STUART MILLSON reflects on his relocation to Wales

Born in London sixty years ago and although, as far as I know, possessing not a drop of Welsh blood, I now live in the country to the west of the River Severn, popularly known for its chapels, presided over by Kenneth Griffith-like ministers, its famous rugby players and opera-singers born in obscure green valleys (obscure, at least, to the English), its rousing songs, hymns and tunes: Men of Harlech, David of the White Rock, Cwm Rhondda – music and people, you might say, bred of heaven.

Throughout my life, my homes have been in England – in London, suburban, increasingly Greater-Londonish Kent, rural Kent, besieged by the planners; marshy Essex and hilly Gloucestershire – and I developed interests in English music, English pints and pubs, pilgrimages to Canterbury and Romney Marsh churches and bird sanctuaries (all some 300 miles away from Wales). Yet today, living in Cambria, it feels as though a Welsh moss, or ivy has entwined itself around my legs, rooting me to the spot – with late-night fog and early-morning mist blotting out any sight of the tips of the Severn suspension bridge, obscuring the entrance to the Severn Tunnel, and making me forget about my previous haunts, routines, and once-loved favourite places. What caused all this? What brought me here?

Thinking back, long-ago family holidays to Tenby or Aberdovey might have sown the seeds for the Welsh enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was the evocative section on Wales from our family’s 1970s’ AA Illustrated Guide to Britain (“the land of Merlin the Wizard and Dylan the Poet”). Or maybe it was the drive, undertaken with the girlfriend I would later marry, on a spring weekend in 1988 to Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire? The trip, even in those younger days when you are meant to have a surfeit of energy, felt like an act of escape from work and everyday life – the return journey spent, inevitably, on those ‘grass is greener’ thoughts, so common to travellers, deep down, ill at ease with some aspect of life. So maybe that explains it all: the vague, formless urge to escape – with only the ‘Celtic fringe’ of the British Isles, less congested by the knotty, breathless way of life everywhere else, now capable of offering retreat?

All of these thoughts and memories – why and how have I landed here? – and isn’t it a miracle – jangled together, as I set off at the very end of February from home in Carmarthenshire to the City of St. David’s (the smallest city in Britain) for the 1^st March St David’s Day pilgrimage to the cathedral, in its wide valley hollow, at the tip of a Pembrokeshire peninsula. According to Welsh hagiography, the sixth-century future Patron Saint of Wales, Dewi Sant was born in a thunderstorm by the clifftop – his mother, St. Non, giving birth on an apocalyptic night, where, miraculously, a well appeared, which continues flowing to this day, to bring forth legendarily life-giving, health-giving waters, considered particularly efficacious for sore eyes, or more serious ocular conditions. Several of the pilgrims gathering for this year’s St. David’s Day ceremony did, in fact, dab their eyelids with well-water – just prior to the Bishop of St. David’s, Dorrien Davies, almost re-baptising the throng (including a Catholic delegation from Kent and pilgrims from Ireland) using a bunch of watercress soaked in a full jug drawn from the well.

It was a simultaneously serious and light-hearted ceremony. Watercress was the thin, subsistence food used by St. David and his followers during periods of fasting. Today, as well as proving effective in the dousing of pilgrims, it also plays a part in a nightly ceremony (reinforced with port and Davidstow cheese!) initiated by the Order of St. David and St. Non. For more than a decade now, the Order (founded by the late Simon Evans and now presided over by one, Steve Turner, from Kent – but with, he tells me, a Welsh grandmother to his genetic credit) has participated in the annual ceremony. This year the Order brought to the altar not just its devotees, but an offering for the cathedral – a substantial cheque to help with urgent repair works to the ceiling of the Quire. It was noticeable that the cathedral bells were not chiming on St. David’s Day morning, no doubt a precaution at this time of crumbling roof masonry. Prayers were said for a swift restoration to the problem; and in a purely spoken service, held at 4pm on the eve of St. David’s Day, other more personal prayers – for family, loved ones, peace in our troubled world etc., – written on small sheets of paper, each imprinted with the emblem of St. James’s pilgrimage shell and left on a silver plate, were unfolded and read aloud.

A glow of early springtime sunshine filled the cathedral – wide, broad, crystal-clear light, all of a sudden, no longer the mean, cramped, cold rays of winter. It really did feel, especially with the daffodils in the cathedral grounds as golden as the cross of St. David, as if the seasons had changed before our eyes. And the sea, viewed from the clifftop at St. Non’s well, sparkled in the westering sun, but had all the stillness of well-water. Earlier, en route to the cathedral, not far from Fishguard, a bank of white cloud, far out at sea, resembled the gigantic cliffs of a lost landmass. I imagined the probable reaction of mediaeval pilgrims to such a sight – a miracle on the horizon, people pausing, fingers pointing at a sign of God’s grandeur.

The 1^st March is a great moment in the life of the small city – a place probably not a great deal larger than my old town of West Malling in Kent – but ennobled and important, far beyond its physical size, by its heritage of Celtic Christianity; by the cathedral cradled in its valley, and overlooked by what appears to be the strange, craggy tip of an extinct volcano. No city should ever be allowed to be larger than St. Davids. The streets, filled with pilgrims, or visitors who just happened to be on holiday on the day of the devotions – folk dressed in historic costume – children parading with dragons and (later in the day) a band evoking a Mardi Gras procession in Louisiana – the Bishop, Dean and Mayor at the Market Cross addressing the citizens, as the breeze caught the large Red Dragon flag of Wales – everything felt right, in its place.

It is important to come away from a pilgrimage with that ‘God’s-in-His-heaven’ feeling.