LOOKING BACK, indigenous knowledge

And then I wonder what is indigenous knowledge here? Perhaps its people who bring a personal connection to history, nature, language and culture all in one. I see so many associations between the druidical beliefs and first nations beliefs in places like Canada. The birds are gods and the trees are gods and the winds are gods and the aurora are our ancestors whispering to us. It’s all about respecting what’s around but also trying to make sense of it. It’s a wonderful way of protecting everything we have.

You maybe sitting here a couple of thousand years ago and a raven comes by, shouting at you, and then goes away and you think it must have done it for a reason, its always telling me off about something, I must have done something wrong. I’m trying to understand. So I give this bird a persona, a role, a place in this world. Whereas now there’s no understanding at all. There’s no connection. It’s almost like people see other things as totally irrelevant. There’s no understanding at all.

Black oats was it? I think that’s what used to be grown here. And cattle, before the sheep. And i think that silvery feathery plant, the one with rhizomes, its called the poor man’s potato.They are delicious - you should try them! And I saw a thing on facebook, a man is starting to grow black oats in mid-Wales. I think we’ll start to look back at these things to see if they can help us now, what with everything getting wetter/drier/more unpredictable. Things like wheat can’t cope.

I’m not strong on pre 18th Century history. But the story is very different to say the Nantlle Valley. There are no strong Mabinogi connections here, but you do have Snowdon. And you have a lot of stories associated with the castle. And you have a tradition of artists coming here that was quite an early one, and quite a strong one. Dolbadarn, studies of a theme, by Paul Joyner, included all the paintings of the valley from the very early 18th Century.

This thing which I plan to do, the maps, talks, exhibitions, lots of reconstructions of lost landscapes and buildings in the valley. Heritage can mean anything from human heritage or environmental heritage, and often there’s not a distinction! I was doing this last week for a school, I set up a slide show, we pretend the classroom is a timemachine, and we try and work out what we’d see here in this valley. The idea being that environmentally 99.99 percent of people would look at the valley and think this is how its always been. One of the reasons there is so much change is because barely anything in the landscape that you see – bar the forest on the other side of the lake over there – is natural. Absolutely nothing of it.

If no one had ever walked on these lands, what would it look like? That forest would extend up to the top of the quarry, that’s our natural tree level, then there would be a narrow alpine forest section, and then fading away and about the top of Elidir Fawr would be exposed. We would now be sitting in the lake [high street, llanberis]. So this forest would have gone all the way along the valley and then you’d have wolves, wildboar, deer trotting around all over the place, probably a linx or two and quite remarkably, European brown bears. The last time the bears were here was around 2000 years ago. The wolves around medieval times. The boars about the same time. The deer quite recently. The eagles very recently – Victorian times.

Lord Dinorwig was given the lordship, the manor of dinorwig after the welsh-english wars. He was given a manor, a tower in brynrefail, in the 12/ 13 hundreds. Dinorwig is this whole valley, and this forest extended all the way up towards nant peris and beyond. And they used to have hunting parties. So they’d be up there hunting the wild boar and deer and whatever. And they’d have these huge feasts in the manor in Brynrefail for the top nobs. And there is a rock in Brynrefail which is called Craig yr Itgorn which basically means the rock of the horns – horns as in ta, ta, ta ta taaaa. These guys would be out hunting, and they’d go to the top of the rock with their big huge horns to call them back for the feast. So that’s why that’s Craig yr Itgorn.

Just behind here [Llanberis High Street] we’ve got Dinas. The first settlers in this valley built themselves a defended little village up there on the hill. What they would have seen is something totally different. The lake in flood would be beyond us here [High Street] and probably 300 yards further back. This is a flood plain. The reason it was built so high was that it was safe up there. It wasn’t attacks from other human beings but from wolves and bears that they were worried about.

I don’t think that has yet irreversibly changed the character of the towns and villages but there’s a great danger as in so many other places that the indigenous population, the people who were born here, lived here most of their lives, generations of people will get increasingly shuffled to the side rather than that being the dominant culture into which other people fit. So that concerns me. If you went to the lake district now, is it the original rural – maybe rural landed – but generations of people who have lived there forever is that the dominant, or is it the retired middle classes or anyone. I hope it is, but. The concern is to lose what is hear now. What is different. What is valuable. It is another diversity thing. We’ve got I don’t know, there is some sub-section of human sapiens that inhabits this part of the world and it is in danger of going extinct and that would be a great loss.

I’ve been reading about traditional ways of dealing with health and things. Someone told me about onion polstice and i put it on my chest and it drew out the stuff in a way that nothing else I’d been given had. There are so many things that we’ve forgotten. I think we’ll get back into learning about them, because when things aren’t available any more, you know, in the surgery or whatever, because maybe they come from China or India, we have to look locally. And what did people do in the past? We should learn about these things.

Did you know people used to use Meadowsweet on their floors to keep bugs out? I’m going to try it.

People think that before, there was nothing, like we were all backwards or something. But it used to be thriving here. People have survived here for hundreds and hundreds of years. Things change. We adapt. We can’t keep things like this just because that’s all people remember. I think we need to rethink now [conversation during lockdown]… take this time to think how it could be different. Maybe we could even be dependent on tourism? Keep things more local. There used to be a really busy high street with loads of shops. if people used the shops and things here then maybe things would work all year round, and that might be better.

I feel like I’m not allowed to be true to my heritage - to be able to live in ways my ancestors lived. Celtic heritage i mean. I feel like a minority, I feel oppressed. I think of the persecution of witches, obviously, that was a way of getting rid of the old ways. We’ve lost so much of that knowledge, of that way of living, of seeing the world, of being. But I mean now too. It’s like there’s one culture now, the consumerism, everything focused on money. It is bringing us to the end of the world. I feel so unbelievably sad about it all.

Are the farmers the closest thing we have to indigenous knowledge? Institutions don’t seem to give them the respect or listen to their knowledge like they’d have to in other places. Take that whole rewilding clusterfuck down near Machynlleth - they developed that whole thing and didn’t even talk to farmers! In Australia they are starting to listen to traditional ways of working with the land, Aborigines have lived and worked with that land for thousands of years.