Two Abbeys I

     After a dismal, wet day on Tuesday the sun shone bright Wednesday.  We went exploring a couple of monastic remains in the vast industrial landscape that sprawls and jostles in the limited space between the sea and the hills east of Swansea.

     Neath first.  Hidden away in an industrial park - an area that has been industrialized for nearly three centuries now.  An unexpected place, then.  John Leland said that it was the fairest abbey in all Wales. (Cistercian, founded 1130 by Sir Richard de Granville) High praise indeed - but better than Tintern?  Who knows now, because the intervening years have been cruel.  Though possibly not a completely false comparison: the plans of both abbey churches are remarkably similar, almost identical, though Neath is a touch smaller and the nave is one bay longer than Tintern, which is the slightly older structure. What does remain of the Abbey church however does suggest something fine. And looking online there are a number of engravings of the abbey remains that show some good architecture. The 16th century Welsh writer Lewis Morganwg wrote of the abbey in heavenly terms.  As often was the case at the Dissolution part of the abbey was converted into a country house, in this case by the Herberts.  That house forms now the most easily understandable, and attractive, part of the ruins. (Unfortunately closed for repairs!) By the 1720/1730s however house and abbey had been turned into a copper smelting works. Then it was iron smelting. The abbey though continued to draw artists and antiquaries.  It was depicted in the Buck brother's monumental print series 'A Collection of Engravings of Castles, Abbeys and Towns in England and Wales' looking very pastoral, the abbey church looking very much as it does today which sort wrecks my theory that the fine stonework (limestone) was robbed out during the industrial revolution for the production of lime. Whatever happened the loss of the detailing has left the abbey remains looking a bit amorphous, sometimes forbidding. When Gilpin visited perhaps more remained than now; he writes obscurely of a 'double tower', but one suspects his visit was fleeting and not too close.  What he actually saw, and thought were towers, are the two pinnacles of stonework left from the west front of the abbey.

   The abbey church again was depicted, from a distance, in that rare and obscure 1835 guide book 'A Guide to the Beauties of Glyn Neath' by William Young. In the 19th century John Borrow describes the surroundings of the abbey as hell on earth, but the abbey, partly abandoned now, was at a one remove from the desolation. By the beginning of twentieth century the remains were buried in up to 17ft of industrial waste, and it wasn't until the 1920s that the ruins were cleared of up to 4,000 tons of rubbish by the Neath Abbey Research Party under the aegis of Glen Arthur Taylor.

   In 1942 John Piper, accompanied by the poet Geoffrey Grigson travelled to Glyn Neath in search of waterfalls (there are quite a number at the top of the valley) guided by Young's book.  Perhaps they came here, but after a quick internet trawl I haven't found anything to suggest they did. The site is now under the care of Cadw.  A slightly strange, haunting place in all.

Holiday III Tintern Abbey

     Friday morning found us standing outside Tintern Abbey. It's hard to know what to say about this building it is so well known. But let's start with the easiest bit, some facts: it was founded in 1131, and the abbey church rebuilt in stages in the second half of the 13th century; it remained pretty much unaltered until 1536 and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

     For the next two centuries it passed into relative obscurity - the domestic buildings robbed for building stone, but the church left oddly intact - until the late Eighteenth century when it became a locus for the secular cult of Romanticism, and it has been painted, photographed and written about repeatedly ever since. It is, rightly, still on the itinerary of tourists and day-trippers. 

     Rightly, because the church is such an elegant, slightly austere design, as befits a Cistercian house, and its setting is magical.  The reasons for choosing this particular place to found an abbey are obvious.  It is incredibly idyllic, beautiful.  An enclosed, remote place.
     The proportions of the church are superb.  The style is Geometric Decorated with touches of that next stage of Decorated Gothic, Reticulated - eg. the great west window.  Everything is clear and lucid. There is no triforium as such but a plain, blank wall, like you might find in some Medieval German churches.

     The first tours to the Abbey were started by The Rev. John Egerton, who lead parties of friends down river from Ross-on-Wye. Thomas Gray, the poet, and later William Gilpin, Anglican priest and aesthetic theorist, made the 'Wye Tour', as it became known, in 1770s in search of the picturesque;

 "The first source of amusement to the picturesque traveller," Gipin wrote, "is the pursuit of his object - the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view."

    The Wye valley with its winding course and steep valley offered much to the 'picturesque traveller' including the Abbey, then overgrown and surrounded with small scale industry. Gilpin though confessed he wanted to get a ladder and assault the abbey church with a hammer to make it more picturesque for “though the parts are beautiful, the whole is ill-shaped”. The Abbey was only seen for its scenic, landscape value; for other later visitors the melancholic emotions it stirred. Gilpin wrote up his travels in 'Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770', published in 1782. This did much to publicize the 'Wye Tour' and Turner, Coleridge, Wordsworth all followed in Gilpin's wake. "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" ('Lyrical Ballads') was written on Wordsworth's second visit in 1798.