I walked Tanybwlch beach today in search of velellas, having noticed Chloe Griffith’s post on Facebook last night. Velella velella, or By the Wind Sailor is an oceanic ‘jellyfish’, but not your usual jellyfish: instead it belongs to a class called the Hydrozoans, and is a colonial animal made up of several different types of polyps doing different jobs (feeding, defence, or reproduction) . Under a transparent float hang many tiny stinging polyps, which catch the plankton of the open ocean. The diagonally placed sail projecting above the water should ensure that the float moves across the wind, and the velellas remain at sea. It is a unique species, there is just one kind, and they circulate in all world’s warm or temperate oceans.
Stranded By the Wind Sailors amongst the wrack
I found them, amongst the rolls of wrack and kelp on the lower strand line, but how tiny they were! Every one I found was just two centimeters long, shorter than a single joint of my finger. Velellas can be 7 cm long, and I have seen them this size in the open ocean, bobbing past at sea. Our stranding of velellas are mere babies, and judging by the uniformity all started life from the same hatching. Drying in the winter sunshine they look and feel to the touch like fragments of stiff cellophane, with a hint of blue around the underside.
Velella velella on Tanybwlch beach
Velella velella on Tanybwlch beach, showing the projecting sail to catch the wind
It was a lovely morning, and I noted that my friend the dragon log has moved once more along the beach, and, after a period on its side and looking less dragon-like has again righted itself with head aloft. It remains a pleasure, as I remarked last autumn, to note how very few items of domestic plastic rubbish are to be found among the driftwood and seaweed.
Wrack and kelp on Tanybwlch beach
There is though, a still abundant category of man-made waste, and that is plastic rope and string. What is it about fishermen and little bits of string? Especially common are short pieces about 6 inches in length of green or blue plastic string with frayed cut ends. In a short distance one can gather a pocketful, either here or at Borth or Ynyslas.
Velella velella on Tanybwlch beach
There must be an explanation. Do fishermen tie closed their lobster pots and cut the string each time they open them? If this is the explanation why cannot they use biodegradable hemp which would decay after its single use rather than surviving in the ocean, breaking into tinier pieces for ever, and clogging the stomachs of filter feeding marine life? Or they could take their pieces of string home and put them in the bin?
Our West Wales beaches are far closer to pristine than they were 20 years ago. If we can identify the reason for the remaining offenders perhaps a small change in behaviour would do the trick.
The Tanybwlch Dragon has moved several hundred yards along the beach during last Saturday’s high seas. Once again it has beached itself gazing out to sea, its lower jaw a little more abraded, but its eager expression is now almost as convincing from the left flank as from the right.
Right cheek
Left cheek
Seas have been breaking over the stony strand which separates the beach from the low lying Tanybwlch flats, the location of summer trotting races, and formerly, of the Aberystwyth Show. Once more a huge pool has formed below Alltwen, beloved of gulls and waders.
The brackish pool on Tanybwlch flats
Over the years there have been a number of efforts to drain this area and return it to pasture, but this seems to be a losing battle and each winter the lake forms again, and as it drains away rushes prosper at the expense of grass. It is highly likely that we will see the day when the sea breaks through the pebble bar and our walks along this wild beach will be curtailed part way along.
The Dragon has migrated along Tanybwlch beach
The strand line was not as free from human debris as when I commented two weeks ago, but as with the comments from my reader about the Gower, fragments of netting and other fisherman’s waste were far more abundant than household plastic. The white lumps on the strand line were not polystyrene but cuttlefish bone, and the fluffy froth just natural sea spume.
There is a new arrival on Tanybwlch beach, remarkably in the shape of a dragon, looking out to sea.
Dragon’s head likeness
A large tree trunk, felicitously worn by the abrasive boulders has beached itself high on the shore near the south end of the beach during a recent storm, and presented itself to best advantage in this weekend’s winter sunshine.
Tree trunk at Tanybwlch beach
Walking the strand line, I was also impressed by the scarcity of plastic waste. I wonder whether this is entirely down to the dedicated beach cleaners who regularly patrol our beaches, or whether, (dare one hope?) the rate at which rubbish is discarded into the Irish sea is at last diminishing.
