Eglwys bach y mor

St Cwyfan's Church lies perched on the small isle of Cribinau just off the coast of Anglesey near Aberffraw in North-west Wales.

Known popularly as 'eglwys bach y mor' (the church in the sea) it was built in the twelfth century (and substantially rebuilt in the fourteenth century) but has been much altered over the centuries. It is reached by walking across the causeway, and the island is usually cut off by the sea for around four hours each day.

When the church was built, the land was still connected to the mainland (as can be seen from the map John Speed made in 1636), but has been eroded over many hundreds of years.

A new church was built a mile inland in 1871 (St Mary) and the old church fell into decay. By the end of the nineteenth century, the church was in danger of being lost altogether: some of the graves had begun to fall into the sea and the building had lost its roof. We owe it to architect Harold Hughes that the present seawall was built around the island and that it was restored in 1893.

If you look at some of the photos you will find on line, you'll see that the church has in recent years been limewashed as it would have been at the time it was built.

The inside is very simple and the north wall shows signs of the north aisle and arcade added in the sixteenth century; this was demolished in the early nineteenth century as the sea eroded the island.

As can be seen, it was a grey August day when I visited the church. I was very fortunate that the church warden was on site that afternoon and so was able to gain access. Potential visitors should note that it is normally locked.

Looking Down to the Wye

Penalt Church rests in a timeless secluded site high up overlooking the Wye Valley (Monmouthshire, Wales), reached via a tangle of little roads from Whitebrook or, better still, through a climb up through the meadows and woodland just above Redbrook.

Most of the church dates from the 15th or early 16th century, but the base of its tower is earlier. It is approached through a lychgate and a pathway of pollarded limes to a church door dated 1539.

The simple East end of the interior has an altar rail dating from 1743 and many fascinating early memorials (see below).

A slanting passage also connects the aisle of the church to the East end in a manner very similar to Rhoscrowther in Pembrokeshire (watch out for a blog on this church soon).

Alongside an ancient chest (apparently older than the building itself) are several memorials from the 1630s and 40s. 

It is early spring and the valley is filled with daffodils . 

Adieu to all alluring toys

Next Monday night (7 December), the music department of Cardiff University are giving a very enterprising concert of music by Welsh composers. It takes place at the University Music Department at 7pm  (details here). There is music by Andrew Wilson-Dickson, Gareth Churchill, Christopher Painter, Sarah Lianne Lewis, Max Charles Davies, John Metcalf and others, including a performance of my short cantata Adieu to All Alluring Toys. 

Some of the most fascinating discoveries in old churches and chapels are often hidden away amongst the memorial stones on the walls or lying benearth our feet. I particularly like those from the later seventeenth or eighteenth century with their lettering and designs by artisan stone-cutters, often with verses that have perhaps been written by someone local. I've often jotted down some of the more striking of these in my notebooks and when, in 2011, I was asked to write a song for a CD of contemporary British songs on the Meridian label, I raided by notebooks to find some texts that might be used. 

Adieu to all Alluring Toys is the name of a short cantata for baritone and piano that I completed in 2011, recorded by Paul Carey Jones and Ian Ryan. it consists of two songs (or arias) framing a small central recitative.The project was masterminded by composer David Power, whose wife Linda Ingham contributed the very striking cover. 

The piece takes words from three eighteenth and early nineteenth century memorial plaques found in churches in South-East Wales and Lincolnshire (those around Brecon and the Black Mountains seem to be particularly rich in such treasures). Two of the epitaphs are written to the memory of small children whilst another warns of the inevitability of our mortality. Innocent, naïve and sentimental, the words nonetheless are full of light, optimism and even humour, far removed from our more recent view of mortality. It is these qualities that the music tries to capture.

Here is the first of the texts and the one from which the piece's title comes. I found it in St Beilo, Llanfilo in Breconshire. It's in memory of Elizabeth the Daughter of Walter Vaughan, of Tredomen, Gent. She died the 31^st March 1774 Aged 10 years.

There is a brief central recitative which I took from Rhulen Church, Breconshire. Inscription: James Probert who departed this transitory life, September 17^th 1756, aged 66. Here is the church, hidden in the hills.

