Golcar

Ann welcomed us to the Colne Valley Museum. She wore a practical grey dress, a simple white apron that my grandma used to call a pinny, and a cotton shawl. She was expecting us; Sarah’s friend, Bob, had managed to persuade the museum staff to open early, so we could be treated to an exclusive guided tour, enabling us to rapidly acquire an insight into the history of Golcar, a small village that is three miles from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

The museum was formed from three weavers’ cottages that had been knocked together. Not having been a very good student of history I didn’t know what a weaver’s cottage was, but it didn’t take me long for my interest to become thoroughly piqued: my day job is all about technology, and the museum was all about industrial history.

Ann introduced us to her colleague, a fellow volunteer, who was also called Ann.

 “All my family come from around this area” said Bob, not wasting a moment to learn more about the area. Sarah had known Bob and his partner Miriam since she was little; they were close friends of her family from when they lived in Manchester. Not only was this trip an opportunity to do a ‘G’ and visit Golcar, but it was also an opportunity to visit them both and to catch up.

“You remember my mother?!” exclaimed Bob after chatting with one of the Ann’s for a few minutes. Bob had been recently doing a lot of research into his family history. In some respects, Bob’s trip to Golcar was a lot more significant than my own. I had no reason to visit the town other than it began with a letter, whereas Bob’s identity seemed to be bound closely to the valley.

A neat graphic charted the history of the property, showing how it was divided and subdivided and occupied by different families. A sign, entitled ‘a family weaving business’ offered some useful background information: “Cloth makers James and Sally Pearson built two cottages here at Cliffe Ash in the early 1840s. By 1845, two more cottages had been added and the row was called Spring Rock. The four homes housed textile workers until the early part of the 20th century”.

I chatted with the first Ann. The entire area was defined by the wool and textile industry, which had all but disappeared. Ann’s woollen shawl wasn’t produced from a mill in Yorkshire. Instead, it was bought from Primark, made in China and was probably polyester. Ann had been a mature student, studied science, technology and engineering in her 40s.  Her dissertation was about the architecture of the textile industry.

After walking through the length of the ground floor, we found ourselves in one of the main exhibition rooms: a kitchen. There was a range that had been recently lit, a couple of tables, and a frame on which you could hang things using tenterhooks, used for the stretching of woollen cloth. On the tables were period items; jugs, pots and bowls. There was a room at the back of the kitchen which contained washing paraphernalia: a mangle, a bucket, and a device which was used to agitate your laundry. Our attention was drawn to a couple of framed pieces of needlework, which were made by girls and young women to demonstrate their skills.

A sign directed us upstairs towards the 1840s bedroom, which contained period furniture: a substantial chair, a bed, a dresser, and a spinning wheel. Ann told us something else about the bedroom: it had been used for drinking when the building was taken over by the Golcar Socialist Club. Ann told us about the hard drinking Colne Valley MP, Victor Grayson, a skilled orator who mysteriously disappeared in 1920.

There was another room at the top of the building. I was struck by two things: the light streaming in through the windows, and two large looms.

“Everyone does that” said Ann, who saw me walk towards the window.

I wanted to catch a glimpse of the surrounding countryside, to learn more about the valley. I wanted to see what the weavers saw. “When we first opened, we had the looms directly next to the windows as they would have been, so there would be as much light as possible for the weavers to work, but then visitors would move between the looms to look out of the window, so we moved them to where they are now” explained Ann.

It was only then that I noticed the size of the windows. They were different to other windows I had seen in buildings of a similar age. They were massive; the windows frames hewn from stone. Behind me were two massive wooden framed weaving looms. A volunteer demonstrated how they worked.

Bob was fascinated by its operation, how the shuttle moved back and forth, and told us how the mechanism changed to create different patterns in the material.

“Jacquard” Bob said, referring to the Frenchman, Joseph Jacquard, who had once visited Huddersfield.

I knew of Jacquard through the history of computing. Jacquard invented a system where looms could be programmed using sets of abstract cards that could be used to realise physical cloth that contained complex repeating patterns.