I used to beach clean here regularly a decade ago when we recorded all the items for the Marine Conservation Society records. In those days one did not go far to fill a sack with single-use plastic and hard plastic crates and bits of rope. Yesterday there were a few bottle tops and fragments of plastic amongst the dried wrack, but the waste was predominantly what it should be: biodegradable seaweed and sticks washed down the rivers in the recent rains.
Driftwood on the strandline
How much easier on the eye than a strandline of coloured waste. Aberstwyth Beach Buddies and Surfers against Sewage are to be congratulated for their action and campaigning, but so too is everyone who now chooses not to chuck their rubbish into the sea in the first place! I remember standing on a cross channel ferry in the 1970s and watching aghast as a kitchen hand emerged on the deck below and tipped all the ferry’s catering packaging off the stern to bob away in our wake. I have no doubt he was following orders. Fifty years later the public all have camera phones and I don’t think many companies would risk being observed.
It can be a mistake to write about something one knows very little about. Today I make an exception, having attended a fascinating Historical Society lecture by Ioan Lord, a Ceredigion-born young man who is studying the mining history of mid Wales.
We learnt that the hilly country of mid Wales is littered with ore-bearing lodes, cracks in the rock of varying lengths and sizes all running more or less northeast – southwest across the landscape. For more than 4000 years these have been exploited by miners. Bronze age workings extracted the copper which along with Cornish tin would be made into bronze, Romans extracted lead, the Society of Mines Royal exploited the silver which was for a time formed into coin at Sir John Middleton’s mint at Aberystwyth castle. In the18th and 19th century a proliferation of mining companies extracted lead, copper and zinc on a massive scale. This was the era for which we have the best historical record, photographs, newspapers and mining journals reveal the ambition and the highfalutin names of these speculative ventures, suggesting riches such were to be found around the world.
Miners Cwmystwyth in 1911
The ‘Welsh Potosi’ Lead and Copper mine was named after the highly productive mines of Bolivia. ‘Welsh Broken Hill’ Mine echoes Australia, at Ponterwd we find the ‘California of Wales’, while Moelfre Wheal Fortune reminds us of the tin industry of Cornwall and the many miners who migrated to Wales at this time.
The industry was gruelling and life expectancy was poor, but the mines nontheless paid handsomely in their day. There are local families today such as the Raws of Cwmystwyth who trace their ancestry to Cornishman James Raw, Mine Captain of the Cwmystwyth mine in 1850. Ioan cited records showing that the Oliver family of Cwmystwyth were taking home £200 a month in 1810.
By 1930 there was no more mining and the workings lay abandoned. Ioan and fellow enthusiasts are exploring this forgotten frontier, equipped with lights and modern caving equipment they find their way into the old shafts and adits, stepping into spaces last visited more than two hundred years ago. From time to time, on Facebook’s You know you’re from Aberystwyth when you…I have watched their videos as they squeeze along narrow adits ( tunnels) or abseil down vertical shafts. They find abandoned wooden ladders, barrows, tools, shoes belonging to the miners, abandoned as it were yesterday.
This is more than sightseeing: their mines research is clarifying much about the history of mid Wales. In the 17th century people tended to call all old mine workings ‘ Roman Mines’ but modern discoveries which can be carbon dated such as wooden tools or charcoal on smelting floors have now confirmed Roman mining at Penpompren, and Cwmystwyth. An exciting discovery, lying in a 19th Century adit was a wooden spade, typically Roman in style, which has been carbon dated to 4BC-71AD. It had presumably been washed in there from the old workings. Hammer stones, probably from Llanrhystud beach bear witness to Bronze age workings at Copa Hill, Cwmystwyth.
On another occasion, when exploring the 18th century working which was Thomas Powell of Nanteos’ Great Adit at Bwlchgwyn they came upon a stone marker neatly engraved TP 1742. Other sources tell us that Thomas Powell was in vigorous conflict with Sir Hugh Myddleton and the Society of Mines Royal which had claimed mining rights for the Crown. Ioan’s survey indeed confirms that Powell’s mine and his marker stone encroached well into Royal Mines territory!
