Apart from its sheer presence in the landscape, the castle at Harlech has a location that is breathtaking – perched high in the elevated centre of the small town, looking back down the valley at a vista that embraces the area of Porthmadog, then slides your eye leftwards to take in the whole of the Lleyn Peninsula.
On our scouting trip in May, we had searched for a location that would meet the needs of the third of our main themes: authority. Our first sight of Harlech Castle decided it. Seen from below – a straight line of a road that runs close to the magnificent beach – it appears that the castle sits on top of the hill with little else around it. In fact, it is in the centre of the town; logical, as the modern town has developed around it from early times.
There are two roads (photo below). One follows the line of the sea, the other climbs a slow and winding curve through the lush Welsh countryside and enters the town at its heart. Parking is a challenge, but the castle and associated tourist centre offers a small number of places directly adjacent to the castle grounds.
Keeping a party of several cars together on such a trip is always a challenge, though we have all got better at it over the years – to the extent of developing our own ‘protocol’ about who stops if the next car gets out of sight of the rest. It’s a simple thing but it can help to avoid disconnected delays that can easily add up to a cream tea…
How do we react to authority? It depends on many things, including age. As young children, the authority of the caring adult is paramount in the relationship by which that child is moulded to fit into its society. This is seen as necessary, yet robs us of much of our spiritual originality. Most would agree it is essential for the child’s survival and prosperity, even though, beyond the original love of the home, it forms the first great ‘container’ of reactions that eventually create the personality. From there on, that hard container is wrapped around the soul in an increasingly dense way.
Later in life, and as our personal power grows, we may feel so aggrieved about the society in which we have matured that we literally go to war with in – as the Prisoner did in the McGoohan series. Seen as a superficial spy story, the man was on a hopeless quest, seen as someone reclaiming his spiritual originality, it takes on a quite different shape. McGoohan’s character was at war with himself…
As a child, holidaying in Wales, and captivated by its beauty, I marvelled at how many castles this ancient race had built to defend themselves, little knowing that this was completely wrong. Most, if not all of the Welsh castles were built by English kings, such as Harlech Castle’s creator, the military and battle-hardened Edward I.
Their purpose was to provide fortified and administrative outposts for the English ruling class, in a country transformed by 1066 and the Norman conquest. Edward I built Harlech Castle to secure the lands he had won from Llywellyn of Grufford, the Prince of Wales. For two-hundred years after the Norman invasion, there had been continuous wars between the conquering Marcher lords and the Welsh princes. In 1267, the Treaty of Montgomery recognised Llywelyn as Prince of Wales, in return for annual tributes and subservience. Llywelyn later lost most of his power an authority in further skirmishes which cost him all but his title.
When you realise that you are inside a foreign power’s redoubt, the secure and ruthless architecture takes on a different flavour, and there is a sadness that such a proud and folklore-rich race lived under the English yoke in such a bloody way; though it is probably true that the Welsh of that time were as warlike as the English.
The model above shows how the castle was originally created. Much of it remains, as least as a visitable ruin. The model illustrates that, at the time of its construction, between 1283 and 1289, the castle was next to the sea, whereas today the long line of dunes constitute a barrier of nearly a mile between the lower part of the castle (and the foot of the town) and the coast.
It was the proximity of the sea that made Harlech such an effective fortress. In times of siege, supplies could be brought in by boat directly to the lower jetty, which was highly fortified. Harlech had its own English lifeline…
Our final act within the castle was to climb the spiral stairway of the west tower – something that proved quite a challenge. Breathless, we reached the top, to gaze in wonder at the commanding view it afforded. Very little could be hidden from the eye based here. One might say the same about the way our own governments seem hell-bent on overseeing all our lives, in the name of such ’causes’ as safety and terrorism. Same psychology, different mechanisms.
Our group had split into two to explore the small town. We reunited at the famous ice-cream shop and were to be found, silent and entranced, sitting outside the shop/cafe in the Welsh sunshine.
Two parts of our Saturday remained. One – the finale – was still unknown by all but two of us; the other followed the castle visit as we gathered on the quiet end of a beach, two miles south of Harlech, to admire the sun, now descending towards the western sea, and shared our final readings of the day.
