Tymawr Farm

Tymawr-Farm Events # 2 - Winter Woodland Walk

We had our first, annual Winter Woodland Walk on Sunday afternoon - we had a great turnout of 20 people, including family, neighbours and friends. We started with a hot pork roll (saddleback), homemade mulled wine and a chat around a roaring log fire. Then we put on our boots and coats and started our walk. I gave an abridged version of the below, complete with homemade cider, Wurzels songs and badger mating calls!

Thanks to everyone who came - it was great to have you here & we hope you'll come again next year!

Tymawr-Farm Winter Woodland Walk – 16th December 2012

Fig 1: Tymawr-Farm Christmas 2009

(1): In the back garden here we can see two essential parts of the cider-making process. The first set of stones is an apple-mill. The trough would be filled with apples, and the smaller stone which would have been mounted vertically would be rolled around the trough, mounted on an arm pivoting through the middle of the bigger stone. This would make an apple mash or ‘Pomace’ which would then go into the cider-press.

The next stone is the base of a cider-press. There is one complete with its woodwork in the Usk Museum of Rural Life (worth a visit – in many ways it is my fantasy shed!). Two large oak uprights are linked with a cross-member and a sturdy screw to press the juice. I’d love to get these stones set up again and working – I’ll get to our plans for an orchard later.

Fig 2: Cider Press in Usk Museum of Rural Life

(2): In the summer this lane is covered with Wild Strawberries – tiny little things. Our neighbours told us that Auntie Catherine advised them to thread them onto a sturdy grass stem, and when it was full to eat them all at once. Ben loves to search for them – they hide amongst the other plants at the base of the hedge, and when he finds one it goes immediately into his mouth – no chance for threading with him!

He’s a natural forager, I have a beautiful mental image of him one Friday afternoon in summertime, I drove home and found Jo and Ben picking blackberries on the Common. From the nose down he was completely purple, with a great big grin!

(3): It’s cold tonight so I’m glad we’re all wrapped up warm. We spent Christmas here in 2009 and I only just managed to get back here through the snow from work. The next morning, although this is only a slight incline, it was impossible to get the car back up the road. I now keep a shed full of rock-salt and a shovel on standby, and take a great interest in the grit container half way up the lane to make sure it’s full!

Mum can remember the great snow in 1947 - the drifts were so deep that the authorities were unable to clear the roads, and local people and groups of ‘borstal boys’ from Prescoed prison (opened in 1939) cleared pedestrian-width pathways along them. Mum can remember walking from Griffithstown with her mother and brother to visit Tymawr-Farm as a little girl (a journey of 5 miles). What a journey that must have been – it certainly puts the few inches of snow that we see nowadays into perspective!

Fig 3: The Lane Christmas 2009

Even that Winter wasn’t the worst – in 1962 it started snowing on boxing day, and this lane was blocked until March 1963!

The late snow seems to recur - it snowed here on the 7^th March 1898 when my Grandmother was born, again on the 7^th March 1947, and again when my Great-Grandfather died on the 11^th March 1963. I haven’t worked the pattern out yet but it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re stuck here again in the next few years.

(4): Little quarries are often found in the open countryside adjacent to small hamlets – they provided the stone to build the farmhouses and barns of course. Glascoed is no exception – there is evidence of two separate small quarries on Tymawr-Farm. One is near the house in what is known as the ‘Bear-Pit’, and another is in the woodland. In British toponyms ‘Bear-Pit’ usually refers to a place where real bears really were baited with dogs, most popularly from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries and very often in old quarries. Probably not a tradition we would like to revive!

In this area rich deposits of what, in geological textbooks is known as Glascoed Mudstone are found. This is actually a Silurian Limestone. This kind of rock was formed around 430 million years ago when most of the Southern hemisphere was land (the supercontinent Gondwana), and most of the Northern hemisphere was a vast ocean. It was during this period that life began to appear on land for the first time in the form of simple plants, although aquatic life was already prolific and quite advanced by this time.

In addition to being used as stone for building, probably from the middle-ages when monks from Tintern Abbey (founded in the 12^th century), established a ‘satellite’ at Monkswood (Capel coed y mynach) and quarried the limestone on an ‘open-cast’ basis. From the 16^th century onwards this limestone was also processed in small kilns to make lime. This in turn would be used to make a form of cement, used in mortar, render and whitewash for house building. The local vernacular owes its smart whitewashed appearance to lime.

The lime production process is very simple – it is just the burning of limestone in air in a simple kiln. The skill of the lime burner was to achieve the highest yield using the least fuel. Fuel in this area would have been coal from the 19^th century, and prior to that charcoal – a process which I’d like to revive here in these woodlands, but probably for a more modern use – the barbeque! There is evidence of 2 kilns just over the road from here in a small woodland currently owned by the Badger Trust.