The multi talented Ioan Lord, is currently working on a PhD at Cardiff but has also been a familiar face operating the Rheidol Valley steam trains. His very handsomely produced book on the mines of Cwm Rheidol and Ystumtuen was published last year by the Rheidol Railway and can be bought at their shop.
Ioan Lord is one of the Directors of the Cambrian Mines Trust which was incorporated as a Company in 2012 with the objective of preservation and restoration of mining remains. Particularly challenging in today’s risk-averse climate will be their objective to re-open underground workings for the public benefit. In the meantime I do enjoy the videos, without risk of either hitting my head or obliterating, with my 21st century feet, the ancient footprints of miners and even horses preserved in the mud of the adits.
I was astounded yesterday to see the new building on the Plas Morolwg site which overlooks the harbour at Aberystwyth. Plonked like a giant brick on the skyline is a building of unsurpassed ordinariness. A box designed to contain seven residential flats rises four storeys high, a positive beacon to philistine development. What were our Councillors and Planning Department thinking of?
The new Residential Block on Penyrangor
Penyrangor is a charming small road by which one approaches Tanybwlch beach and is flanked by squat bungalows and houses of early 20th century design. Newer development behind this rank was somewhat controversial when the railway cutting was filled in and built over, but all are two storey in height and designed with at least some respect for their position at the foot of beautiful Pendinas. This monstrous cube is totally out of scale with its neighbourhood, perched on the top of rising ground above the road, and totally dominating the other developments of flats around the harbour, let alone the regular housing.
The new block viewed from the harbour
Not long ago I looked at the Planning proposal to demolish and replace Bay View, one of the small houses on Penyrangor, a 1930s cottage which started its life as a tea house tucked into the small quarry on the left as you approach the sea. Reading the applicant’s proposal made one feel that landscape protection is alive and well. The report alluded to the Special Landscape Area in which it is set, and presented a sensitive design for a modern energy-efficient, two-storey building which respected the setting and would be tucked in such that the low pitched roof would not break the skyline above the sheltering rock face.
The site of Bay View, the old cottage now cleared away
No such considerations seem to have influenced the Wales and West Housing Association. Indeed I’ve just been looking at their planning application and found two remarkably unhelpful projections of how the development will look.
The bird’s eye view hardly helps in predicting how we land-born humans will perceive the relative heights of the buildings around this development.
Meanwhile a Side Section elevation shows the ghosts of the adjoining houses looming tall behind the new block. I have no idea where one would have to stand to see this perspective! Indeed I suspect there is there is no such possibility. My photo shows the same houses to be half the height of the block in the foreground.
The New Residential apartment block at Plas Morolwg, by Wales and West Housing Association
It seems a great pity that such misleading schematic drawings have, I presume, allowed the impact of this building to be overlooked until it is too late and the frame is up. Its eventual appearance, it seems, will be that of a block escaped from Penparcau, with similar glass fronted balconies, but some render and wood-effect cladding on the exterior.
The former Plas Morolwg was widely-known locally as ‘Colditz’ on account of its forbidding exterior, and its later claim to fame was as the setting for the lowest and most disagreeable characters in the TV show Hinterland. The opportunity to replace it with something reflecting better on Aberystwyth has been avoided.
A view from the harbour. Nothing else breaks the skyline as this does.
There is much disquiet at Hafod at the impending loss of another of its veteran beech trees, one which stands beside the little stone bridge on the drive just below the spur path up to the Bedford Monument and Mariamne’s Garden.
The veteran beech tree stands below the drive through the Hafod Estate
This is probably the tallest of Hafod’s surviving ancient beech trees, drawn upwards in a fairly sheltered position in the lea of the steeply rising hillside. It is also one the best known, because only two of the big beeches are easily visible from the road through the estate.
Unfortunately it drew attention to itself last September by dropping a large branch, which fell harmlessly into the stream valley below. As a result, a much earlier bough loss became visible to the passer by and was noticed by Jim Ralph the NRW Local Area Manager responsible for Hafod. Higher up the tree, well above the recently-lost branch, an old tear is visible which is flanked by the curved buttresses of wound-healing wood on either side. I would guess this injury is several decades old.