The final room was different to the rest. Rather than focusing on spinning and weaving, it was all about shoemaking. The weavers of Yorkshire, like textile workers in Lancashire, wore clogs. After the death of one of the last clog makers, the entire contents of a cobblers, including stock, tools, and materials were moved to the museum to be preserved. Visitors could sit on a bench and try on pairs of clogs in different sizes. Our visit to the museum ended with a short walk through a café and gift shop, where Bob continued to chat with the two volunteers.

Our journey to Golcar had been a journey through personal and industrial time. It began at the town of Macclesfield, spending the night at Miriam and Bob’s house. Bob explained that Macclesfield used to be a famous silk town, but I only know it as an anonymous train station that I always used to pass on the way to Manchester. Macclesfield is a part of the North West that I didn’t know anything about, but in this instance, the notion of the place was secondary: it was friendships and shared personal histories that mattered. Sarah shared stories and greetings from her parents, and Miriam and Bob gave us a tour of a well-tended garden that overlooked a quiet canal; an important echo of industrial heritage that we were only just starting to explore.

When Bob had heard we were visiting Golcar, he was very happy to help. He prepared us a printed information pack entitled ‘Golcar: a West Yorkshire village’. His pack introduced the Colne Valley and highlighted sights, such as the village church, the valley museum and a café. A very concise history referenced wool, the building of canals and industrialisation. Bob also offered to guide us from their home in Macclesfield to Golcar, which was really helpful, since I had no idea how to get there.

On the morning of our drive to Golcar, we followed Bob and Miriam in their car. Bob’s route took us to a place called Standedge which is the site of a series of canal tunnels connecting West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. We stopped at Standedge visitor’s centre, a former warehouse, now a museum.

We wandered around the visitor centre for around half an hour, looking at the various exhibits; a set of display boards that explained the term ‘legging it’, and revealed that Standedge tunnel was ‘the highest, longest and deepest canal tunnel in Britain’ and a series of wooden life size cut out characters who played a significant role in its construction. One board explained that its construction began in 1794 while it opened in 1811. “The railways” said Bob, reflecting on its closure in 1944.  The tunnel was restored and reopened in 2001, and is now open to canal tourists.

Just as Sarah was catching up with Miriam and Bob, I had the opportunity to catch up with one of my old friends: Dave. I met Dave on the first day of university at a cheese and wine party. I remember Dave because I was envious of the way that he could seemingly talk to anyone and the fact that he had a bold plan, which was to liberate some of the free wine and take it to the lake side, and continue drinking. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I think I was party to his scheme. There is something else that I need to mention about Dave. Just as Bob had a connection to Golcar, Dave was, more or less, a local: he was from Huddersfield.

We met Dave in the Golcar Liberal Club, a working men’s club. The club was almost empty, except for a single family celebrating a birthday. A huge television on a back wall displayed an ignored football match and two bored barmaids chatted with each other. A flyer on our table suggested that there would be a club singer performing during the evening. Later on that evening two local lads started playing pool at a table that was just behind us.

Dave lived on the opposite side of Huddersfield, but had cycled for over an hour from Halifax, which was where he seemed to be spending most of his time. I asked Dave what it is like around Huddersfield.

“You look around you and you see history everywhere; it’s just there. You see it when cycling around, next to the canal and going into the different parts of the town. You’ve can’t escape it. It surrounds you. It’s everywhere, and you’re a part of it too. You see that parts of this area were once really very wealthy, because of the industry, because of what this area used to mean”.

After an hour or so, we invite Dave over for dinner. We were staying in a small house situated two hundred metres away from the Colne Valley Museum. Our house had been built on a steep hill. The bottom floor contained a kitchen and a living room, and access to a garden. The ground floor contained a single bedroom dominated by a series of substantial windows, like the windows that I had seen in the museum. Although it had a high ceiling, it didn’t seem to be large enough to have once accommodated a loom, but it was certainly a place where someone worked. Perhaps it used to be a finisher’s cottage; a place where fine detail to cloth was added.

The house was dwarfed by the adjacent building, which appeared to be a former industrial building, perhaps a mill. There was one main tell-tale sign of its former use: an external beam that was used to haul materials up from the ground level and into the building for processing.