The day could hardly have gone better… but it was not over, yet…
——- to be concluded in the final part (7) ——-
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three,
©Stephen Tanham
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Our visit to the actual village of Portmeirion ended quietly, but with an interesting mosaic of happenings. We rejoined our colleagues, silent in our own conclusions – for everyone must find their own in a place like this, and there can be no right or wrong, for the author, McGoohan, is long departed.
We took the beautiful coastal walk which would bring us to the place of the final set of Portmeirion readings, high up in the forest once more. There is only so far you can take a walking mediation like this. After a while, you need to step back and let the ‘now-ness’ of the actual place take over. This part of Wales, just south of Snowdon, is spectacularly beautiful, and days as fine as this was are rare in a British summer. It was important to move on and, in doing so, to bring our wonderful adventure in the ‘Village’ to a close.
The Truth can only be in the now. Each of us discovers this in their own way. Even the wisest of books can only point us to that eternal basis of the ‘real’. We live in an organic body; a body which is undergoing cycles around the sun that will eventually lead to its death. Death is programmed into the genes of the human being. It could have been otherwise but it is not. We, therefore, have to look within our lives – that sequence of the moments of now – for that which is eternal, for we will not find it in our bodies.
We might say that in an act of fully experiencing the now we bring together two worlds. What those worlds are and their significance in our lives is a matter of personal discovery. The past weighs on us in the form of our beliefs, fears, memories, likes and dislikes. This accumulation becomes something that we have no choice but to assume is ‘us’. But that is false. What is us lies ‘beneath’ that layer of detritus, and it is the job of mystical schools to tease it out and have it take its rightful place. The inner part of our being – the soul if you like -will use ‘the accumulation’ as cleverly as possible to fashion an effective instrument of consciousness and action in the world it must inhabit. But it is only by realising that we are really kin to the inner and not the outer that freedom can be truly viewed.
A fuller perspective would show how the nature of our experience is closely tied to what we need the most in order to, finally, see the real.
It was apparent that a certain amount of levity had entered the day, on the back of the noonday sun, no doubt. It certainly wasn’t alcohol; tea and coffee had been the only liquids consumed. We set off back along the shore path, for the final time, when, in the nature of these days, an event happened…
This one was prompted by Sue announcing that she could live in the small lighthouse, built by Clough Williams-Ellis, as one of his jocular landscape features and on the basis that the new Portmeirion village didn’t have one. It was obviously conceived as a piece of humour – it looks like it was rescued from a ‘Clangers’ set – the 1970s children’s TV show. True to form, Stuart climbed up, as well, and they set about deciding what renovations would be needed before it was habitable.
Much mirth below. Proceedings halted for while, until we could move on, again.
Sue’s new house… her architect gives it the once-over…
I have another photo of the two of them up a tree – the next item in our mosaic – but we have an agreement, usually honoured, that we will not publish photos without the subject’s approval. Instead, here’s a photo of the tree with John about to size up the possibility of sitting on its bent and horizontal trunk. For the second day in a row, our chess champion was about to contribute some mystically-themed reading, many of which he recited from memory.
The humour continued for a while, as the sea views dropped off along the climbing path. Then we were in the forest, again, and the mood changed, becoming more reflective. At the top of the steep gradient, we found a peaceful glade, and, with the delightful company of a very tame robin, carried out our readings. We had all forgotten the theme of this part of the day, which is just as well, as our next destination awaited and offered a much more fitting place. It’s important to be open to change on these occasions. The nature of any ‘mystical journey’ is defined by what happens between the building blocks you put in place; though it must be said that without the building blocks there would be no gaps with which the spirit can work…
Stuart and Sue contributed a great deal to the weekend with their ‘bibliomancy readings’. At each place, someone from the group would be asked to open the selected book at a page of their choosing. Then, another person would pick one of the readings from that spread of pages. The reading would then be made. It is a matter of record how much such a method of selecting, using an appropriate book, can throw light on the topics of the day.
