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| From Tuchenn Gador |
There were early travels over the Brecon Beacons, as my poor exiled
Welsh parents, miserable in manicured and over-managed Gloucestershire
countryside, often made the return to their homelands - Swansea, Mumbles, Gower
- with four children in tow. It was part of my father's sad, hopeless quest for
a reassuring identity and a crucial building block in my own first passionate
attachment to landscape.
The sight of those moors we passed made me happy, and when I walk now on
the heaths of the Monts d’Arrée in Brittany I am connected each
time with that childhood self in the rekindling of a deeply stirring feeling of boundless freedom. I know better now that the apparent simplicity of
the moors is an illusion, but it seemed of high value then. Other landscapes
were psychologically more complex to me even as a small child: the sea with its
tides, the changing shape of a river, the uncertainties of woodland, hills
lost to the unsettling exploitation of farming. But those long, high rounded
slopes, empty of life and difficulty, solid and unchanging, gave me both a
powerful sense of permanence and an invitation to limitless possibilities, to
the open heart and mind that seemed so perplexingly elusive in the constraints
and compromises of the everyday world. I came to learn that there was far less
isolation and considerably more connection for me in the wilderness of moor
than in family life.
