Country diary: we wander as tourists of decay amid the ruins
Woods have grown around the village of Din Lligwy, hiding it in a clearing where the grass is mown in ancientmonument style around the ruins of iron-age huts. Signs inform visitors that Din means fortified, and these remains of walls are from buildings, some round and some oblong, from different architectural periods, some with iron foundries worked during the Roman occupation; coins and pottery recovered here suggest its people traded with the Romans.
The walls are massive, compared with those of a medieval chapel nearby, and constructed of huge upright stone slabs with smaller stones placed beautifully between them. Many of the larger stones have enigmatic grooves and holes in them that make me wonder about the spiritual or psychological archaeology of the place. What was the internal acoustic quality of the walls like and how did the shadows play against them from within? In my imagination, this creates an image of the huts as a kind of cinema for the soul.
And then I notice a tiny maidenhair spleenwort growing in shadow and return to looking at lichens and mosses on the stone, ferns in the cracks, and the surrounding trees. I realise I am watching the juxtaposition between verdant life and decay that leads to the kind of pleasure Rose Macaulay attributes (Pleasure of Ruins, 1953) to the self-projection of the tourist into the past, “of composing poetry or prose, of observing the screech owl, the bat, and the melancholy ghost, and the vegetation that pushes among the crevices and will one day engulf”.
We have been wandering in Anglesey and then in north Devon as tourists of decay, looking at ancient and modern sites in various states of disintegration, and what really fascinates me is not so much what these ruins used to be but what they are waiting to become, as the gothic power of nature transforms and engulfs historical forces. Vegetation flourishes in fissures between the ideologies of science, aesthetics and the supernatural; there is an anarchic ecosystem taking root in the ruins of cultures and nations; it pioneers the way for woods, so familiar and yet so estranged from us, reclaiming an unthinkable transformation of society from its shadows, spaces that hitherto did not exist.