The reader is referred to Stuart’s blog where the whole sequence of his and Sue’s trip is narrated, in order of how the bibliomancy reading were selected and given.
Soon, though, it was time to leave this beautiful cove, and to take advantage of the perfect weather to visit another – though one in a very different landscape and from a very distant period in time. The spirit of levity still dominated the day. We said our goodbyes to Portmeirion, knowing we had established a strong enough connection to draw us back for further visits.
Just around the estuary, a very much older landscape beckoned, one that was to fit very well as our theme moved from ‘acceptance or resistance‘ to ‘authority‘.
Thirty minutes by car away and seven centuries in time, the Men of Harlech were waiting… The prisoner might have established his attitude to Portmeirion, but the iron first of the establishment was about to respond in stone.
——- to be continued ——-
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,
©Stephen Tanham
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Just so good…
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“Tell me,” said Joshua, “why is that person carrying a lamb to the city ?”
Judas Thomas said, “So that he may kill it and eat it.”
Joshua said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.
Damn the soul that depends on the flesh.
Damn the flesh that depends on the soul.
How miserable is the body that depends on these two ?
Together they are like a dog in a cattle manger, where neither the dog nor the cattle can eat hay.
During the days when you eat what is dead you make it alive, but when you are in the light, where the dead are not alive and the living will not die, what will you do ?
If the body came into being because of the spirit then…
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*
“There are a lot of ugly looking lions in Portmeirion.”
We shrink from wondering whether or not one of them is devouring the Buddha’s missing right forearm.
“And lots of steps.”
“Number Six spends a lot of time in the village running up and down steps.”
Run up one set of steps in Portmeirion and a Mansion becomes a Two-up-Two-down.
Run down another and one is accosted by a plaster-cast-christ declaiming on a balcony from which depends a black sheep.
*
*
“Soft clothes?”
“Perspective. One is spatial, the other, intellectual.”
“Clever that.”
Here, the ridiculous jostles with the sublime to unfeasibly pleasing effect.
“It’s nothing more than a clutter and jumble of odds and sods, lovingly reassembled into, well, something, uncluttered and well ordered.”
“Much like memories, perhaps.”
“Or what memory makes of experience.”
*
*
In the corner of that courtyard there, a manicured tree sprouts in-front…
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The road through Snowdonia was spectacular…at least, once we had left behind the rush hour traffic on the main coast road that delayed us. Realising we might miss the pre-evening drinks, my companion sent a text to say we would be a little late, while I tackled roads I would otherwise have loved to play on. It had been a long, fabulous day and we were looking forward to a shower and a change of clothes before dinner. It was not until we reached the hotel in Tremadog that we found the message alerting us to a change of plan and a scramble to reach the restaurant in time for dinner.
The tide was out when we reached Borth-y-Gest, a Victorian village on the Glaslyn estuary. Boats were beached on the sands of the little harbour and distant clouds blurred the view across the river to the Rhinog Mountains. After…
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As the land-train pulls out of the main square in Portmeirion, we head up into the forest. There are three distinct internal regions within the Portmeirion site. The first is the village, itself; the second is the coastal walk; and the third is the forest walk. The little train follows the forest road, but stops to give a view of the coast in several places. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate the often wicked humour of the creator of Portmeirion – Clough Williams-Ellis, from the mental overlay that hunters of the ‘Prisoner experience’ project onto this unique place.
Station names like: Salutation, Old Castle, Playground, and Shelter Valley all take on a secondary, if not intended meaning within the context of following the McGoohan mind as you attempt to tease out the secrets of this landscape embedded in the Prisoner series.
We had invited our companions to spend their own time in the forest before meeting up for a group walk along the coastal path. The forest is a very special place and, to my recollection, featured in the Prisoner series only when No 6 was running away or having secret meetings with other ‘prisoners’ – many of whom were planted, and simply pretending to suffer to get No 6’s sympathy so that he would tell them why he resigned. The thought brings back the central question of the series: why was it so important that the various No 2 characters found out the motives of No 6? They were presumed to be all-powerful, so why did it matter what reasons had engendered the resignation in the first place?