I ask Dave about what he was doing in Halifax. Dave was between jobs having recently returned to the UK from a university in central Europe. He was working on a personal research project that was connected to his doctoral studies. Dave has interests in philosophy, politics, sociology, economics and computing. He connects these subject together by writing computer simulations and studying the emerging patterns. Writing simulations, or any types of software forces you to really think about your assumptions. If you’re using a computer to simulate anything, the computer becomes a philosophical tool because you need to define everything that the computer does. In some respects, you can describe a whole universe within a computer and define the laws that govern that universe. Dave cycles to a well-known pub chain in the morning, orders a coffee and gets to work on his simulations. He says it suits him: it is warm, he’s not disturbed, and the coffee is cheap.

The discussion moved onto politics and the debates regarding the European Union, and I sensed that Dave had different views to many members of his immediate family. One of the last things that I remember from our discussions was his point that it is important not to condemn those who have different perspectives, but to understand.

Dave left our weavers cottage at around 11; he had a long ride home in the cold but he didn’t seem to mind. It looked like he was used it. He donned a waterproof jacket, turned on his lights, unchained his bike and cycled to the centre of Golcar and followed a road that travelled downwards to the centre of Huddersfield.

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We found some time to walk around the village, which didn’t take us very long. The heart of the village seemed to be a road called Town End which contained a library, a post office, a hairdressers, a tanning salon, a small supermarket and what appeared to be a wine bar. As I walked, I looked upwards, towards the windows and again saw evidence of distant industry.

A walk took us to a closed pub and a small deserted industrial estate that contained a brewery. We retraced our steps, found another pub, and soon discovered a narrow footpath. We nodded at dog walkers as we made our way to an unknown destination, and I looked around, gradually falling into my own thoughts about what it would be like to live in one of those weavers houses. The footpath emerged in a part of the village that felt unrecognisable from the Golcar of Town End.

We found ourselves in a version of Golcar that belonged to the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties; streets with cul-de-sacs and closes, filled with simple box-shaped detached houses with integral garages, and homes that an estate agent might describe as ‘alpine bungalows’. I felt unnerved and disorientated. In my mind, Town End gave Golcar its sense of place, whereas its estates reminded me of the time I spent in a similar sized village in rural East Anglia. Somehow, time and architecture had collapsed space and distance through childhood memories.

Whilst Golcar is its very own place, every place exists within its own geographical context which deserves exploration. We had a choice; we could either head into the metropolis of Huddersfield, or follow further footpaths to leave the town and into the next village.

The following day we decided to head to Slaithwaite, a village to the west of Golcar. We began from our weavers cottage and walked down an adjacent snicket, twintern, or passage and onto a road that roughly followed the course of the river and the railway line. As we walked, I started to play a simple game with myself called: ‘spot the weavers cottage’.  It was a very easy game to play; stone houses with large sets of upper windows overlooking the Colne valley could be easily found along the road to Slaithwaite.

I liked Slaithwaite. I like the stone uniformity of its buildings and the way that stone shop fronts offered visitors an assortment of useful establishments: cafés, butchers, and newsagents. The village was dominated by what was called the ‘Globe Worsted Mill’; an imposing monument to the industrial revolution which sat ominously in the middle of the village, its location dictated by the river and connected by canal. The mill opened between 1887 and 1889, and closed in 2004. I later read somewhere that it might become a technology and innovation centre with a connection to the nearby Huddersfield University, leading to a delicious play on words: the establishment of a Sili-Colne valley.

We discovered further abandoned mill buildings in Slaithwaite; industrial buildings that could be described as a five storey wall of windows, like the weavers cottages, expressly designed to let in the light. Some of those windows had been bricked up, others had been smashed. Dark streaks ran from the top to the bottom of the building, following the path of downpipes. I didn’t feel sad looking at these buildings. Instead, I felt curiosity: what stories emerged from those buildings, and a curiosity about what those buildings would or could become.

On the way back to Golcar, we stopped in a local pub called The Swan for a couple of pints. The Swan felt timeless. It had two bars; a saloon bar and a lounge bar. Musical hall era posters adorned the walls. One advertised ‘five Braemar Pipers’ and ‘eight dancing lovelies’. An extended family came and sat down for an afternoon pint; grandparents, parents and children all occupying a set of tables.

