Smoke signals

It was a beautiful afternoon for a walk: warm and sunny with puffs of cumulus drifting across the sky.

The cloud effects above the redundant, derelict church of Llanllawer reminded me of the arson attacks by the Meibion Glyndwr Welsh Nationalists in the late 70s and early 80s. Resenting the anglicization of the culture, the depletion of the language and the grabbing of natural resources by Wales's dominant neighbour, they fired the (unoccupied) holiday homes of the English.

Similar notions may have occupied the minds of the Celtic pagans who saw this piece of their sacred space, hard by the ancient Holy Well, annexed by Christian missionaries in the 4th and 5th centuries BC. Strange to relate however, while the church is abandoned, its local congegration having dwindled away over the past 50 years, the Holy Well is still a place of pilgrimage and reverence - witness this little painted pebble hare we discovered tucked into a crevice of the well's stone hood. And our only sanguinary encounter today was with this ruddy darter, basking in the autumn sunshine.