“His power – the very reason for him being here and retaining a glimmer of that power – was that he had a secret,” hisses the intense green all around us… The sun is getting hotter and the deep, summer blue fills the gaps in the canopy of the forest. The shifting has begun, again….
And then, high up in the trees, a pagoda comes into view and we’re suddenly back in that different sense of presence where the voice of McGoohan is guiding us from ‘above’. There is no pretence that the being of the actor is actually here, simply that we have woven an internal, creative state – a kind of walking meditation that enables insights, using the ‘voiced presence’ of the creator of No 6 to help bring it to life. It’s a directed mediation, just like we use in the Silent Eye, and, in this rich and wonderful hillside, it’s working beautifully…
There is a real question here, beyond the mental and emotional game we are playing: what did it mean? What was the inner meaning that McGoohan went to such pains to conceal, giving only hints, even long after he had left the Prisoner behind. “It’s important, then,” says his voice in my head. “to work it out for yourself.”
We move deeper into the forest. The green intensifies…
“Who were they, then?” asks the dark voice of No 6, “The others – the supposed fellow victims of abduction to this demented heaven and hell?”
It’s a sobering question. If McGoohan was the ‘awakened’ self, projected, post-resignation, into a new reality in which his ordinary life became exposed as a prison and left him resolutely determined to escape to the ‘real’, then who were the characters who met him in the forest, pretending also to have been abducted? Agents of someone, singular or plural, but who? The mysterious No 1, presumably…
We are climbing now, and, up ahead a Japanese Cedar curls out its exotic curves, projecting an image of something that goes somewhere via a very roundabout route. Its shape suggests that straight lines don’t necessarily get you there as you expected, and sometimes curved paths are more fruitful.
How do you follow a curve? I ask myself. Then the old answer comes back, one borne of recent experience: with trust… in other words by staying on it. When the envisaged future is invisible you can either refuse to get off the bus in the forest or get off at Unknown Crossing and trust that you are where you should be…
The forest begins to speak for itself; there is the sense that we have discovered enough, that if we take what we have and see it from the green wholeness that this place provides, the important patterns will emerge.
We say little, simply walking and letting our thoughts wander.
There’s a signpost up ahead. Ironically, it speaks of a lighthouse. What more potent a symbol could there be? And then, as the path moves downhill and turns sharply left, the forest gives way to the coast. The splendour of the sea is revealed, pointing us back to the place where our adventure began, the previous evening – in the tiny cove of Borth-y-Gest. It’s a wonderful omen…
“I’m going to take a stab at it,” I say to Barbara.
“What, the whole thing?” she laughs.
“What’s to lose?” I ask, sounding more sure than I am.
“Ok,” she says, challengingly; waiting and watching as I draw breath and look out to sea.
“No 6’s life as a spy is just that – he spies on life from a distance and under the cover of special powers.”
I look across at her. Initially, she says nothing, then, “It’s a good start…”
Another breath, deeper this time, because I’m assembling this, charged with the forest’s green energy, as I go.
“He realises the shallowness of his life and resigns – the brochure of a holiday paradise in his case – intending to be free of the whole thing and completely underestimating the power of the establishment to curtail his little adventure.”
“The establishment… I like that,” Barbara says, laughing, and continues. “Who promptly drag him, drugged, back to where he came from and psychologically torture him.”
“Exactly,” I say, warming to this unfolding. “He forgot the power of the establishment – the ego – to take away his new, enthusiastic consciousness and drug him back to an imprisoned state where ‘it’ could find out what he was up to…”
“So, in a sense, he stays drugged, and wakes up powerless but determined to get back to that moment of truth from which he could see his new life, his paradise?”
I look at her, so glad this has been a shared thing. “Yes… Exactly that.”
“And No 1?”
“No One, Oneself… Take your pick. The other ‘controllers’ are the regents of the ego, trying different ways to undo him – as they have done all his life. They don’t answer his question of Who is No 1?, because they can’t.” I pause, slightly giddy with the ride, and grinning like the proverbial cat.
She is smiling, too. “But when he truly wakes, again, by defeating the No 2s, he will remember that he is really No 1?”
