And they say it never rains in Wales… that’s the saying, right? Well, you know the problem with sayings, let me say it… they’re often wrong. It does rain in Wales but that’s okay, it keeps those things growing that I chop down during my business hours, and gives good competition for the heart during a minor pilgrimage. Me and mine have recently got back from one at Pennant-Melangell for the feast day of Saint Melangell, nature maiden and spiritual overseer of her corner of the Pennant Valley, where it rains tears of Spirit. A bunch of us had a right wander up one of the tall hillsides which quietly cocoon her church, holding it almost from perceptibility itself until you round some final bends on the potted flat of the valley bed and her roof lingers over the foreground before you pull a little handbrake turn onto the parking shingle. I’m not generally recommending that last bit but my family is blessed to visit this church with some regularity, and it is generally very quiet indeed so the odd tail happy arrival doesn’t feel entirely out of the question. Plus women (Saints or no) love to be attended to by a lovely handbrake turn so its all just a big hello! and you’re welcome from me.
You didn’t want to handbrake around onto the parking gravel on this day though, let me tell you. Quiet as she is in generality, all corners of far congregates will pick themselves up by their roots and waddle the winding way to her parking bays come feast day. Basically their were loads of cars parked up by the time we arrived so it would have been completely inappropriate to hot-tail in, and possibly even dangerous to my insurance premium. So sensible was the approach and gentle was the handbrake.
And then me, my daughter Melangell and my dear wife Anna were mixed in with everyone else under that veil of otherness which permeates over the small details and then outwards until time passes which you did not know had. I have been here a good count of times and each time that I come I think… well I think a lot of things that often I think aren’t really thoughts that I have had but are ones which have come in due to the Holy atmospherics of this place. I do always think that that atmosphere at Pennant-Melangell would break every piece of Ghostbusters equipment though. It’ll probably break your heart as well. It does me.
We had visited recently and after three hours about the church grounds I had to make my peace and leave to dial down the frequency a little. The church yard has various yew trees which are considered to be dated back to when Christ himself was walking some great distance away… It’s the sort of atmosphere which reminds you that ages of ages does not just mean the road ahead but that which has long since been rooted in the long past. It cuts both ways. Fullness. Like I say it will break your heart.
But I am already ahead of myself.
We had parked up with everyone else and because Anna was on secretarial duties for our church I knew repeatedly that our pilgrimage was also to collect holy water from Melangell’s spring, located at some specifically unknown location aloft the hillside to the north of the church; I say this not for drama on my part but because everything within this atmosphere becomes slippy. Want to find Saint Melangell’s known spring of holy water? You can find it but your heart will have to go searching because you are not going to find it any other way. The visitor room over the back,-back lane to the church has an Ordinance Survey map featuring the wells’ location but I can tell you from experience that that is just not going to help you. You are on Holy Time X Wales here, and that’s just a different diagram. So off we all gathered in rough and Orthodox file and went out to find that spring like some heartfelt but otherwise am-dram vision of Exodus with those tears over us as if in some recognition from Melangell herself that we had come for her feast, and that we might find her spring if we took some wrong turns but just kept going anyway. In other words it was going to take pure Orthodoxy.
So first we went that way, through the field littered with poultry bones from the minor free range farm a little below us. I like bones so I started collecting some but then I started to see a lot of them and knew it would get out of hand, it has before, and that Anna wouldn’t let them in the car when I would go to pile them in the boot. I’m not going through that conversation with her again so its easier just to leave them be for the most part. More importantly if you do want to reach Melangell’s spring yourself then start by going through the bone field. It’s nice and flat and if you have a welsh Cob handy you could do some serious accelerating across it.
After that there is a gate. Make sure you close that behind you.
Now into the climbing. Just keep going up. Don’t follow the obvious path because it was sent by Satan and will lead you up and then steeply down and towards the road which you first drove in on (unless you used a theophanic glory cloud). This is the wrong way and you will upset everyone when you tell them that they are about to walk back up the incline before tackling the climb proper, around the edge of the last farmhouse where a yew hedge has displaced a section of slate walling. Just look for where the rhododendrons are growing and follow that path. It goes up as the spirit of Melangell looks down and the trick is to just ignore everything else like bridleways, sheep tracks and possibly other people who say they know the way; especially ignore them as they have probably been out there for years looking. Just hold two things close; your heart and your footings on the corrosive slate track that is your route up, the one with the leggy beech trees above you.
We’re getting close now and you can feel it. I thought I could practically smell it but that turned out to be a decomposing sheep which was curiously positioned next to a little flow of water springing from the earth some fifteen feet further upstream.
You have arrived!
That poor sheep though. We’ve all moved enough dead sheep already in our lives as I’m sure you’ll agree, but I did think about getting this one out of the way before the main party arrived. To be honest there was only half of him left to move but the problem you fast run into with moving sheep is that they just come apart by whichever extremity you grasp. There’s just no end to their ways… I was wheel barrowing one across a field to a vet not that long ago while it appeared to be attempting to prolapse itself entirely in the barrow. At least with this one I reckoned I could roll it away with my boots.
I wouldn’t get the chance though as the party was arriving and I thought that if I started kicking it now then by the time all the bits have gone everywhere and I picked them up then people would see and wonder what on earth I was up to. I already had a dozen bones in my pockets. So I just left it and went to tell Fr Ioan.
‘So you think the water is safe?’ he asked me.
‘I’ve already put some on me’ I told him.
We had a small discussion on the difference between faith and idiot faith then but Fr soon saw the animal, spied the spring and went straight for the source, fashioning a cross from some close by pine trees and was then down to his ankles in the spring. I truly loved Orthodoxy in that moment, one of those sustained ones when the Lord presses at one of your soft spots and you already realise that this moment will humble your thought of it for ages to come; that oddly warm sensation of a feather pillow passing right through you…
Back in actual time though it was now raining dem tears big time, and having gathered a few bottles of holy water I was self assigned to alight with them as fast as possible for the Vespers service at Melangell’s church, led by my regular Priests, Fathers’ Stephen and Pantelimon, and now only some scant moments away; and in cruel truth less than a few hundred meters beneath the position of her spring. If I hadn’t got bottles of holy water to deliver I could have simply launched off the hillside and rolled down to the north wall of the church. As it was I was going to have to come down the way we got up, just faster. Again that welsh cob would have come in handy, but that not being an option I settled in to a sensation somewhat akin to one of those montages from the adaptations of The Lord of the Rings; one of those ones with the endlessly looping and crescendoing musical motifs, in this case the music actually being the growing sound of church bells calling the valley to worship. That moment was another soft spot.
‘Last one to the church gate is a loser’ I said to the Lord and went for it, first back down that slate path and barely noticing those rhododendrons, then closing that field gate behind me and collecting none-more bones as the church came back into view through her tears. The bells came to a close somewhere short of the church gate which inevitably I lost the holy race to, fair doos unto the Lord.
Then I was at the doors with the water, bustling through to my regular priests’ like a Labrador with and old stick. Things then started and the spirit of that valley, in the hold of that afternoon, really began…
Oh the doors, the doors!
See you soon, dear Melangell. You’ll hear me arrive…
Peace!
JW Bowe