The veteran beech below Mariamne’s garden
However its potential to shed further branches came to mind, and when Health and Safety collides with Conservation the the latter is seldom the winner. Expert opinion of an arboriculturist identified the tree as a ‘moderate’ threat, further branch fall could occur, the branch could fall onto the road, there could be a passerby on that road at the moment when it falls. The recommendation was that it should be felled to a tall stump.
Hafod residents are so upset at the prospect of loosing this lovely tree that a few weeks ago a petition was launched on Change.org which has already attracted more than 200 signatories. I attended a meeting recently at which an articulate group expressed their views to NRW. Tellingly, all were willing to see the road closed through the estate if such a course of action would save the tree by reducing public access to its vicinity.
In a wide ranging discussion it was asserted by the residents and confirmed by Dave Newnham, the Hafod Estate Manager, that a greater risk of being struck by a falling tree is posed by the large Douglas firs and other conifers adjoining the road and paths on Hafod. The Local Area Manager did not disagree with this opinion, but explained that the conifers are not subject to similar levels of inspection and risk assessment. As anyone who has walked through a conifer plantation after a storm knows, perfectly healthy trees may blow over, their root plate lifted clean out of the ground. Which trees may fall is unpredictable, so the crop is not inspected. Wind-blow is an accepted risk.
It seems that the collapse of a piece off a veteran tree cannot be an accepted risk in terms of NRW management, so any veteran beech faces a similar fate. Just such a scenario was played out at Hafod ten years ago when the then Forestry Commission Local Manager’s eye fell upon a beautiful tree in a group below Pant Melyn, not far from the footpath to the Cascade Cavern, (locally known as the Robber’s cave).
The hollow beech at Pant Melyn, Hafod, in 2009
The tree was huge and healthy, but had at its base a hollow trunk into which it was possible for a small person to squeeze. A specialist report employing sonic tomography confirmed the obvious, that the tree was hollow on one side, and despite an inconclusive debate as to the relative strength of a rod and a cylinder of wood, the tree was duly felled to a high stump. The Hafod Trust argued passionately for its retention, but to no avail. The case for its destruction was enhanced by the fact that the route to the Cavern Cascade is a public footpath, and families often paused to rest and enjoy that very tree.
The hollow beech at Cae Melyn, Hafod, in 2009 was deemed unsafe, and was cut down
There are probably a score of other fine beeches, dating from Thomas Johnes’s time on the Hafod Estate, and fortunately most of them are further from a road. For the time being this is their salvation, for NRW are unlikely to send out specialist arboriculturalists to inspect them all. But if they did, probably none would be given a clean bill of health for the 21st century.
Current interpretation by NRW of the risk of litigation appears to be that the further from the car park you are when felled by a tree, the less responsible they, (the landowner), are likely to be considered! Across the UK about 4 people per year are killed by a falling tree, a minute contribution to overall human mortality. But for this reason, the veteran trees which draw people to Hafod will all be, sooner or later, at risk.
A change of policy at a high level would be needed to overturn the current thinking. The petition to National Resources Wales is at https://www.change.org/p/nastural-resource-wales-to-support-local-veteran-trees-of-hafod
In the summer of 1788 Jane Johnes wrote to her brother John Johnes of Dolaucothi describing her garden at Hafod as ” in high beauty” and “full of flowers”. Two hundred and thirty years is a long time ago, and for much of the recent hundred there was nothing to boast about at Hafod. So it is pleasing this summer to be able once more to echo those words, as the borders fill out with recently replanted herbaceous perennials and a glut of multi-headed foxgloves.
Foxgloves in the borders in Mrs Johnes’ garden Hafod
The restoration began with the removal of the sitka spruce plantation 10 year ago and the shrubs around the perimeter are now up to 7 years’ established. Recently, pride of place has been held by the scented Philadelphus, the gleaming white blooms of Rosa x alba Semi Plena, and the arching briars of Shailer’s White Moss Rose.
Rosa x alba Semi Plena
Rosa Shailer’s White Moss
The Hafod Trust received donations towards the planting of the garden from the Finnis Scott Foundation, and from the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust. With the final planting phase and a lavish application of rich organic mulch in the autumn of last year the garden has now turned a corner, and is developing the frothy abundance of a proper garden. The foxgloves are natives which, finding themselves in such a rich environment, sent up as many as half a dozen flower spikes from every plant. The two or three welsh poppies planted two years ago now have spawned a host of seedlings, while patches of Doronicum, Chelone, Lysimachia, Veronicastrum and Elecampane jockey for position amongst the shrubs.