We left the following morning. It had snowed heavily overnight. We had opened the curtains and white night blazed through the windows of our weavers cottage. Clouds hung low in the sky threatening further snow, but it was clear that it was melting quickly. We loaded the car, and followed the snow to the motorway, where it disappeared.

This trip had a slightly different feel to the others. Golcar was Miriam and Bob, and Golcar was Dave. It was a trip that seemed to be less about place and more about people.

I liked Golcar. Perhaps it was the light, the large windows. I like that it was idiosyncratic. I liked that there were wine bars and closed pubs, weavers’ cottages and alpine bungalows. I liked the friendliness of all the volunteers who all seemed to be called Ann. I liked that their museum seemed to be saying: “this is Golcar; it’s a small place, but what happened in these valleys was important for a time, and this is a part of us”.

Fron

I pointed towards a solitary sign, took my foot off the accelerator and edged the hire car to the side of the road. We were there. We were at Fron, Powys, mid-Wales.

I got out of the car, took a photo of the sign and then a celebratory photo of Sarah. It was just after ten o’clock in the morning; the air contained a touch of cold, reminding me that we were now in autumn.

“Shall we have a walk about?” asked Sarah.

I had spent a few minutes studying the map before we had set off; I had a slightly different idea.

“I want to go up one of these roads; I’ve seen one on the right which looks like it might be, you know, the village”. I turned the ignition, put the car into gear and pulled out onto the A483. As soon as I was on the main road, I took a right turn onto a residential street.

“This is nice!” said Sarah, who was looking at all the houses as we passed. “Look! That one’s for sale! We could move to Fron!”

The hill got steeper, then narrowed and began to wind its way up the side of a valley. I passed a pair of well-maintained iron gates and drove into an empty church car park. We got out and found a path that led us on a route past the side of a well maintained building that looked less like a church and more like a residential home; there was signs of life, but nobody was about. The path led us to an unkempt graveyard, complete with tall grass, gravestones with faded lettering and a warning sign that said they were dangerous and may cause serious injury.

We rounded a corner and found another graveyard. This one was different; it was tidy and well maintained and was situated on a steep hill. As I climbed the hill towards the boundary of the church my eyes caught the names: Evans, Jones and Morgan. I saw something else: distant hills filled with light valley fog. This was the Wales of my imagination.

Wales features little in my personal biography. I have one main memory which has faded with time. It is a memory of when I was fifteen; I had joined a scout group out of my own volition after realising that I had inadvertently become a teenage recluse. I lived in a different part of London from where I went to school and I felt as if I was under house arrest since I wasn’t yet allowed to roam the streets and hang out with my friends; joining ‘scouts’ seemed a way around this.

My fifteenth year was punctuated by a trip to ‘climb’ Snowdon. It was an adventure that I remember finding entirely baffling. I didn’t understand why anyone would walk up a mountain ‘for fun’, especially when you had to share bunk beds with a group of malodorous teenagers. There was another aspect of bafflement: the endless car journey from London to our simple hostel was accompanied by a soundtrack of endless heavy metal music that was favoured by the nineteen year old driver who gave the impression of being impossibly grown up.

One thing I did get out of that particular adventure, other than a profound feeling of exhaustion, was a sense of achievement, awareness of different way of being or living; the scenery I encountered during the adventure was an overwhelming contrast to the urban environment in which I was familiar. In some respects, that trip had changed my teenage self. I had returned tired, but happy.

This trip was very different; Sarah had booked an AirBNB that was a ten minute drive away from Fron. Our journey had taken us to the borders of Birmingham and into the county of Herefordshire. Our route had changed from dull motorways into A-roads that were devoid of traffic.  Strips of asphalt and bridges had given way to picturesque landscape of gentle hills and pretty settlements. Half an hour of post-motorway travel made me realise that I had thoroughly escaped my familiar urban environment of buses, crowded trains and streets packed with idling cars.

Leaving London had been brutal. Although we had set off outside of rush hour, it took us over an hour and a half to wrestle free from the urban traffic and onto a densely packed but free flowing motorway. Our route out of the city took us past districts of Forest Hill and Shepard’s Bush, rural suggestions that were at odds with the claustrophobic city.

