How wide is our border?

Merlin Gable describes the border country where he grew up and how the way we think about our borders shapes the way we think about Wales

By Merlin Gable

Near where I grew up, Capel-y-ffin waited in the wetness and dark. The minutes that went by to reach the village were totally out of proportion with the mile-markers along the way: 8 miles, then 3 ½, then, finally, the chapel-of-the-border itself. It felt on the edge of things. If I had to draw a map of my milltr sgwar, like in a fantasy book, this would have been right in the corner, where the details get hazy. It was a place I associated with blue-cold breath of family walks, with sticky, quiet pubs and with a sort of wildness that felt quite different to my own village. I don’t think I knew, to be honest, how close to home it was.

This word ffin in the name denotes a border (that between parishes, not between countries) but also a line, which in a sense fits its theological setting. In a village of only a few houses there are two chapels, both barely bigger than barns. The more famous, which gives the name to the place, stands with a quiet certainty, white and even; the other lies beyond the river, shrouded in trees, locked up and much more forgotten. Nearby is a monastery founded much later by an eccentric monk; visions seen here by farmers and monks gave the name to the nearby Vision Farm. With the glass of the lancet windows wavering and wobbling the light in its imperfections, you feel the three worlds – the Black Mountains, heaven, and hell – rubbing up against each other, the walls between them paper thin inside the meagre little chapel with little half-length pews. You walk a line yourself between reality and imagination. It’s easy to get caught up in it.

The real ffin is up the hill though, the border with England atop the frozen tsunami of Hatterall, threatening to crash down into Wales and wash away everything in its path. To reach it from the capel is difficult and rather impractical to anyone but the most determined and fit. Although it promises to draw a line, it’s always deferred: you find yourself avowedly on the border with England, yet distant from it.

St Mary the Virgin chapel, Capel-y-ffin (Merlin Gable)

With the border an unreachable point somewhere just over the horizon, everything between you and it becomes coloured by its presence. This is the border country that so many of us feel and it brings us to our second word: gororau, what Welsh speakers call this area, and everything north and south. The borderlands, the marches, y Gororau. Here, border as a line becomes border as a region. It doesn’t give you the sense of movement that you might expect – the romantic image of an escape into Wales from pursuit or from the law, or of the real present-day struggle and pain of border crossings elsewhere. Instead, it describes the important sense of the border as a state of being, a border-ness, and thus a cultural form and a social identity: neither one nor the other, damned if we do and damned if we don’t. 

I remember as a child driving with my parents around the lanes, lower down where they cross the border without a fuss, and prizing myself on being able to tell the Welsh side from the English. I thought I did it by the stance of the houses, their relation to the road, or by spotting a brambled-up gate which I imagined would lead to an abandoned manor house (the surest mark of the English – class). In reality, the Welsh on the road signs probably did most of the work for me. Different histories had given rise to differences between villages – yes – but the similarities were arguably more striking: the vestiges of subsistence farming; dispersed, ragged settlements; the railway and later dual carriageway cutting like an arrow between Abergavenny and Hereford, severing the mountains from the more rolling fields. Sometimes those mountains felt further away than the lowlands in England that flowed uninterrupted from the Welsh ones. Sometimes there was no sign at all when you crossed over – what was the point?

From there, Wales was a question, not an answer. It didn’t do to simply say you were Welsh and so I didn’t really until I found myself faced with a bourgeois English culture at university and in the cold recognition of contrast saw myself more clearly. We were, in many senses, terrifically marginal – of complete disinterest to England except for second homes, and a somewhat perplexing embarrassment to Wales. Y Gororau has been amongst the most sharply sceptical regions of devolution in Wales. Not easily digestible by either side – neither Welsh enough nor English enough – you end up at the margins of both. So we reach our final word, cyrion, the edge, the margin, always about to fall off the map, fall of the list of counties (was Monmouthshire ever part of Wales?) that make up the country. 

All this is to say that borders, presenting themselves as the clear binary between countries, also open up their contradictions, their imbrication and their interweaving in a way that destabilises any simple notion we might have of this side or that side: a line, a land, and an edge, all at once. Could you not say, then, that to be on the border, on the margin of things, is a quintessentially Welsh state of being? We are as a nation geographically marginal, pushed out to the west, and our experiences and stories don’t matter to the general idea of Britishness beneath which they are subsumed on a global stage. Could our cyrion – in all their forms – not tell us something quite fundamental about our essence too? 

Yes and no. The border is a physical thing and also a cultural thing. The geography has given rise, in many places, to the culture. It presents itself as a potent site of understanding Welshness, yet in doing so we also risk losing that cultural, geographical specificity – the unthought reality of many people – beneath the temptation of a good metaphor.

Explorations of it, therefore, must be careful. Mike Parker’s recent All The Wide Border is a journey down the border in an effort to trace its structure of feeling, to understand its power and to understand each side better. It’s an impossible line to walk, balancing the desire for significance, for productive metaphor, with the complex, sometimes more quotidian realities. He invests in the border’s symbolic presence, testing its logic against society, commerce and landscape. Inevitably, that sometimes results in somewhat over-celebrating the Welsh side. ‘When travelling from England into Wales’, he writes, ‘it is invariably so that the greens swell deeper, the contours sharper and the crags sulkier.’ This might be true of a general movement but the logic is subtly reversed: the geography that gave rise to cultural and political difference suddenly becomes the sign of that difference. 