The Cardiganshire Horticultural Society visited at the end of June and despite persistent rain enjoyed a number of short talks about the garden.
The Cardiganshire Horticultual Society visits Mrs Johnes’ Flower Garden, Hafod
Historian Jennie Macve described its place in Garden History. In 1787 Johnes visited Rev W. Gilpin and told him that his chief guide in laying out his grounds at Hafod had been Rev William Mason’s lengthy poetic work, ‘The English Garden’. In volume four of this work, Mason (who laid out the garden at Nuneham Courtney in Oxfordshire) gives his prescription for his then innovative style of flower garden, with its circuit gravel walk, its flower beds cut out of shaven turf forming winding grass paths between, its thickets of shrubs and colourful flowers. Visitors to Hafod described the garden lying, like a jewel in the wilderness, glimpsed briefly from the wooded heights of Gentleman’s Walk on the south bank of the Ystwyth, or appearing suddenly to the walker approaching on the gentler Lady’s Walk.
Jennie also revealed that although the Coade stone heads of a Nymph and a Satyr which form the keystones of the two garden entrances bear the date 1793 it is unclear when they were installed there. The door arches as seen today were heavily restored in the 1980s when the garden was derelict and the original Coade stone heads had already found their way into Margaret Evans’s Collection, which now resides in the Ceredigion Museum. The heads in the garden today are perfect replicas in resin. Oddly, none of the contemporary descriptions mention these arches, or the stone heads. It is even possible that these elaborate doorways were installed by a later owner, perhaps the Duke of Northumberland, using second-hand Coade stone ornament. We just do not know.
The original Coade Stone heads, now in the Ceredigion Museum
She also viewed with caution the designation as an ‘American Garden’. Only one contemporary visitor who left a written record describes the presence of American plants. What is clear though is that Jane Johnes was a keen plantswoman, the Johneses employed able gardeners, and that they corresponded about plants with their friends Sir Robert Liston and his wife, who cultivated an acclaimed American Garden at their home in Edinburgh. Plants enthusiasts, then as now, invariably seek out and exchange rare plants new to horticulture. Just as the Wollemi pine and the tree fern Dicksonia antarctica have become the must-have plants of today, Jane and the Listons would have sought to obtain the new. In the late eighteenth century much of the new was being imported by plant collectors working the eastern seaboard of the USA. Very few plants had yet been imported from the far east, and the many exotic Chinese and Japanese garden plants so familiar today were quite unknown.
Landscape architect Ros Laidlaw was also present to explain how she had selected the plants for Mrs Johnes’ garden entirely from species and cultivars known to be available to British gardeners in the eighteenth century. This was quite a challenging task, for some, such as the fragrant North American shrub Comptonia asplenifolia have fallen from popular use and no longer appear in nurserymen’s lists, whilst for many other plants, improved hybrid versions have now largely replaced the original species. The roses I alluded to at the beginning are named cultivar Old Roses with an established history, the fragrant Philadelphus coronarius has open yellow-centred single flowers, quite like a Eucryphia bloom, rather than the familiar double flowers of modern garden cultivars.
The modern restoration does not attempt to reproduce the layout of the original garden which would have had many brilliant island beds, probably geometrically arranged and cut out of the shaven turf. Such a garden would be extremely labour-intensive to care for, and is best enjoyed by small groups of people strolling through the sinuous paths inspecting the plantings. In its present form the garden offers historical authenticity in the path layout and the selection of species in the perimeter border, while the central lawn has made possible events such as the phenomenally successful Foxglove Fair which in early May saw as many as 2000 visitors enjoying food, shopping and entertainment under a brilliant and cloudless sky.
Crowds descended on the Foxglove Fair in 12 May
Doronicum pardalianches
The garden is principally maintained by the Hafod Estate manager Dave Newnham and his assistant Simon Boussetta. There are also regular Volunteer Weeding Days, the next of which will be on Friday 19 July and Friday 23 August. Garden maintenance is vital and more loyal volunteers are always needed. Volunteers bring their preferred weeding tools, and are rewarded with tea and coffee and a keen sense of achievement! They have been very enjoyable days.
