Between the villages of Dinmael and Tŷ Nant in north Wales, there is a half-mile stretch of road that has been closed to vehicles since 1997. It winds along the side of a short leafy gorge above the river Ceirw, and remains open to visitors without advertising its considerable history. Approaching this road along a lane from the surrounding farmlands, the river’s sound thickens from a hiss into a pouring crash, and I pause at an old stone bridge above a waterfall. A rhyming plaque set into one of the bridge’s waist-height walls says “yma yr heriodd gwŷr llangwm orthrwm y degwm“. In English, “yma” is here, “heriodd” is challenged, “orthrwm” is oppression, and “degwm” is tithes – the compulsory payments of money or goods to the Anglican church, which for a long time were enforced on everybody regardless of their religion or denomination or income or resources.
The plaque commemorates one day in May 1887, when a crowd of local people forced a tithe-collector onto the bridge and loudly debated whether to throw him off or merely dangle him over the 60-foot drop to the river until he could understand the depth of his errors. By the 1880s, people in Wales had built a vigorous opposition to the tithe system. A booklet of anti-tithe songs, printed in Dinbych, included a song whose chorus went like this: “ding, ding, ding dong bell! dim degwm! wel! wel! clywch yngan cloch angau – ding, ding, ding dong bell!“. “Dim degwm” means “no tithes” and “clywch yngan cloch angau” means, according to the infinitely-inadequate Google, “hear the bell of death”.
Imagine the crowd singing something like that on this bridge in 1887, gathered around a man who for a few long moments had no idea whether he would live to see the sun set. At this time, Nonconformism was very popular, Anglicanism not so much, and the Anglican tithe-collectors sometimes relied on military support to collect payments from farmers. Some people who withheld their tithes were forced by law to sell their properties. These and other facts might have circulated in the conversations and songs amongst the crowd around the bridge, while the local postmaster, who opposed the tithes himself, persuaded the people not to kill the tithe collector. He was released after promising, on his knees and in writing, never to return, and 31 men were subsequently charged with assault. 31 men would cover more than half the bridge’s surface area today, since it is hemmed in by thick metal traffic barriers along its walls. Stretch across the barriers to peer over the wall, and you can see the falls beneath cascading through several pools, crowded by trees on both sides.
Over the bridge, where the lane bends to the left, a sign for a public footpath points to the right. The sign is small and wordless, just a curved white silhouette of a person on a green background, encouraging us to walk through the gap between two vehicle-sized gates that mark the start of the abandoned road. There is a “no parking” sign, but no information whatsoever about why the road is here.
I walk between large old trees that lean into the road from the left, and thin young trees that grow directly against the wall on the right, seemingly rooted into nothing but a moss-topped layer of dirt on the kerb. The sound of the falls is a loud swirling fizz, but except for one spot where you can briefly glimpse some of the falls’ lower half, the water remains unseen. The hundreds of trees have grown towards and into each other from opposite sides of the gorge, and their foliage is rainforest-dense. When JMW Turner made some sketches here in 1808, the trees were much shorter, allowing a clear view of the bridge above the dropped tongues of white water. George Borrow, in his 1860 travelogue Wild Wales, famously declared the view from a bend in the road to be “one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes imaginable”, and the view from another bend to be “if possible yet more grand, beautiful, and wild”. It was a wildness made accessible by civil engineering, and these views have now disappeared, but the viewpoints built into the road remain.
The viewpoints were built when, in 1815, the UK government spent an unprecedented amount of public money to employ Thomas Telford to upgrade the roads between London and Holyhead, which then became the A5. The upgrade included “looking places”, set off from the road, as Borrow describes, “for the use of the admirers of scenery”. Those looking places are narrow pens, extended about three feet out from the road and into the trees, bordered by wide flat walls that make good seats. Admirers of scenery will have no trouble finding scenery to admire, but Borrow might be disappointed: you cannot see any distance, and there is almost no falling water.
The first looking place I come to is the second one Borrow described, which he thought to be the better, the “yet more grand” of the two. It brings you to the threshold of a three-dimensional field of sunlit leaves, veined by pale grey twigs, and thicker trunks and branches sleeved in antique moss. I feel a kind of thwarted vertigo: I know the drop is deep, but the foliage seems so abundant that the fall through it might not be lethal. Next to my knees, in a gap between bricks, four hair-like tendrils slowly nod and sway in the breeze, auburn at their roots and satsuma-skin-coloured at their tips, like something that lives in a coral reef. Admirable scenery.
