David Brodie explores
Bryn Eglwys
with photography by
John Keates
L
oose stones slide beneath my feet as I climb terraces, through a scrub of vegetation. Huge drystone walls and ramps block my intended route so that I’m forced to pick my way carefully over rough ground, and more than once I must retrace my steps. In thick forest I find a hole quarried deep and wide – a damp green place of echoes where trees reach for the light but are still not as high as the ground around. Further down the valley a stream rushes past ruins of workshops that present less resistance than the quarry rockface to the relentless dance of wind and water. The scarred hillside is the size of a small city, but it is an empty city. There is not a person anywhere amongst the tangle of forest and broken rock. The Acropolis and other such places of the past may teem with tourists, but nobody cares much for the remote slopes of Bryn Eglwys. The stones here are monuments not to celebrated ancients
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C a mbr i a
the national magazine of wales cylchgrawn cenedlaethol cymru