June 16, 2014

My trip to Anglesey: Penmon

It’s a double feature! Part one of today’s Anglesey trip featured an excellent visit to Beaumaris Castle. I followed that by a trip further east along the coast, to Penmon.

Penmon lies to the east of Beaumaris, and is notable for the long history of its church, which stretches back to the sixth century AD. Founded by St Seiriol, a friend of St Cybi who founded Holyhead on the opposite end of the island at this time, the early monastery was attacked by the Vikings in the tenth century, before the current buildings were established in from the middle of the twelfth century. Shown above is the chancel, which is a significantly later addition, but the tower, transepts (one of which is on the right in the picture) and the nave are all dated from the original Augustinian house.

No great saint would be complete without a holy well, of course! St Seiriol’s Well was used, as were most holy wells, for reputed healing properties until at least 1811.

The monastic buildings at Penmon Priory include the refectory, or dining hall, as shown above. The building to the right in the above photo is the dovecote, which post-dates the suppression of the monasteries. The Jacobean landowner Sir Richard Bulkeley, with a mansion just outside Beaumaris, had the dovecote built sometime after 1600. The Cadw guide tells us that, in the days before farming had advanced to keeping animals fattened all year, doves and pigeons provided an important source of meat in the winter months.

The monuments at Penmon also include a number of crosses, now kept in the Priory itself, which date to the time of the Viking invasions:

I really like Penmon. The close-siting of the monuments of a small monastic community gives a really strong impression of what life must have been like in these early Christian foundations. The remote location serves to add to this feeling, too – much better than the St Cybi monuments, which are within the town centre of Holyhead.

Just a little farther on from the Priory, there is a fantastic reminder of Anglesey’s rich industrial past. The Flagstaff Limestone Quarry was originally operating from around the 1830s, though limestone had been quarried at Penmon much earlier, as Beaumaris Castle was made out of the stuff.

A small confession, here: I love industrial archaeology. While I think I will always be a medievalist at heart, nevertheless I find the remnants of our industrial past simply irresistible. The remains of the Flagstaff Quarry buildings can be seen from the coastal road on the approach to Penmon, and I was ridiculously excited once they caught my eye:

If I ever get round to writing travelogues of my previous trips to Anglesey, first on the list will be last year’s trip around Cemaes-Bull Bay, where I came across the ruins of Porth Wen brickworks and was almost faint with joy! Truly, truly magnificent!

I think what excites me so much about industrial remains is the fact that everything we see had a working purpose to it. As much as one can say that every inch of a castle is intended to be a defensible structure, or an abbey is intended to glorify God, things like these massive banks of lime kilns here made things. People worked here, and they made stuff. It’s just really, really exciting to be among such buildings!

I have spent a lot of time in quarries – there’s a massive limestone quarry not that far from where I live – but I can’t pretend to know a lot about what I’ve seen here today. The Royal Commission site tells me that there is a crusher house still standing, which could potentially be the structure above – that would certainly explain the chutes coming out of the walls, if not the chimney as a means of powering the rollers – but I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that this place was awesome! And so picturesque, too!

Leaving our industrial past behind momentarily, however, we come to the final stop on this tour: Penmon Point.

This is really what drove my trip today. I’d seen a lot of this view over on twitter for a while, and had been wanting to get up to the island to see what it’s like for myself. Pretty damn amazing, I think you’ll agree! The island to the right in the above pic is, of course, Puffin Island, once home to possibly the largest colony of puffins in Britain until a plague of rats reduced their numbers. The island was the site of another monastic foundation of St Seiriol, who is said to be buried here. There are apparently ruins of a church on the island, but it is strictly off-limits due to the bird-breeding programmes.

So there you have it, an excellent tour along the eastern tip of Anglesey! It’s well worth a visit, and on an excellent day like today, you really ought to get out there and see the sights!

My trip to Anglesey: Beaumaris

Hello everyone, and welcome to another trip-focused blog! Being off work this week, I’ve got several trips lined up, beginning with what turned out to be an absolutely incredible trip to Anglesey! I love that island so much it’s untrue, but with perfect weather, it was just grand! So let me share some snaps with you of stage one: Beaumaris!

Obviously, any trip to Beaumaris these days almost has to include the famous castle. Built from 1295, it was the last of the four great fortresses constructed by Edward I in an ‘iron ring’ around the Snowdonia strongholds of the Princes of Gwynedd. By the time work had begun at the castle, the last Prince, Llywelyn ap Grufudd, had been dead for thirteen years, and the Edwardian invasion of Wales pretty much successfully concluded, but revolts throughout the final years of the thirteenth century showed a need for visible English dominance still.

Beaumaris was the only castle Edward built on Anglesey, its location chosen expressly for the purpose of supply by sea. The Welsh town of Llanfaes that already existed at the site was seen as the most prosperous in the whole of Wales, benefiting from its location on the main route between Chester and Holyhead, and beyond to Ireland. It was also the final resting place of Joan, the daughter of King John and wife of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth ‘the Great’.

That the town was also built on a marsh was of little consequence to Edward – the need for symbols of might and dominance was never far from his mind, so placing his castle here was the natural choice. Before work began, however, the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of Llywelyn the Last, broke out across English-controlled Wales. This revolt is most startling to me because it was led by a chap who had once been on good terms with Edward. Anyway, at one point the revolt razed the incomplete castle at Caernarfon, and the sheriff of Anglesey, Roger de Pulesdon, was lynched. The revolt was brutally quashed by the English, and it was perhaps in response to this that work was ordered to begin immediately at Beaumaris.

