the south-east end of Pleasant View at SS 973 954. Job done (almost). Route now clear Llantarnam – Margam (Caerphilly might be persuaded to do a bit of maintenance to the Raven Walk over Mynydd Machen. Ceredigion pretty much done. Volunteers forging ahead in Denbighshire and Flintshire. Web site nearly finished. What do we move on to next?