I found the final text in Grimsby Minster, Lincolnshire: Inscription: Under this Stone was Buried the Body of GEORGE, Infant son of Captain PETER RYE, Royal Navy, who died Dec’r 6^th 1808.

Because this is a commercial CD, the music hasn't been posted up on a website, but you can hear extracts if you go to Meridian's site, buy it online or, better still, come along next Monday. 

Cyppin - The Video

Readers of this blog might remember between October last year and last March I reported on a the process of planning a video with a musical soundtrack. During the summer the final edits were finished and I have just uploaded the result to You Tube. Click here to see it.

The video features and is built around the small non-conformist chapel of Bryn Salem Chapel in Cyppin, Pembrokeshire, founded around 1847 and built in 1852. It now lies unused and derelict, about half a mile off the main road on the edge of a field. You won't find an entry for it in the Buildings of Wales architectural guides. 

The project was part of a the Creative Wales project from the Arts Council of Wales which I am currently completing. It is concerned with musical performances of my music in unusual and remote spaces; particularly small Welsh churches and chapels. Whilst the idea of a performance at the chapel was attractive, in this instance I wished to creating a short video around the chapel, for solo double bass and an electronically generated soundscape made of manipulated natural sounds (wind, birdsong and so forth) captured at the church. 

The video is concerned with the idea of the decay of the chapel and, perhaps, other elements, places, ways of life and so forth in the area and community. But this is not necessarily seen in a negative context: nature gradually and gently reclaims the chapel and its structure,re-absorbing it back into the landscape. A similar process is also applied to the musical structure.

This short film of the chapel and its location was made by Aaron J Cooper and directed by Heledd Wyn Hardy (seen below working on the film on a very cold January day earlier this year). 

The music is played here by Ashley John Long and the recording engineer was Odilon Marcenaro.The last sentence however doesn't begin to reveal how much Odilon helped me through the process last winter, mentoring me through the use of electronics and then showing me the process of transferring these to film. Without him it would not have happened.

This is very much a first stab at this way of working and therefore a student effort - it's presented here as a curiosity and more as work in progress than a finished item. I am very much aware of its defects and crudities (at a musical level) but was fortunate to work with several fabulous people - particularly Aaron and Heledd (who constantly pushed me forward and encouraged the project) not to mention the wonder double bass playing of Ashley John Long. 

Hasguard

A day out to do some research for the final part of my Creative Wales project. This is the most difficult part, requiring a conceptual leap that I’m still rather uncertain of how to make. It’s concerned with the relationship of music to architecture and place and, following on from the last part of the project (based around the abandon chapel at Cippyn), I have decided to follow up a similar site of which I have been aware for sometime. This is a ruined medieval church at Hasguard, in Pembrokeshire.

Hasguard is quite remote, about ten miles South-west from Haverfordwest and beyond the more industrialised Milford Haven part of the county. This is the bit that tourists and visitors are not so familiar with and is about four miles from the little coastal village of Dale.

As you will see from the photos, it was a perfect early autumn day and the roads were empty apart from an endless stream of tractors; it’s harvest time after all…

Like Cippyn, Hasguard is one of those villages that no longer seem to exist beyond a handful of dispersed houses, farms and the ruined church itself. Unlike Cippyn though, it’s not too difficult to find.

The church is medieval and of uncertain age, added to and adapted from about the thirteenth century onwards. The roof has gone and the inside rendering has been open to the elements and only two windows remain, but it’s otherwise in surprisingly good condition and there is no vandalism or graffiti. 

It certainly could house a performance of some kind without posing any serious Health and Safety risks. As you’ll see it seems to be well-looked after; a friend who visited it some years ago tells me that it was then overgrown with weeds and creepers, though it does still house a small colony of snails.

It’s difficult to know when it was abandoned. The churchyard has a number of rather ordinary nineteenth century headstones and the burials seem to have persisted through into the 1960s, so its use seems to have ceased sometime in the last forty to fifty years.  