Parker’s book dances across the border, deftly handling its material, but a second border exists behind the narrative like a stage curtain: the Covid pandemic. For Parker, the different policy solutions either side of the dividing line speak to its solidity, and to its advantage from a Welsh perspective: ‘after more than twenty years of political devolution, the border seems suddenly sharper than ever’. Through this historically limited lens, the border can become an easy sorting machine: good and Welsh to the left, bad and English to the right. ‘From my very first encounters with Wales’, Parker admits, ‘I’ve been certain that it holds something special, qualities we could all do with learning about, even emulating’. Its presence in the book is therefore subtly transformed. Instead of exploring the genuine hybridity of its communities, the texture of living they experience, sometimes the conversation turns to a more static mode of national affinity. 

This isn’t to do down Parker’s book in the slightest – it is engaged, committed and curious throughout – but rather to demonstrate the challenge of the task. Parker calls the border a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ – I’ll call it a mirage, offering whatever salvation you seek upon it. Whatever the metaphor, we often seem so willing to explore its mutability, but we only seem to do so on our side. East of the Black Mountains in England, Parker finds people who understand Wales as something that happened some generations back, when the area they lived was part of it. This area, Parker deftly reveals, was in fact never part of Wales. However, instead of seeing the commonality of ways of living determined by a type of landscape and social history regardless of a border, we see it as the rightful ascribing of a better life to the Welsh side.

As a consequence, the border country too only occurs on the Welsh side, hemmed by an invisible frontier beyond which undiluted England occurs. This reservation of hybridity only for our own – an admission just of our permeability, some might suggest corruptibility – places hybridity as a noble cross and another sign of our worrying decline. The border, of course, has two sides: what is it like for those on the English end, with their received assumptions of a unified British character challenged by an increasingly distinct, inscrutable land to the west?

Practical experience of the border quickly collapses the sorts of questions that the more prefigurative proponents of independence (Welsh, British, etc) might like to pose to excite themselves. It will never be a border of customs checking, visas and lorry parks. The strong images of the border at the Severn crossings and the A55 can sustain these ideas but the small stone bridge a mile outside my village – my closest and most familiar – proves the challenge. The pandemic response Parker sees as so clear a sign of the border’s reality to me showed its ultimate illusion, at least in the conventional nation-building senses we might be used to. In thinking about our own increasing independence and desire to articulate different decisions on each side of the border, we can only do so whilst conscious of its multifaceted nature and of its ability to melt into nothing when it so chooses.

The Black Mountains viewed from Skirrid Fawr (Merlin Gable)

Our border is ultimately in large part an imaginative act – even an article of faith. Instead of looking at its political effects, I suggest we think about how it feels in each instance of its presence. This differs not just along its length, but with each encounter by each different person. The philosopher Etienne Balibar has referred to borders as ‘polysemic’, having a different meaning for different people. It is to these different versions of our border – as ffin, gororau, or cyrion, or something else entirely – and the experiences that give rise to them, that we must attend. 

We need to think not just about the political aspect of the border but also its aesthetic aspect, in the sense that the philosopher Jacques Rancière describes aesthetic acts as ‘configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity’. If its geographical and political instantiation has created a border country and structure of feeling, then we should pay attention to the feelings these places elicit not just for their metaphoric content but for the affect to which they practically give rise. It’s the difference between the border as a national metaphor – all Wales as border country – and the metaphor which engenders understanding by unlocking greater specificity.

The UK, as a political entity, feels more than ever as if it is on life support. As the frictions and contradictions mount of each nation pursing quite different policies led by quite different parties, the pressure that our internal borders are under to sustain those differences and the cultural changes they bring only increases. We urgently need to extend our vocabulary of the border away from that one strong word – the border, to border, bordering, bordered – into a litany of ideas of negotiation, traversal and residing in space. In doing so, we stand a better chance of being able to articulate the lived conundrum of the UK’s internal borders, to invert them and understand our place and our nation better.

If you leave the chapels and the history and carry on up the single road past Capel-y-ffin, you’ll keep climbing. Nobody seems to be willing to maintain the road now – it gets worse and worse each time I come back. A last push up a steep hill and the strum of the cattle grid announces you’re approaching a change. The trees give way to rocky grassland, wild ponies and a walkers car park. The Gospel Pass is there, Twmpa to your left and Hay Bluff – the final crescendo of Hatterall ridge – to your right. In front and below you opens up a stain glass of fields, all grass green, yellow crops and the dark sucking red of the clay earth. This, your instinct tells you, must surely be England – through the looking glass of the Black Mountains and out the other end into a totally different place, with a different tempo and opportunities written into the land. In fact, England lies just in the wings, the line between indeterminable now the mountains have gone. The border has fooled you again.

Merlin Gable is co-editor of Cwlwm.