Our AirBNB in Fron was a 17th century stone cottage, owned by Michelle and Peter who were, like us, both in their mid-forties. Michelle took us through a hallway, past Peter’s dismembered Ducati motorcycle and into a kitchen that was warmed by an exotic emblematic fixture that you only tend to see in rural homes: an Aga. Michelle talked us through how to use it, before returning to the lounge area where Peter explained how to use the wood burner. Our room was on the first floor through a second living area that also doubled up as a bed room. I remember highly varnished stripped floorboards that sloped downwards from one side of the room to another. Our room was small; a dark structural beam was set in the wall. My eyes later traced the grain of the wood, following a line from the top of the room to the end of the beam, my imagination trying to visualise a network of beams, all working together to support the structure of the building. It was very different to the beige box of a house that I had in London.

When the tour of the cottage was done and Michelle and Peter had left I suddenly began to realise this was their main house; I had initially thought that it might have been a second property, an investment holiday let, or a house that may have once belonged to a deceased relative. It was immaculately clean and well prepared. Although we were paying for the privilege, I was also struck by their trust: all their possessions were on show, which included a guitar and accompanying music, a CD collection and a carved wooden duck.

The outside was equally lovely: the back yard was small but offered adventure. I later found a small path that followed a steep incline, arriving at a weathered bench. Peter later told me that there was more land beyond the house, which now I understood had been built in what appeared to be a semi-sheltered cove.

The front garden was different. To complement a stone outbuilding, which doubled up as a motorcycle workshop, Peter was building what appeared may become a warm wooden hut, or some kind of showroom where he could store his motorbikes. Beyond the garden lay a gate, a single track road, a neighbouring farm, and a stream.

An hour later, it was dark; we had followed the single track road and had driven to the nearest major town, Llandrindod Wells, to find a supermarket.

“Did you see that woman?” I whispered to Sarah as we walked back to the car, laden with milk, bread and pasta.

“What woman?”

“That woman! The woman we just passed!”

“No. What about her?”

“She smiled at us.”

“What did she want?”

“I don’t think she wanted anything.”

I unlocked the car and put the bags in the boot. Minutes later we were back on the road, heading towards our cottage, anticipating the very middle class challenge of figuring out how to use an Aga and wood burning stove.

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We were up early the next morning, ready for our trip to Fron. Our journey was straightforward; a short ride over scrubland, a right hand turn towards a settlement called Crossgates and then onto Fron and a layby; the point where I got out of the car and took a photograph of the sign to document our arrival.

“There’s something satisfying about seeing a random place on a page and actually getting there” said Sarah.

I couldn’t help but feel that there must be more to Fron than a bunch of houses and a church. Fron is a part of a community called Llanbadarn Fawr. I had a need to collate stories and facts to get a sense of the area; I chastise myself for not taking time to visit the Crossgates community centre, or loiter in the only pub in nearby Penybont. Later, I would think: ‘maybe I need to go back, to find those stories’. In some ways, the visit to Fron had morphed from journey of accomplishment to a journey of tourism. Instead, we were again drawn to the more urban environment of Llandrindod Wells, a couple of miles to the south.

We parked up not too far from our previous visit to the supermarket and started to walk around. We discovered an imposing municipal council building called The Gwalia, a park, and a pleasant high well-used high street. A trip to the town museum had an exhibit that explained how the town had become a tourist attraction due to its natural spa.

“The waters contain lithium! That might explain it!” whispered Sarah, as we walked around the museum.

Before our trip Sarah had found a survey that reported that Llandrindod Wells was the happiest place in Wales (and twelfth overall in Britain). A bit of research revealed that I lived the 145th happiest place in the country, and Sarah lived in the 124th, but neither of us could identify any qualitative difference between our two locations other than my area had a park and chicken shops and Sarah’s area had a Tube station and Irish pubs.

After being forbidden to use the museum toilets by an enthusiastic receptionist, we popped into a local landmark, the Metropole Hotel and Spa, to inspect their plumbing. There was a conference going on. We found ourselves surrounded by very jolly farmers, most of whom were wearing tweed, clearly relishing the opportunity to network and discussing loudly the subject of farming processes and development; a subject entirely alien to us both.