Hafod has come along way from its derelict state in 1994. The walks and bridges are all now restored and it is prized by many people for its its quiet tranquillity, its vistas and waterfalls and the three walled gardens at its core.
This coming weekend that tranquillity will be, for some hours, interrupted by an event much anticipated in the community. A large marquee has blossomed in Mrs Johnes’ Flower Garden, and on Saturday evening it will host Music in the Marquee, a ticketed event at which food and drink will be available along with entertainment by two local bands, the Hornettes and The Hicksters.
On Sunday the Foxglove Fair runs from 10.30 to 6pm. There will be 40 outdoor stands selling crafts, plants, food and drink, while more stands devoted to sales and local organizations will be in the marquee. Throughout the day a programme of music in the marquee will be provided by local schools and choirs and the Aberystwyth Silver Band.
It is right and proper in my view that a garden should be not merely beautiful but useful, a place of sociability and fun. Mrs Johnes’ garden, which occupies a low lying area by a bend in the Ystwyth river, has proved its merits before, notably at a lavish wedding reception held there by Nick and Claire Lee in 2018.
Wedding marquee at Hafod
For this weekend’s events the initiative came from the tourism body Pentir Pumlumon and the Cefn Croes Windfarm Trust and has been choreographed by Tourism Development Officer Tanya Friswell and Hafod Estate Manager Dave Newnham.
I hope visitors will take time to stroll round the garden, planted, as an echo of its former splendour, with plants which were available to gardeners in the garden’s heyday in the late 18th century. Some contemporary visitors described Mrs Johnes’ Garden as an American Garden. At this time fashionable recent introductions were chiefly from the eastern side of the USA. The rich variety of Japanese and Chinese flowers and shrubs familiar in gardens today had yet to be discovered.
Just ten years ago this garden was barely discernable, swamped by a mature plantation of sitka spruce. Huge earthmovers and diggers extracted the stumps, lifting and shaking them of earth as the weeder shakes a groundsel.
In 2009 the sitka spruce plantation was removed and the garden restoration began
The forest road was re-routed round the margin of the old garden, and the dry stone walls repaired and topped with moss.
In Mrs Johnes’ day the lawn would have been ornamented with many island beds brilliant with flowers. It is well described by B.H. Malkin (The Scenery, Antiquities and Bibliography of South Wales published 1804) “A gaudy flower garden, with its wreathing and fragrant plats bordered by shaven turf, with a smooth gravel walk carried around, is dropped, like an ornamental gem among wild and towering rocks, in the very heart of boundless woods. The spot contains about two acres, swelling gently to meet the sunbeams, and teeming with every variety of shrub and flower”.
The modern restoration has the original circular gravel path but the ornamental borders are confined to the perimeter of the garden. Those fragrant, gaudy plats would require a great deal of gardeners’ time, especially when the ‘shaven turf’ was all mowed by scythe. The present arrangement still requires regular effort by garden volunteers, but also allows Hafod to welcome the occasional big event, and play a full part in the community. I intend to be there.
August 2018 Volunteers spread extra mulch on the border
The garden volunteers meet on Fridays: this year weeding dates are planned for 31 May, 28 June, 19 July, 23 August, 3 October. More volunteers are always welcome, and will find tea and biscuits and a warm welcome in the garden from 10 am till 4pm.
In 2016 I wrote about Aberystwyth’s two fine mosaics by Jesse Rust of Battersea, which respectively adorn the exterior of the Old College, and the floor of Llanbadarn Church. Both arose as a result of the influence of the architect J.P.Seddon, who worked on the restoration of St Padarn’s Church in 1878 and who designed the seafront hotel which was to become Old College. When Seddon enlarged the building for the College the triptych panel, (which depicts Pure Science flanked by two acolytes bearing the fruits of applied science), was installed at the south end of the Science wing in 1887.
For many years the mosaic floor of the church has been partially covered with a red carpet, and pockmarked here and there with damage, missing tesserae, and a few poor quality repairs. That is until last Monday, when the Mosaic Restoration Company came to town.
