THE border between Wales and England was once possibly the most fortified of anywhere in the world. To this day ancient forts surrounded by moats, “mottes and baileys,” follow the course of the winding old border.

Many are tumbled down, others now grassy, bramble-covered hillocks, still others such as Kinnersley Castle are still standing, with additional wings added over the centuries.

The border briefly came flickering back to life during the pandemic, although fortunately not with soldiers guarding bridges, as different rules governed pubs and clubs on the Welsh and English sides.

In some places, at Presteigne for instance, you can simply walk across a bridge in town and find yourself either in England or Wales.

Snaking up through the borderland and driving up from Presteigne towards Knighton, I spotted a low-lying white church on a hillside in the Bryn Glas Valley, behind which grew a small clump of large conifers, including some Wellingtonia trees that looked rather out of place in this landscape.

A winding track led up to this ancient place, graced by St Mary’s Church, which is itself built upon a Celtic site of worship. Behind the church is a holy immersion well, whose waters it is said can heal diseases of the eye.

The fierce summer drought had managed to largely dry the well out and the landscape in this, one of the wetter parts of the British Isles, although still just about green had none of its usual lushness.

The silence of this ancient place served only as a reminder that a ferocious battle took place in the grassy slopes of Bryn Glas and around this church at Pilleth on June 22 1402, as the forces of Owain Glyndwr, the last native Welshman to hold the title the Prince of Wales, rounded on and defeated a much larger English force, led by Sir Edmund Mortimer, Lord of the March.

The victorious Welsh forces marched into England and sacked and burned Leominster to the ground. The battle was referred to by Shakespeare in Henry IV.  

There is a depiction of this bloody battle inside the church, where hundreds lost their lives and where Glyndwr’s men set fire to the church during the battle, burning its tower to the ground.

The clump of trees that I had spotted earlier is a more recent Victorian marker to where many of the bodies were buried after the Battle of Pilleth.

That great Welsh actor Michael Sheen said recently that he wasn’t taught about Owain Glyndwr at school, which probably isn’t all that surprising.

I imagine that Sheen’s grandparents might have been caned at school had they dared even to speak Welsh. Fortunately, Sheen, who hails from Port Talbot, the steel town that has also brought us those other great actors Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, has set about putting much of this right.

His play, which he is directing, titled Owain and Henry opens at the Welsh National Theatre in Cardiff on November 5.

Will that ancient place of pilgrimage and worship, the scene of one of the most bloody and influential wars fought across these borders feature I wonder?

Glyndwr fought to establish an independent Wales, but as his threat became more real, the English response became more powerful and by 1409 his forces had effectively become a rural guerilla army, engaged in sporadic attacks.

Around about 1416, Glyndwyr simply disappeared. He wasn’t captured and no one really knows where he spent his final years although folklore has it that was in the thickly forested wild rolling countryside of north-west Herefordshire.

For more information on Owain and Henry visit https://www.welshnationaltheatre.com/owain-and-henry
 

Coming a cropper               
                         
SOME readers may recall my hopes and expectations of a bumper harvest of vegetables this season from my small-ish vegetable patch and greenhouse.

I suspect that my tales of disappointment and woe will have been the experience of many of you too. Much of this can be put down the seemingly never-ending droughts that we experienced over the course of the summer.

My King Edward potato crop usually yields at least a couple of decent sized buckets. As I forked my way through parched soil this year, I managed only half a bucket.

The runner beans — the “Trail of Tears” was so named by the Cherokee Native Americans as they were forced from their lands taking their beans with them — almost made me tearful as they withered on their bamboo canes.

There was more success with the tomatoes, although I won’t be growing them from grow-bags next year; I will try and fund such much bigger, deeper, pots. Tomatoes of course require a lot of water and during the intense heat had me pouring washing up water into watering cans and traipsing along to check on them.

The big success story, for a while at least, appeared to be the watermelon which I had grown from seed in the greenhouse.

Over the weeks it grew and expanded until it was the size of a large cricket ball. And then last week, as I was watering it, I noticed that it seemed wrinkled on the outside. Turning it around, I then saw a neatly chewed, hole. A mouse had completely eaten the inside of the melon so that there was nothing left!