A 1970 novel by Welsh language author and Plaid Cymru activist Islwyn Ffowc Elis features a terrifying encounter with the deep past. Y Gromlech yn yr Haidd (The Cromlech in the barley) depicts a chilling confrontation between an incomer and a megalithic stone structure known locally as Cerrig Mawr yr Hendre (The Large Stones of Hendre). To the new owner of Hendre farm, Bill Henderson, the presence of a cromlech on his land is a cause of annoyance, standing as it does in the middle of his best twelve-acre field. In the novel’s opening pages he berates his tractor driver, Gareth as he breaks yet another farm machine when he drives too close to the cromlech. The binding machine requires a trip to the menders which will hold up the harvest. The farmer’s solution is to have the cromlech removed. Folk memory has it that this will not end well for the farmer.

At the moment of the first stone’s removal Henderson’s pregnant wife falls down the stairs and miscarries their child. Whilst recovering in hospital she informs him she wishes to return to Trilling in Gloucestershire to spend time with her family, in the community she knows, amidst voices she recognises. Whilst they are away the local vet watches a television report detailing an outbreak of foot and mouth in Trilling. He fears that on his return Henderson will bring the disease back to Hendre and infect the surrounding farms. On Henderson’s return he is enraged to find steps have been taken by the local authority to recognise the stones as a scheduled ancient monument whilst another neighbour on a visit to the National Library has found evidence of tragedy striking those who have sought to meddle with the stones in the past. As the local deacon puts it, these stones are, ‘arswydus o hen’, horrifyingly old.

A skull and bones are dug up as Henderson prepares to blast out the cromlech’s second pillar and Gareth, the farm worker initially fearful at tampering with the stones, leaves the farm, petrified. Henderson continues alone but on returning to the farm house having blasted out the second stone notices signs of the disease in his heifers. Foot and mouth has indeed been brought to Hendre. Henderson’s herd is destroyed but rather than deterring him from his now seemingly demotic quest to rid the land of the cromlech he is made more determined, dynamiting the final stone ensuring the Cromlech’s total obliteration. The stones’ dissolution gives way to a further dissolution as following the explosion Henderson is found groaning on all fours looking towards the crater where the Cromlech once stood. He shouts in distress that there are ‘hairy, cloudy, satanic things’ rising from the holes and that the air is full of them.

His wife rushes to his aid but he cannot see her and speaks instead to the ‘spirits’ who have apparently risen from their grave after being buried for three and a half thousand years, “Sut roeddwn i i wybod ych bod chi yma o hyd?” ‘How was I to know that you were still here?’, he continues, chiding the spirits that there’s no place for them in this time, that they should go back to their holes in the ground, to their own age. Finally, he begs them to leave his mind alone – to not ‘come into me’. And then there is an about face, a doubling, as the farmer is seemingly possessed by one of these spirits who implores, “Why couldn’t you leave me alone in my grave? Me, Kia, and my children and my children’s children? What did we do to you? What bad did we do?”

Cromlechs are recognised to be burial chambers; the place where the ancestors were laid to rest; it was for this purpose for which the stones were first bought into their alignment and held meaning for the people that moved them. After ensuring the Cromlech’s devestation Henderson enters into a psychotic state hallucinating an experience related to the Cromlech’s megalithic past. He is assessed by the local Doctor and moved to the psychiatric hospital at Denbigh where a psychiatrist establishes a relationship with the possessed. ‘Kia’ is able to describe the killing of a mammoth by a river, the building of a graveyard for himself and his family ‘in this place’ and can speak his own ‘primitive’ language which he is described as, ‘sliding back into’. Thank goodness, the Doctor jokes, he is still bilingual.

Kia ultimately narrates the scene of his own death, hit by a stone in the midst of an elk hunt and Henderson is returned to his right mind, resigned after his ordeal to start again...somewhere else. Hendre is sold and as the locals congregate at the machinery sale, they discuss who the likely next occupiers of the farm will be, ‘rhywun a thipyn mwy o barch i’w gorffennol hi y tro yma gobeithio’ - someone with a lot more respect for the past this time, hopefully.