And, to follow, a visit to Dale to write up my notes together with some coffee and cake…

Cippyn : The Decay

I've recently been working on a film collaboration with Aaron Cooper and his tutor Heledd Wyn Hardy from the Faculty of Creative Industries at ATRiuM (Course Leader, Bilingual Media Production) at the University of South Wales. It's about a deserted chapel near Cardigan in the village of Cippyn; it now sits in a remote spot, a quarter of a mile from the main road, hidden away on a solitary footpath leading towards the sea (you can see more information in previous blogs back last October and January). 

Next Wednesday, 4 March, between 7 and 8pm, you can see the film and photographs of the chapel as part of an installation in the theatre at ATRiuM. You will be able to enter visuals of the chapel in a small space enclosed by four screens through which you can wander. Here's the poster:

Over the last few days I have finished a soundscape that runs through the film, made up of sounds from around the site - gulls, wind, rain, water dripping off the chapel roof and today Odlion Marcenaro at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama has been matched up to the film. Here's a sample of what I've been doing: https://soundcloud.com/peter-reynolds-2/no-1-gulls

When the rest of the music is added to the film, later this month, double bass player Ashley John Long will play the part I am composing for solo double bass. Next Wednesday, he will be playing it live as part of the installation. Here he is, running through it with me recently. 

Heledd at ARTriuM has produced a very elegant little flyer  for the event. If you'd see it, just turn up on the night - you can find details and an invitation here.

Filming at Cippyn

In a previous blog post I showed pictures of abandoned chapel in Cippyn near Cardigan. Since then I have started working on a project as part of my Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales project based on the building and its surrounding landscape.

I'm very lucky to be working on a short film of the chapel and its location.with Aaron Cooper and his tutor Heledd Wyn Hardy from the Faculty of Creative Industries at ATRiuM (Course Leader, Bilingual Media Production) at the University of South Wales. I'm now writing a piece for solo double bass (for Ashey Long) which is underpinned by an electronically manipulated soundscape of sounds recorded at the site. I've never worked with film before and am coming to grips with the technology of producing the soundscape over the last couple of months with the help of Odilon Marcenaro at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama.

Last Sunday I went along to the chapel at Cippyn with Arron and Heledd to watch them working on the film.

It's a long and painstaking process, with lots of tiny shots and different angles that will eventually be stitched together into the final cut. Here's Aaron filming a tiny clump of weeds that have grown up around the internal door to the chapel.

We were lucky with the weather and had the whole range of different types of weather and light during the day - very much a part of the coastal micro-climate in this part of the world. Here  is Aaron with Heledd filming the exterior of the church.

From the porch of the chapel itself, there is a breathtaking view down to one of the bays on the coast.

Most of the film is being made digitally, but we also had ten minutes of real film used for some of the shots. Here's the camera ...

Whilst Aaron and Heledd were working on the filming, I recorded various sounds from around the church: wind, rain dripping from the roof, different birds in the locality, a sudden downpour of rain and the inside of the church itself.

Now I'm working on the music, but won't put the whole thing together until after Monday when I see the first rough cut.

Chapel in the Woods

When I posted my blog about the small chapel at Bayvil back in August, Andrew Wilson-Dickson told me about a ruined chapel he had discovered whilst taking a detour from the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path near St Dogmaels, near Cardigan. The idea of the church suggested many new ideas that I could use as part of the Creative Wales Award I’m currently working on, so I set off to find the church.

I initially I started walking the south along the coastal path from Poppit Sands, encountering some alarming notices …

… and the usual fellow travellers …

As well as other abandoned and discarded artifacts

The chapel belonged to the community of Cippyn, which is so small that it isn’t even signposted. Eventually, after walking along a bridal path for half a mile or so, the roof of a building came in sight.

The chapel is surrounded by woodland and fields

Some of its windows are broken and the entrance is overgrown with brambles, but the building has not been vandalised: 

Inside the original communion table is still in place

Someone has recently left a little plastic bottle with flowers in a little niche in the wall

It’s difficult to know how long the church has been abandoned, but there was still a newspaper scattered around the floor dating back thirty years: 

I left armed with lots of information, ready to move on to the next stage ... watch this space! 

More pictures of the deserted chapel near Cippyn