The castle was built on flat, open ground, which is probably why the architect, Master James of St George (see picture below), was able to make it the almost-perfect concentric fortress that it is. For years, the English had been building castles in Wales in this manner, perhaps most notably at Rhuddlan and Harlech, but at Beaumaris, the example is really quite stunning.

The castle was built speedily, with stone quarried from nearby Penmon, and within about ten weeks or so, there was enough standing for the records to describe the king as staying in thatched buildings ‘within the castle’ here. Some pretty amazing records survive, showing that the castle was costing about £270 a week to build in the first season, and was projected to run around £250 a week throughout the 1296 building season.

However, almost as soon as the conquest of Wales was considered complete, Edward turned his attention north to Scotland, and began waging wars up there. The consequence was an increasingly tight budget for all of the royal castles in Wales, and the records show that labourers and other workmen were leaving the site in droves because they weren’t being paid. As 1300 loomed, expenditure on the castle was virtually nonexistant.

The work was resumed early in the fourteenth century, but on nowhere near the scale that it had been taking place earlier. The primary focus was to secure the site, and complete the curtain wall circuit across the north and west (shown above). The reason for this was a commonly-held fear that the Scots might join forces with the simmering Welsh and attack the castles of north Wales. While the curtain walls were completed, work on the castle was eventually halted around 1330.

As an incomplete castle, Beaumaris has a peculiarly squat appearance in comparison with the other royal castles of Wales. No turrets here! The outer curtain towers were left at pretty much single-storey, and the work continued just long enough to secure the towers of the inner ward around a storey higher. A survey of 1343 estimated costs to bring the castle to completion at £684. This work wasn’t carried out, evidently.

But that doesn’t detract from the fact that Beaumaris is a superb castle, and is justly referred to as a perfect design. For years now, I’ve thought of Aberystwyth as my favourite of the Welsh castles, but walking around Beaumaris today, it makes me think that I may have to revise that opinion! An excellent day out – you should all go! Now!

The Minority Report

Hey everyone!

It’s a new week, and I’m off work again, so to get the celebrations started, I thought I’d ramble a bit about a short story I read last night, The Minority Report, by Philip K Dick.

I first read this story back in 2002, when the Spielberg film came out and it looked really exciting in the trailers. I’ve got to admit, I did actually enjoy the film when I saw it, as it was a nice futuristic piece and whatnot. But then I read the short story on which it was based, and I suddenly lost a lot of my earlier admiration. See, while the film is a good piece of cinema, with lots of action and lots of intrigue, the story has got so much more depth, it has so much more subtext, it generally succeeds at telling its story much better than the film, which appears mainly to entertain.

The story follows Commissioner John Anderton, the head of the PreCrime Agency in New York at some nebulous future date, as he appears to have been framed for a crime he has not yet committed. PreCrime uses the abilities of three mutants that can see into the future to predict when crimes will be committed and apprehend the would-be criminals before any violent act. Anderton’s own name comes up as the perpetrator of the murder of a man he doesn’t know, the day his eventual replacement at the Agency starts, Ed Witwer. Anderton, an aging cop, tries to escape the net he knows will close around him once he is suspected of a future murder, but is picked up by agents of the man he is said to be plotting to kill, a retired Army general named Leopold Kaplan. It eventually surfaces that Anderton is being framed, but not by Witwer, who he assumed to be after his job and his young wife. After years of peace, the Army has been sidelined by the Police, especially the PreCrime Agency, so Kaplan intends to discredit the agency by using his agents to keep Anderton safe and, when the ex-Commissioner fails to kill Kaplan, prove the flaw of the system.

However, the basic premise of the Agency is called into question when the mechanics are scrutinized. The three mutant precogs never agree perfectly on how the future crime will take place, but a majority report is generated out of the three reports, with a minority report being rejected as false. Anderton discovers that the minority report was generated slightly after the earlier reports, and stated that Anderton, with the knowledge of his name on the majority report, decided not to commit the crime. His vindication is short-lived, however, when he realises he has been manipulated by the Army, and on further examination of the other two reports, it transpires that all three were, in effect, minority reports. At an Army rally against the PreCrime Agency, where Kaplan, now armed with the three reports, Anderton decides he must uphold the system rather than worry about his personal welfare, and so kills Kaplan. Witwer, now Commissioner of PreCrime, commutes his life sentence to exile to an outlying planet, and in the closing pages it is revealed that, while the first report determined Anderton would kill Kaplan, and the second decreed that he would not after receiving that foreknowledge, the third report was based on the earlier two, and prophesied that Anderton would indeed kill Kaplan in order to preserve the integrity of the PreCrime system. His parting words to Witwer warn that this situation can only ever happen again to the Commissioner of PreCrime.

It’s a really fascinating read! The sort of wheels-within-wheels philosophy of free will, and whether you would choose to carry out a deed if you thought it was preordained is called into question throughout the thirty-or-so pages. The justice system that bases itself on the notion of PreCrime – imprisoning effectively innocent people – is also a nice moral issue.

The precogs themselves raised some interesting questions for me, too. Described as “idiots” and said to be babbling nonsense, which is only converted into reports of premeditated crimes after computer analysis, it raised the question – does it really work? Or is it really just nonsense? The notion of a government investing heavily in a system that is fundamentally flawed is of course raised, but becomes much more interesting if that system isn’t just flawed, but is actually plain wrong, is irresistible!

The movie differs significantly from the story, even on small points, so as to almost exist as a separate entity in itself. As such, I feel it is possible to appreciate both. Unfortunately, however, the sense of depth provided by the state of animosity that developed between the Police and the Army is completely absent from the film, which uses an altogether different scheme for the events that follow Anderton on the run. But anyway.

As the picture above shows, I have two volumes of Dick’s short stories, as well as the famous Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so you can prepare for more as the weeks roll on, I’m sure!!