Set on a farm somewhere in Wales, Elis never makes it clear whether the cromlech of the story relates to anywhere in particular. There are, after all, many in Wales to choose from, often residing, as in the novel, on agricultural land. Some remain private but others are accessible by permissive paths that allow curious and reverent visitors to pay their respects and to be awed by their remaining. In recent weeks I have on several occasions visited one such Cromlech in the Pembrokeshire landscape, the landscape my grandparents moved to from England to farm in the mid 1950s. Llech y Drybedd is on agricultural land just outside the village of Moylegrove in North Pembrokeshire. This cromlech, short and squat, stands in the corner of a triangular field, its dramatic backdrop the line of the Preseli hills.

Elis the novelist is better known for an earlier novel written in 1957, Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd (A week in the Wales that will be). In this work it is not the past that rules the action but the future as this work of science fiction rather than folk horror tells of a time travelling office worker Ifan Powel who is catapulted into the future not once but twice when he takes part in a time travel experiment. Ifan travels to the year 2033 where he finds himself in a self-governing, economically prosperous and socially harmonious Wales where everyone can speak both Welsh and English. He falls in love with the daughter of his host family and on returning to his own time finds he longs to be reunited with her and asks to be allowed to make the trip into the future again, despite knowing that according to the principles of time travel, the future he may encounter could be quite a different one.

Visiting 2033 for the second time he discovers a very different Wales; a Wales where most traces of Welsh identity have been utterly suppressed and the Welsh language has died but for one last speaker, a woman whose utterances are virtually unintelligible. In this Wales, now referred to as Western England, ancient monuments no longer bare their original names but are merely numbered, in a country whose land is part re-forested leisure amenity, part penal colony. He meets his former future lover, no longer Welsh speaking Mair, but Maria who has no memory of him. On returning again to his own time Ifan is given to understand by the scientist conducting the experiment that both futures are currently possible and that it is up to the people of Wales which one will play out in reality.

For this reason Ifan becomes a Welsh nationalist committed to do everything he can to ensure that his first future Wales is the one that is realised.

In Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd the possible futures for Wales offer a clear choice between pessimism and optimism; utopia and dystopia. What can be said of the later work which makes of the past the key protagonist in the unfolding of a Welsh present? When Henderson first hatches his plan to move the Cromlech he predicts that his actions, what he calls ‘modernisation’, will make his land look like a farm and not like a piece of Connemara. The megalithic landscape will not however allow the by-passing of the contestations of the present; custom, possession, use and even language. Rather the confrontation between the farmer and the stones throws these contestations into such sharp relief that the novel’s only conclusion is that post, ‘modernisation’, the incomers will leave. They leave having failed to recognise the integrity of the place they inhabited made starkly manifest by the attack upon the integrity of the cromlech which is irreparably ruptured and removed. In a resolution to the novel’s sub-plot Gareth the farm worker is reunited with his sweetheart, the deacon’s daughter and is finally invited to enter the minister’s house, marking a renunciation of the superstitions of local custom by entry into a community that similarly rejects folk memory. Fortunately this utopia can never be realised beyond fiction.

So where stands the incomer in 2020? In 2020 the Cromlech at Moylegrove has not been reduced to a number as in Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd but still retains, just like Cerrig Mawr y Hendre, its Welsh name, Llech Y Drybedd. The name, again like the Cromlech in the novel is self- explanatory; llech taken to mean slate, tablet or flagstone and drybedd meaning tripod referring presumably to the three post stones. In the University of Wales’ online Dictionary, the corresponding example to describe the usage of drybedd cites the three legged alter at Delphi where the priestess would sit to prophecy, bringing to mind the incantations of the last Welsh speaker of Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd. The word trybedd however also has a very specific usage in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire where it is taken to mean tribe.

In Welsh the settlement of Moylegrove where Llech y Drybedd is located has another name, Trewyddel, meaning the place of the Irish. On my first visit to Llech y Drybedd in Trewyddel, being of agricultural stock I noted that here is good grassland with lots of clover. On my second visit the air was full of noises, of late crop silage cutting. On my third visit the grass had been cut and lay in triangle rows mirroring the shape of the field, ready to be carted, the last cut. On my fourth visit the grass had grown again.

The migrant knows where the dead are buried and their graves are marked because when we pass this way again the grass will be greener.

This essay was printed first in ‘The Surface of Past Time’ a collection of curated texts by sonic artist Dr Dafydd Roberts in April 2021