How did the day go? Mostly I have been tired, this is Mollie's fault. Listened to the new Macfarlane book - Are River's Alive' and thought who hasn't seen a Welsh river which has splashed and sparkled with life, so yes to that. Or seen the slow graceful movements of grayling in an Essex river. The sadness of the River Wye down South being destroyed by chicken waste is heartbreaking. A classic slow moving river roaming through a beautiful countryside. We load the rivers with s**t and then watch them die. I can remember as a child going fishing in Wales for trout, my father went salmon fishing as well. In a small clean river, you could lay on your tummy and tickle trout and maybe catch an eel.
I picked up another book as well this by an old friend of long ago, it is called 'Theodore and Eliza by Susan Harvard. It looked a heavyweight in words but is surprisingly interesting. It harks back to Princess Diana's great, great (there might be a couple more greats) grandparents. Theodore is in service to the government and he falls in love with an Armenian girl and they marry. He is sent to the Honourable East India Company and then after a couple of years to Mocha in Yemen to run The Factory. He dies though at the early age of 32 years old, on a boat transporting him to England so that he could visit his parents in Scotland. Also his 6 years old daughter Kitty.
Eliza sadly does not benefit much in his will, she is referred to as the housekeeper, though he settles a good amount on his children. These two were in love but of course the stigma of the time marrying someone from another race must have been the trigger. So this is where Princess Diana ancestry comes from. And that is all I have read so far.
It took Susan over 30 years to gather together the information, and she also went to Yemen to try to find out more. Here she met a 10 year Yemeni boy who showed her the ruined interior of a merchant's house and she writes below the photograph 'may he live and thrive throughout his country's troubled times'. Such a difference to the words voiced today.
Susan was so good through the death of my first husband, they were all a band of friends at Oxford together and I shall always remember this period of time as both happy and sad.
But not to get too down what I meant to write today was about Nine Wells just outside Solva. I camped round here several times and wandered around the cliffs. There is an abundance of history lying just under the surface. From cromlechs to WW2 runways and a mill and also a water building, both of which had disappeared. Yet look at it now, nothing shows under its verdant carpet of green. Somewhere along the coast someone has named a little hamlet 'Land of the Druids = Llandruidion, all that seems to remain is an old farmhouse.
On the left hand side of the inlet is a promontory fort called Port y Rhaw, you can practically find these prehistoric settlements every half mile along this coast line.
Nine Wells supplied Llanruidion water tower with water for St Davids
I looked further into what is happening to the River Wye, and what an utter disgrace. It seems like there will be some prosecutions, but what use is that when the river has been so badly polluted and in my opinion, in a quite predictable manner. Hopefully it can recover quickly once the pollution ceases.
ReplyDeleteThere is a scandal about the pollution of rivers and the sea. Problem is we are a small country Andrew with a lot of people in it. It is said (oh how careful I am;) that a lot of the profits in the water companies goes into the pockets of investors and large salaries to board members. One day London will back up in sewage, there is still a lot of 19th century sewage pipes around.
ReplyDeletethe rivers and waters are regularly tking a hammering from one thing or another..... we recently had a chemical spill in one of our local rivers that had been recovering well and a large scale die-off of all the fish.... very sad indeed - and not an unfamiliar tale!
ReplyDeleteThe rivers are being destroyed sadly, because not enough infrastructure has been built to get rid of sewage. But then, you should have heard the moaning and groaning when the central road in the valley was half closed when the road subsided over the drains.
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