Taking my camera walkies. Picspam 2

[linda_joyce]

I then took my courage into both hands and took the mountain road to Mynyddisllwyn to photgraph the church.



It’s very long history



Local legend has it that the site was holy in prehistoric times because of the earth tump next to it. Local legend is probably wrong though, it really is only a pile of soil, probably a beacon site in times of war.



That doesn’t mean the site wasn’t holy, the early church had a habit of taking over pagan sites. The church still retains an arc of a circle of yew trees that have been calculated as being over 2000 years old
It used to be a custom when this church was built to paint, the steeple or tower if it had one , the whole church if there wasn’t, white. The vicar has chosen to have the tower rendered in White to honour this custom. You can see one of the yew trees in the left forground.



Here we see the Lych gate from the Church Yard with the silver Queen parked to one side.



Here is the last remaining aec of yews starting left and panning right, you can see the tump between the yews on the last one.

Comments

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

An evening class tutor informed us that you can't use the normal tree ageing methods on yew. He told us about one tree estimated to be 1000yrs old. This is known to be wrong as it's in the churchyard of a 1200yr old church and in the crypt there is a small arch carrying the wall over the root of the yew tree.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

I read a book, many years ago, that said it is impossible to date a yew by normal methods as the heart wood rots as the tree ages but with a bit of complicated maths involving the circumference of the trunklets left and the diameter of the canopy you can make a fair guess. The author had done that with the Mynyddislwyn yews and got them to 2000 years plus or minus 500 years. From the information you have given plus is more likely than minus.

[inyadreems.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous sky in the second photo.

I don't know, the earth mound could be an ancient holy site. Wales is just about covered in 'em!

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Being a Reference assistant a few years back enabled me to catch up on local history, TPTB in that feild say not. Local legend says it was a burial mound of an ancient Celtic cheif/demigod and that he was buried with a fortune in gold and jewels. Ground penetrating radar says it's just a mound of earth. Local legend also says it is one of the sites that St. David preached at when he was busy converting the heathens and nobody can disprove that until some one invents a time machine so I still believe that.%P

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

St David had mounds of earth popping up under him so that he could be seen and heard preaching, didn't he?

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Yes and the twmp(It's what we locally call a mysterious mound of earth) above the church is suposed to be one of them.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love old trees. *hugs yews*

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

There are yew trees still knocking around that make the oldest oak tree no more than babies. The first trunk rots from with in but the tree sends up new trunks from the roots so you get a ring of apparently new trees but they are genetically the original one and when this ring dies another ring appears outside it. Not as impressive as the Calafornian pines(redwood?)that can live a 100 years with just one trunk bet there were probably 10s of thousands of years old that looked like separate trees before the wild wood was chopped down.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

Redwoods live quite a bit longer than 100 years, I *think*, but I believe the oldest trees are scrubby things that cling to mountainsides in California-- Bristlecone Pines?

Ah...yep. I googled- The oldest single living organisms known are bristlecone pines- the oldest verified living one is over 4,700 years old. (Yews are 'clonal colonies' where the shoots form an unbroken chain of life but the original doesn't live much longer than an ordinary tree.)

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Yep that's right but since the colony are all clones of the original genetically they are the same plant

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

Right- it's as if you killed Blake, but the clone lived on. :^) You can't count it as the same life- but the same genetics persist.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

That's about right not the same plant physically but the genetics are the same.

[sue-chose-this.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be wonderful to see time lapse photography - beginning with the planting of the trees 2500 years ago to the present day?

/random thought

Hee!

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

At the rate they grow that would be a hotograph every 50 years, but it would be wonderful if we could.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Even without a burial it could still be a holy place the Christians had a bad habit of pirating pagan sites to build churches on so the juxtaposition is not possibly not coincidental.
In spite of excavations all Silbury Hill so far has proved to be was a mound of earth.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

True the story of how Mynyddisllwyn got its name sort of indicates that. The first church, just a wattle and daub thatched roof single small room was supposed to be built in the same field as the twmp. But each night the work that had been done that day was dismantled and the supplies found on the land where the present church is. After a few nights of this some brave man hid in the hedge between the two fields to see who was doing the moving. Around midnight a bright light appeared above the church and a voice spoke from it saying, in Welsh, 'Go below the bush'. This phrase sheare a lot of it's letters and pronunciation with the name of the present settlement. Then the watching man fell into a deep sleep and found the supplies in the next field when he woke up next morning. So they built the church on it's present site and they never had any more trouble. So it looks to me that the druids were playing mind games with the Christians to get them away from their sacred site.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Love the story and yes I'd say it was the local druids protecting the site too.

[javahound07.livejournal.com]

Love it, thank you for sharing. The historian and genealogist side of me loves local histories and old church yards. :)

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

A short story for your historian side. I was talking to a gentleman in the churchyard who was researching the families who had owned the old mill he now owned and was restoring. One family the Mores had a family plot that he had come up to photograph. Two of those who are buried in it have interesting stories but sad ones too. The youngest person buried there was a 4 month old girl who died in the late 19th century. Her mother was carrying her Welsh fashion(on the left hip supported by a shawl wrapped round both mother and baby). Mam had gone out to feed the pigs as ashe was working thw shawl slipped and the baby dfell in the pig pen. The old sow had attacked and killed her before the mother could do anything.
The second is her younger brother Arthur E More born 1890 who lost a leg as a small boy in an argument with the mill wheel. Since he couldn't go out to play with the others and since as a mill owner was reasonably well off, he was indulged with 'toys' one of them was a radio receiver that could pick up ship to shore broadcasts. He was the first person in the UK to pick up the distress calls from the Titanic. It is stories like these that fascinate me

[javahound07.livejournal.com]

How tragic and how interesting! The Titanic story has always held a special interest for me, not sure why. Maybe 'mans' boasting about being unsinkable, I do believe mother nature had the last word on that .
Thank you for sharing. :)