I have to confess I googled, ‘The Bell Ringer’s Stone.’ It was niggling me, at 5 am this morning I lay in bed listening to the dawn chorus and trying to work out why it rang a bell with me! I seem to be increasingly dwelling on such conundrums at the moment, lockdown is doing strange things to all of us.
Eventually I gave in and picked up my phone – another definite no, no, phones are for daytime and whilst in bed they should only ever be used in an absolute emergency. Well, it was sort of, I would never get back to sleep unless I solved the puzzle.
‘The Bell Ringer’s Stone,’ at least the one I was thinking of, is a public sculpture in Borth, Wales. It was carved in 2014 and stands on the shoreline overlooking a pre-historic forest. I have never seen the sculpture, it was pre-2014 when my cousin took us to see the forest, but I remember reading something about it and it bringing back memories of our day in Borth.
My cousin lives in Aberystwyth, I’ve probably written about him before. Some years ago he bought a tumbledown bungalow on a steep hillside overlooking the Rheidol valley. The plan was that the bungalow would be demolished, a new home built and he and his wife would develop a smallholding together. Somehow though it never seemed to happen. Pipistrelle bats in the roof space delayed building for a number of years and when building did start they found a natural spring popped up under the foundations and suddenly the bungalow had its own small lake. It was only last year that building began in earnest and I am yet to see the new house.
As for the smallholding, his wife bought a horse which she put to stud with the idea of selling on the foal and starting a business. The foal stayed, as did the next, and the next, you get the idea. He has, a couple of years ago, planted a cider tree orchard but as I pointed out to him, that’s not a short term project.
Despite the setbacks, they seem very happy on their Welsh hillside and every year they welcome us on a missionary trip to save them from going totally feral. Getting to their place is an interesting journey in itself. You turn off the main road and follow a very narrow lane for three miles. Along the way you have to negotiate a lot of loose gravel, a 1 in 4 hill, a number of hairpins, two gates, cattle grids and of course, a lot of sheep. All very hazardous on a motorbike. It is well worth it though to sit on that hillside (weather permitting), a glass of wine in hand, breath in the clear Welsh air and marvel at the beauty of the valley. Red kites soar overhead and in the summer you can track the path of the little steam train through the trees as it makes its way up and down the valley.
Over the years we’ve been visiting my cousin he has taken us out and about to nearby places, and one such trip was to Borth. The town itself is pretty unexciting but the pre-historic forest is amazing. At high tide nothing is visible but as the waters recede this weird and wonderful spectacle comes into view. As we walked along the shoreline I wondered what to expect and as the first few blackened stumps came into view I remarked politely how interesting they looked but I wasn’t really that impressed. As we continued to walk the stumps became more numerous and their size larger until laid out before us were the obvious remains of an ancient forest. The blackness and density of the stumps as they rose out of the wet sand gave them an, eerie, magical quality and it was perfectly possible to believe that you were walking through the same forest that dinosaurs had once frequented.
Apparently in the 1960’s the skeleton of a dinosaur was discovered here and the Bell Ringer’s Stone is carved with its image as well as with scenes of other stories associated with the area. There are lots of folk stories about hidden cities and shipwrecks and looking at the dark forest stretching across the beach it is easy to see why. The sculpture has a ship’s bell set in a hole at the top of it and people are encouraged to ring the bell to honour the dead. I am missing family, I am missing motorbike trips and so perhaps, as soon as we can return to anything like normal, I will be able to return to Aberystwyth and together with my cousin and our partners we can make a return trip to Borth and ring that bell.
Alison
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