“Exactly… and paradise will be reclaimed.”
“Bloody hell!” she says.
It’s a very precise statement…
——- to be continued ——-
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three,
©Stephen Tanham
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Got these in the wrong order!
‘The prophet takes over where the mystic stops. The mystic is ascent; the prophet descent.’
– William Everson
The bibliomantic reading could not have been more appropriate. From the mines, we were heading for the heights to meet a Druid on the top of a mountain.
“I’m not sure I’m really up to climbing mountains….” Between the mountain that loomed above us, the sun and the heat, the word ‘convalescence’ seemed to be at a bit of a loss for something to connect with. I had heard the tale of the day-long wander around the mountain on a spiral path that had led to my companion’s original ‘discovery’ of the site.
“That must have been the wrong way. The book…” Ah, the book… the same one that had led us on so many wild goose chases with its maps drawn to some variable scale? “… the book says it is…
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*
Borth-y-Gest from Portmeirion Beach
*
“We have Take-Off!”
Resignation
“One-Nine-One, or One-Nine-Two?”
*
No 3 (Light)
‘Suddenly the world
Cracks, the phallos
Slams home, slams the ineluctable stroke.
And the universe splits, the touched-off tinder,
Fired by that blazing torch
Detonates all the tamped and pounded down empacted intensity.’
– William Everson
*
“I think we were all surprised by that reading.”
*
*
“We’ll save the dark reading for back at the Hotel.”
*
No 2 (Dark)
‘How long they lie each never knows.
This prayer, their one worship. A worship
Learned in the years. For youth leans on them:
They are getters of children: known much and have suffered.
In the deeps of the soul have ached for each other,
Accepting suffering…
*
And now in their night
They know the incarnational join: body to body
Twain in one flesh…
*
Out in the night the River…
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You could not wish for a more spectacular setting for a stone circle. Perched high above the sea, with views to distant mountains in every other direction, it is a magnificent site. A slight rise to the seaward side blocks the view of the modern quarrying and, from within the circle, there is no visible trace of the modern world at all.
It is easy, here, to rebuild in imagination the fallen stones. There were once thirty of them standing, now only eleven remain upright. Even so, they have a presence impossible to capture on camera. It is a place to simply sit in wonder. To sit and wonder too what our forebears were thinking when they quarried Penmaen-mawr in the 1920s, decapitating the 1500 ft summit by the simple expedient of destroying Braich-y-Dinas, the Iron Age hillfort that crowned it… which was one of the largest in Europe. No trace…
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In tiny Hynish’s western shore
Where gentle waves now kiss the sand
The resting seas recall the names
Of they who built the Skerryvore
➰
Forgotten in the passing nights
Unknown to most, of even few
Who chance on Hebridean soil
And stumble on the wreck of lights
➰
For ears a story here in stone
Which value engineers of night
Of iron and glass and fearsome seas
That rivals any ancient tome
➰
Not shifting sands or limestone frieze
No Pharaoh wise, nor Mayan king
Have ever dared to light the night
With giant tower upon the seas
➰
In deep of howling winter’s night
I’ll sit upon my writer’s keys
And ‘Stevenson’ will be the word
The image: glass infused with light
➰
So come from history, taking bow
From we who sail on greatness past
We bow to you, who built our age
Forgotten on the quiet sands of now
➰
©Stephen Tanham
Underlying outline from the Hynish museum of the Skerryvore Lighthouse.
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I was distinctly sceptical…unsure what to expect when we parked at the entrance to the mines. So many ancient sites, once commercialised, seem to lose both their intimacy and essence, but I remembered watching something about the discovery many years ago and was curious to see for myself what had been found. A landscaping project in an area thought to be above Victorian mines had uncovered something much older which had astonished archaeologists and changed the way the nation’s ancient history was written.
At school we were taught that the Stone Age peoples were primitive… pretty much your archetypal cave-man, with a minimal survivalist technology and little else to recommend him. That never really added up to me, not when I had seen so many of the great stone circles as a child. It made even less sense when you looked at the incredible artwork of the caves at Lascaux…
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