This looking-place brings us very close to a waterfall we can’t see. So we are encouraged to listen. Beyond and beneath the leaves, there are two distinct strands within the sound of the water. To the left, a loud wash of static, cut through by a kind of slow flutter, or soft chopping. To the right, quieter but busier, the water-roar’s higher frequencies filter in and out unpredictably, at some moments sounding like thousands of distant raised voices and at other moments sounding like stadium applause. The zaps and pips of birds punctuate the auditory scene from above. The long laments of speeding motorbikes swell through from the far right. These bikes travel along the new section of the A5, opened in 1997, when the old section on which we now stand was closed. The new three-lane bypass was smashed through a rocky hill, and for a brief interlude in the early 2000s, the old route had to be reopened so that the tall rock-faces on either side of the new route could be covered in meshes of debris-preventing steel. It seems to me that the new route’s rocky surroundings capture some of the motorbikes’ reverberations, so that by the time the hum of their engines has swirled itself into silence, the riders must be at least a mile away.
Moving on towards the next viewpoint, the tarmac is covered in deconstructed tree: all the possible sizes of twig, branch, and splinter, in hundreds of shades of brown, grey, and blonde. Nettles grow out from the low stone wall, punctuated by pink and white flowers. I expect litter, but the only stray object I find is a torn scrap of football. At the second viewing-place, there is a large plaque commemorating Borrow’s visit. The water sounds more diffuse here, less pushy, and from a certain angle, with a tilted head, you can glimpse some of the lower portion of the falls. But the density of the trees is undiminished.
The difference between the sights here today and the sights as sketched by Turner at the same location is vast. I can’t think of Turner without picturing the gnarled and turpentined face of Timothy Spall, who played Turner in a decent film and then played LS Lowry in one of the shittest films I’ve ever seen in my life. Timothy Spall’s face has significantly flattened my experience of the history of art. Turner made nine sketches from different points along this road, and you can see them in a sketchbook on Tate.org. On one page, he depicts a small group of people who’ve driven here in a private coach to admire the view. The trees seem like mere tufts amongst the clear pale angles and contours of the gorge and the surrounding hills. The coach party are not pictured at one of the looking-places built into the wall: they visited before the road was upgraded, when it was still maintained by private turnpike trusts. The sketch is full of space and light. The same location today is much more complex, enclosed, and strange. Its sightlines have changed forever. The light is green, and the space is full of wooden tendrils. Some of the many people who’ve written about this place have called for the famous wild views to be restored by the shrewd felling of a few trees and the careful restriction of the growth of the others. Such hopes are extremely unlikely to be fulfilled, since the authorities seem to have no resources for, or interest in, the maintenance of things built for the public. The local footpaths are often blocked. Within a couple of miles of this area, one of those walking silhouette signs points directly towards a barbed-wire fence. Another points to a stile entirely swallowed by a prickly cloud of hawthorn. Sometimes the signs point the way forward, and sometimes they are little monuments to inaccessibility. Only the pheasants are free to roam, through fences and under hedges and over walls, to be killed by cars and pecked by crows.
Where the old road joins the new bypass, the mottled milestone that gives the distances to Corwen in one direction and Holyhead in the other sits in a curve of overgrown grass. A short stretch of pavement leads to another footpath sign, pointing right. I walk down a steep muddy path, tussle with brambles, dodge nettles, and barge past trees. After a hundred metres there’s a huge stump in the middle of the path. It wears a crown of roots: it has fallen over from the steep bank on the left. It is slightly curved, leaving enough of a gap underneath so I could crawl under and continue. If I possessed more enthusiasm, and less autoimmune disease, I’d carry on. But I turn back, up the slope, along the new and then the old A5, over the bridge, and away.
Ed Garland won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2018 with his essay collection Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories, which is available here. He is completing a PhD thesis entitled Sonic Experience in Contemporary Fiction at Aberystwyth University. He is on Twitter: @EdGarland9.