Walking the line: the ghosts of old railways
Exploring old railway lines leads Merlin Gable to consider how our rural histories can be more complicated than they seem
I reach a point where the water comes up and over my boot and down inside it. From there, like quenching a sword, the feeling shoots up my leg and into my back; I shudder and curse a little. It’s not nice water either. It’s bog-black, coal-black, smooth and gritty at the same time. I slightly relish the feeling of the soft, red, yielding clay mud of the farmyards I know around my village, but this is different: mud that’s slick and wet enough to flow – and that’s what it’s doing, right down into my sock.
To backtrack: I have developed a habit of sorts of deliberately finding unfashionable places to walk. It’s hard to say exactly when it started but perhaps it was to avoid the crowds of waterfall country and Pen y Fan, or an act of resistance against the idea of a ‘hike’, those proscribed interactions with nature which always seem to blunt the raw vibrancy of the encounter, just a little.
Instead, I always looked for a ruin, or a strange parting of the trees in Google Maps, or a forgotten, boring hill to walk on – and I enjoyed the perverse charm of its charmlessness. From here, I ended up with a secret hobby, kept private from friends, to walk abandoned railway lines. It has to be a somewhat furtive activity, partly because it involves a degree of trespass, but also because everything that involves railways somehow smacks of the wonkery of train spotting. So that’s how I ended up with mud in my boot.
I’ve been wanting to write something about walking along old railway lines for a while. South Wales, where I grew up and still live, is littered with them. Many were closed as a result of the Beeching Cuts in the 1960s, so the remains are approaching 60 years old now. The tracks have generally been removed but there are some things that are harder to get rid of: deep cuttings and high embankments, soaring bridges and the cold silent face of closed up tunnels. The idea captured my imagination – these extraordinary acts of infrastructure, of people’s labour and sweat, still there but forgotten and without purpose.
The first one I remember walking along was just outside Cardiff. Clambering through the surrounding forestry and coming upon the beginning of a 30-foot cutting built right into the rock, it felt as remote and engineered as a castle. As I began to walk down there in the cutting, it was hard initially to find any deep profundity of thought to except that of bearing witness to the grandeur of the work of railway building, and the fact that it has gone, gone – faded into modern ruin. There was a poetic, though, to the experience: trees that lay across the path like sleepers, the ballast that had become a winter borne – a new unmapped river. On higher sections, tunnels found their inverse in conspiring trees. Everything was patterned, repeating, linear and yet slowly being interlaced by creeper, branch, shrub and vine.
Walking along, it was very clear how much the forms of nature we normally interact with are – despite what we might feel about their remoteness and wildness – still prepared for us in advance. In our palimpsest country of herd tracks, farm tracks, footpaths and byways, it’s fairly hard to come across a path someone hasn’t already cleared for you. But here there were bogs where you couldn’t see them, trees that crumbled under your feet. A place once devoted to giving people and goods passage was now highly resistant to it.
What was clear too was a form of pressure that was too silent and too slow to really notice. Of rock bearing down on banks, the rain slowly pushing back a wall. It’s not entropy, a return to chaos, nor is it perfect design; rather, it’s just the result of what happens when highly engineered spaces are left and forgotten for nature to blindly, gropingly return to. No-one else wants it – it’s often not ever clear who even owns them – so why not?
Why am I so interested in these places? First, I think is the aesthetic experience: there’s a certain undeniable fascination with a place characterised by absence rather than presence. With barbed wire often snarling the fences on both sides, it’s clear that nobody wants these pieces of land. They’re at once indelibly marked with human labour – they’ll never return to a ‘natural’ state – but also wholly abandoned.
Second, walking past spaces for water towers and sidings, even abandoned platforms, makes me think of all the ways in which the version of rural Wales we know can feel so timeless, claiming a continuity with history upon which we place a lot of significance as a nation. Yet if you scratch the surface, barely below, just down in an embankment, you find the remains of a different history which speaks not to isolation from commerce, cities, and industry, but instead an integral, interconnected role with them.