Following the advice of Elena, who worked in the tourist information office that was practically attached to the museum, we drove across town and parked up next to Llandrindod Wells Lake. The lake sits just on the edge of the town. In summer, it would be glorious; in deep autumn, it was merely ‘pleasantly quiet’. I could imagine myself looking forward to a walk around the park, ending up at the café called The Lakeside, which was a clear draw for locals. I began to see why Llandrindod Wells was a happy place to be.

In the space of a couple of hours, we had walked around the lake, got vaguely lost in a wood, and traipsed back into town to look for something called the Bicycle Museum, which was closed. Realising that we had covered a lot of ground, we returned to the car and set off, heading south, to the nearby town of Builth Wells.

Builth Wells is a small market town that sits next to the rivers Wye and Irfon. After crossing a road bridge over the Wye, we parked up and set off on a walk that was listed in a guidebook that Michelle had said we could borrow. I looked at my watch; we had a couple of hours of light left. I looked at the sky; it wasn’t going to rain. We found a riverside path and followed it until we found the Irfon, and then tried to follow that too, until we realised that we didn’t really understand what the guide was telling us. After a few turns, we followed some increasingly steep roads that took us onto a housing estate, before following other roads that made a gentle descent into the town.

In the town, we found evidence of its rural heritage; a large livestock market situated at the back of the high street. In the late afternoon, shops were starting to close. We also found a smart looking café that was still open. It was empty except for ourselves, and a solitary customer.

“Is there anything to do around here, in the evening?” asked Sarah. The café owner paused, before eventually saying: “Not around here… You could go to Llan’dod, but there’s not much going on there either; there’s more going on in Newtown”.

We found a sofa and sat down. Sarah had bought a copy of the Radnorshire County Times and Gazette. Amidst stories of local tragedy, and a feature about a potential ‘tourism tax’, there was a report that Preseigne town council had made a decision about the species of cherry trees that they were going to plant. The story, sadly, omitted to mention the name of the species.

I liked Builth Wells. I liked the houses that we passed on our walk, and the fact that there was a group of middle aged motorcyclists congregating by the bridge next to the river Wye, perhaps out for one of their last rides of the year. I liked the quietness, and that there was a café where I could read about cherry trees.  A visit to Builth Wells marked the end of the day that we had visited Fron, but we had booked another day in Michelle and Peter’s house. We traced our route, heading north to Llan’dod to Crossgates, and then across the scrubland to our cottage.

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Rhayader is eight miles to the west of Crossgates. Like Builth Wells, Rhayader is a market town. At its heart lies a war memorial and a simple clock tower which sits adjacent to a road junction. We parked up and walked up and down the high street, which took around fifteen minutes. I liked it for the simplicity of its topography and practical array of useful shops: a newsagent, a picture framer, and a kebab shop named ‘Turkish Delight’.

We stopped off at the local tourist information office to learn more: Rhayader’s heyday was between 1893 and 1904 when the nearby Elan Valley reservoirs were being constructed. Thousands of workers flocked to the area to work on a series of dams and reservoirs which were designed to provide clean water to the Birmingham area; a necessity due to the industrial revolution.

After our wander, we took a drive to one of the reservoirs, parked up, and attempted to follow a trail that had been recommended to us by a chap who manned the Elan Valley visitor centre. Well-made paths led to well used foot paths, and then onto a roughly marked woodland trail that was encouraging us towards the shores of a reservoir. This unexpected and somewhat muddy hike, complete with confusion about which direction to take, led thirty year old memories to resurface. There were differences; this time my legs didn’t ache as much and I wasn’t engulfed in a tiredness that gave way to an existential teenage crisis. Rambling around a series of muddy hills and fields was, in some ways, something that I had been looking forward to.

In anticipation of this trip, I had tried to make contact with some community groups through social media. I had been mostly unsuccessful; perhaps my limited success had been down to my choice of social media tools and unfamiliarity as to the communities that I could approach. There was one online community that were willing to chat, and they were based in Newtown.

Newtown caught my attention since it was the largest town on the main road that runs from Fron to Crossgates. The journey from Rhayader, to Llangurig and then onto Newtown was fast, quiet and lovely. The main road we followed sat in a valley and traced the path of the River Wye. As I drove, I remembered a vague plan that Sarah and I had discussed some time earlier; a plan to visit the Machynlleth comedy festival. Sarah would catch a train and I would go by motorcycle to experience the elements and drama of the countryside. The scenic roads reminded me of those thoughts, as did a road sign as we approached Newtown.