Llanbadarn Church mosaic floor. holes before restoration
In just four days the team of four have wrought a massive change. Specialist cleaning has revealed a palette of colours barely apparent before. Down on their knees each worked on replacing the missing pieces of of the design. Beside him was a set of tupperware boxes containing appropriately matched pieces of opaque glass. The original glass was made, by recycling glass bottles, in Jesse Rust’s Battersea workshop. Today the glass is sourced from Italy, where mosaic restoration is bigger business than it is here.
Repair in progress
Material for the glass tiles
Many of the swirling patterns contain flower designs, in which the replacement petals have to be clipped away to make a curved edge.
New white tesserae cut to shape to replace the missing pieces
A crudely repaired curlicue before restoration
The same after restoration
It takes close inspection to notice all the elaborate detail of the floor, the different shades and patterns within which the large squares of gold and red picture tiles are framed, and the edging details which make this extensive mosaic resemble a bespoke fitted carpet. The sets of four picture tiles set in circular frames are by Godwin of Lugwardine, a popular manufacturer of tiles on holy subjects. The many different designs include the Lamb of God, the four evangelist symbols, and sundry angels and kings. Not a single one is broken, and the variety on the church floor far exceeds the collections of the British Museum!
The gleaming cleaned and restored floor.
The Church is to be congratulated for seeking out the funding and expertise which has brought this huge mosaic back to its full potential. I hope that the carpet will not return! The organist tells me that the acoustics, without it, are much improved so there is every reason to display the entire floor as the designer intended.
Four restorers from The Mosaic Restoration Company, at Llanbadarn Church last week
I googled the Penglais Campus today and found a link to its Investing in the Future campaign of refurbishment. The first line reads “Penglais Campus has benefitted from extensive refurbishment over the last year. Keep checking this section for more developments in the near future.” But when I clicked on it this is all I found.Embarrassing is indeed a good word for what has been done to the campus in the last two years!
People are still reeling from the conversion of the main entrance from this:
The Hugh Owen building, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth with original planting in 2003
to a gulag with weed trees in the foreground, and vistas of bark and turf.
The Hugh Owen bank today
Other major losses to the important Cadw II* listed plantings have been described in this blog over the last 18 months. Its historic character is being steadily and unnecessarily whittled away. Another loss has just occurred in association with the car park which occupies a space between Computer Sciences and Physical Sciences and is being radically reconstructed.
Refurbishment of the car park underway between Computer science and Physical sciences buildings.
The Sweet Chestnut which stood out so handsomely against the red wall of the Physics Building has been cut down. It adjoined the car park, but was not in it. The stump stands, outside the contractors’ area today. Once again the decisions about “Improvement” are being carried out without attention to the landscape significance of the site.
The Sweet Chestnut ( left hand tree in picture) in October 2017. In spring and summer the bright foliage gleamed against the plain red wall.
Plantings were created by thoughtful horticulturalists to complement this architecturally striking building. On the other side there is a fine border and a birch, ( safe but for how much longer?). This view was formerly framed by a lawn on which happy students were often photographed for University brochures. Was it really necessary to sacrifice so much of it for the giant lettering on the huge turning area which serves the users of two disabled parking spaces?
The other side of the Physics building
I took a visitor around the campus on Saturday, and across the road from this she spied the entrance to Biological Sciences. Could those really be PLASTIC PLANTS?
Plastic ferns flank the entrance to Biological Sciences
” I’ve seen enough” she exclaimed, “take me away from here!”
Perhaps the people in Biology are doing irony. The creation of the campus plantings in the 1960s and 1970s was closely influenced by the expertise of successive professors of Botany working with well-qualified designers and gardeners. Today, the academic staff have no influence upon their environment, and the University has no Conservation Management Plan, presumably because conservation of a 20th century landscape is not their priority. Indeed it was recently announced that the care of the garden landscape of the campus has been devolved from the Estates Department to the general manager of the Sports Centre.
Contrast this with the University of Bristol which is custodian of eight historic gardens including a 2009 Centenary Garden, all expertly cared for. Aberystwyth could shine for its exceptional 20th century landscape. It is an opportunity lost.
Embarrassing is indeed a good word for what has been done to the campus in the last two years!