The Scottish writer Amanda Thomson describes these sorts of places as ‘snags’ an Old Scots word for a dead tree that nevertheless plays an important role in nourishing the wider forest. The metaphor speaks to how ghostly places, where you feel the presence of old paths and old ways, provide energy for thoughts and feelings in the present.
That, for me, is what walking these railways lines is about. Amongst the mud and brambles, the quietness and subterfuge, there’s space to think differently. About all the people who travelled along the same route in different circumstances for different reasons. About the way that interconnectivity has changed so much, and about the slap-back echo between the communal history of railways and the individual pioneering practice you’re forced into to be in the same physical space now.
I expect there would have been far fewer trees when the railways ran through. They block out the sky often now but occasionally blue cuts through the green and affords space for higher thoughts. It was walking along the tree-shrouded embankment of the Grosmont Railway – a tramway built in 1816 between the early industry of Clydach Gorge and the commercial opportunities along the Wye in Hereford that I realised my little rural corner of Wales was nothing of the sort. Or rather that industry was nothing of the sort. Or rather that the dichotomy that had been put to me all my life didn’t exist at all.
I’d grown up thinking of where I was from as somewhere that people just passed through. That valley – running between Abergavenny and Hereford – still has a railway but since closures in 1958, the trains only pass through an area where there used to be six stations to stop at. At night, in bed a few miles away, you could sometimes hear the horn like a sort of ghost, marking beginnings and endings that could happen once upon a time but which can’t anymore. So it was easy to leave it there, as a place between places; a place one must pass through.
Then I found the tramroad. There’s only a bit of it left, which I eventually pinned down on satellite images – well-practiced by now from finding other railway lines – a suggestive curve as brief as rumour, formed in a different dance to the curtains of mountain and the crosshatching of fields around it. I did some research and, somewhat unlike our modern railways, this tramroad served as a more local network. Any landowner over its course was able to erect a wharf and act as a carrier, moving goods along. In this stage of early industrialisation, the area I grew up in had quarries, kilns, sawmills, brickworks, all of which existed alongside and with the benefit of the tramway, which one can imagine also facilitated the movement of animals, produce, equipment. This formed a local economy and local set of relations, as well as a wider one, contributing to the work going on westwards and eastwards.
Yes, it connected two places, but in collecting up produce and the products of rural industry on its way, I think of it like a ‘snag’, something to challenge, even in its ghostly form, the easy distinctions we sometimes make between country and city, industrial Wales and rural idyll, the rugged mountains around us and the lush valley floor and get us thinking more actively and alertly about the forms of living we assume as natural now in rural Wales.
Since discovering it, I think with a similar sort of double vision: seeing the tramway as it is now, just some remains softly resting in the countryside around it, and also as it was, an active point of connection and commerce. I can look to the end of my valley and think about the glow of the Ebbw Vale steelworks that used to be there but also think about the soft darkness and beauty that has replaced it, and how these two ways of seeing can tell us different stories.
Our land has produced material differences which, in complicated, intricate and local ways, have determined our historical relations. As our rural places become ripe for new ways of working, for distance working, self-employment, digital employment, we need to think through how to embed those practices within a wider social logic that still thinks of itself through place, that makes sense of who we are, what we do, and why we do it here, in relation to this place’s past and to the material conditions that have resulted in our own individual presence.
Something I thought would be the story about me trying to walk an abandoned railway line became a story about how nature can overcome man-made spaces but also, in doing so, bear their imprint like a ghost and, in experiencing them, allow us to think afresh about what remains. It’s really a story about resources – about the places we live in and the ways we live in them and, most importantly, about the way we think and speak about how we live in them. What walking the lines has shown me is that this divide exists largely in our minds.
Merlin Gable is co-editor of Cwlwm.