Newtown was more than twice the size of Llandrindod Wells and felt noticeably busier. Our timing, however, was unfortunate. After chatting to the manager of a co-operative store that was called Newtopia we discovered that all the key attractions, the Robert Owen Museum (which celebrated the founder of the co-operative movement), the Oriel Davies Gallery and the Newtown Textile Museum were all closed. To kill time, we wandered around Newtown, exploring its streets and studying its character. I liked it. It was a town with a definite centre. Although it had the same type of shops you would see on any high street, it appeared to be punctuated by independent businesses. Before heading off to a restaurant we settled down for a pint in a back street pub called The Sportsman.

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“This is it…” I said, turning to Sarah. An hour and a half had passed. It was now dark. We walked towards a community centre situated on the corner of a small housing estate. I pushed a set of red double doors that opened up into a short corridor and into a large open room, where we met a chap called Patrick who had invited me to ‘bell ringing’. Patrick greeted me enthusiastically, said hello to Sarah and introduced us both to his wife, Sam.

Patrick asked me what we were doing in Newtown. I explained that we had just done an ‘F’, and that meant visiting Fron.

“Did you know that Fron means ‘breast’ in Welsh?”

Patrick ran Newtown Handbell Ringers. As we talked, furniture was moved around and cases of hand bells were unpacked and carefully placed on tables that had been covered by a thick felt-like material and arranged in a simple horse shoe configuration.

“Can you read music?” asked Patrick.

“No.” I replied. I admit to being slightly worried; I had musical baggage. I had once been fired from the school orchestra due to my inability to play the triangle; my ineptitude was down to a bad case of day dreaming.

“You don’t need to read music; you just follow what everybody else does; it’ll all make sense”. Sarah had grade seven for flute and piano. I felt out of my depth.

I assumed that his group attracted a diverse group of people but this particular evening Newtown Handbell Ringers was comprised entirely of retired women.

“Stand over there, next to Sally. You’ll be taking over from Gladys. Gladys can’t make it because of her sciatica”.

Each ‘ringer’ was given two bells and a music book. Each book was different and had been annotated for each performer; Patrick has highlighted exactly where each bell should be rung. Further annotations connected the notes to the left hand and the right hand. With books allocated, bells grasped and a few directions offered about how to hold the bells, it was time for first performance of the evening: a rendition of Waltzing Matilda. Patrick stood at the front of the tables and conducted, enthusiastically pointing and announcing each note. Our performance was halting, confused and yet vaguely recognisable. We gave it another go. This time our rendition was slightly better, even though I managed to confuse my left hand with my right hand.

We soon moved onto another song: a Christmas carol; I forget what it was. I have never been in a band or a choir. This session of bell ringing is one of my very few experiences of communal music making. While this experience might be familiar to some, the translation of highlighted notes in a photocopied book, to the movement of two different bells, and onto the creation of a simple collaborate enterprise felt unfamiliar and exciting. Although I didn’t know who Sally, Edith or any of the other bell ringers were, I know what they did; they were different notes in time, connected through Patrick’s highlighted score.

After our visit, I asked Patrick why he ran Newtown Handbell Ringers. His answer was brilliant and simple: it gives something to the community; it makes Newtown become a better place.

“It allows non-musicians to play music” he continued. “There is something good for the soul to play in a group or band or orchestra. It has a bit of physical exercise and mental stretching, which is good for preventing dementia. When you perform, there is an element of fear; you should know about that, and it's good to face fears. [I run it] because the members of the group want to play and I get a thrill out of giving them music arrangements that no one else has ever played, and I get to hear them play it for the first time ever.”

Our drive back was fraught; our simple journey back past Fron and onto our cottage was interrupted by a road closure. I adopted a simple and pragmatic approach and decided to retrace our route through Rhayader.

In the car, we were silent. I couldn’t quite believe that we had played Waltzing Matilda in a community centre in Powys with a group of pensioners.  What’s more, I was surprised that I had thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

“We could move here” said Sarah. “We could live in a stone cottage and I could take Aga lessons”. It was a thought. It was a thought that was not entirely unappealing.