On a map dated 1892 in our woodland there is an ‘old lime kiln’ marked, in addition to 2 house-sized buildings which on an 1896 conveyance are described as ‘Bailey Edward’, and referred to as an ancient “messuage” (meaning a farmhouse and associated buildings). “Bailey” in this description is the same as the ‘Motte & Bailey’ castle: The ‘Motte’ was a circular earth mound, created by excavating a moat. Upon this mound a wooden castle would have been built. At the base of the castle, outside the moat, a fortified enclosure of perhaps an acre or so would have been built, and the community’s living accommodation, stores, well and animal housing would be situated inside. Over time, the “Bailey”, or “Beili” in Welsh came to refer to any enclosure surrounding a farm house, and the “fortress” connotation was lost. So it is likely that Bailey Edward was the farm-yard and paddock surrounding Edward’s, or the Edwards’ family’s farm.

By the 19^th century most lime for cement was produced on a larger scale, and the limestone quarried here at that time was more likely to have been crushed and used as road-surfacing material.

It would be really interesting to uncover and fire up the old kiln and have a go at making some lime. I don’t know if it could be commercially interesting any more. One fact I came across in my research was that almost all Tortillas are made using lime – the corn is soaked in a dilute solution prior to grinding to promote elasticity. Perhaps we should start the Tymawr-Farm authentic Mexican foods company?

(5): There has been a strong Baptist church tradition in Glascoed for centuries, and an interesting note I came across not long ago referred to an annual ‘Cherry Tea’ to raise funds in the 1930s to build the Manse for the minister to live in opposite Mount Zion chapel (built in 1817). Prior to that the minister had lived ‘remotely’ from the village, and the building of a Manse was thought to be necessary to attract a suitably qualified and reliable candidate. Aberaeron House at that time had a large Cherry Orchard which provided the Cherries, and many people attended to eat their allotted ¼ lb of cherries, drink tea, sing songs, play games, chat and pay a small subscription towards the building fund. The house at the end of our lane is called “Cherry Orchard” and it would be lovely to imagine a huge orchard stretching all the way from Aberaeron House, down past Tymawr and to Cherry Orchard.

My Great-Grandfather Emmanuel Sainsbury was chapel secretary at the time of the Cherry Teas (and until his death in the 1960’s - he served in the role for over 60 years). Also, and I hope coincidentally, after a 3 tender process, he was the building contractor selected for the job of building the Manse!

One of the games they played at the Tea was called ‘Kiss in the Ring’ – in this game all the players except one would sit down in a ring, and one person would be ‘it’. The ‘it’ player would walk around the outside of the ring and drop a handkerchief behind one of the sitters. They would then have to jump up and run around the circle in a clockwise direction while the ‘it’ player ran round anticlockwise – whoever managed to sit back down first was ‘in’ and the loser was ‘it’. If ‘it’ managed to get someone out they were allowed to kiss them. I can imagine in the slower-maturing 1930’s, particularly in rural communities where young people may not see unrelated members of the opposite sex very often, events like these teas may have been when many people met their future husbands and wives. I remember Auntie Catherine once telling us how fascinating she found the ‘dark, bright-eyed boys’ at chapel – I wonder if she enjoyed playing ‘Kiss in the Ring’?

(6): On the subject of Orchards, at one time there would have been extensive apple orchards around this area for the production of cider. It was normal practice to pay a part of worker’s wages during haymaking time in cider, and the farms with the best cider usually had their pick of the best workers. My mother can remember taking my Great-Grandfather’s lunch out to the fields during haymaking – she told me that it usually included a white enamelled jug and a what she described as a mug, which sounded suspiciously like a tankard. Although the orchard would have been long gone by that time I like to think that sometimes the refreshments may have been something cidery!

Fig 4: 2011 Cider making!

Just up the road from here (you can see their lights) are two houses, one named “Berllan” (Orchard in Welsh) and the other Orchard House. Another piece of evidence which we’ll see shortly is a great, ancient Perry Pear tree. Interestingly Perry Pear trees live for around 300 years, and Cider Apple trees for only around 100 years, so it’s quite common to find only a pear tree or two where once a great cider orchard would have stood. The cider tradition is one which we are planning to revive here at Tymawr-Farm, we have draughted plans for a 2 acre orchard (around 700 trees), which should allow us to produce around 12,000 litres or 20,000 pints of cider one day. I hope you’ll all come back to help with the 2022 haymaking – we would be glad to pay you in delicious cider – whether we’d succeed in actually making any hay may be a different matter! In the meantime we have a few glasses of 2011 vintage cider which was made from apples from Tymawr, Mum’s garden, and also a few precious kilos of the tiny Perry-Pears still being produced by the great old tree, which I hope you’ll enjoy with us. Please note at this stage only the non-drivers are allowed to have any cider – it is a bit potent!

(7): This little woodland is about 2 acres in size, and consists mostly of Ash, with a decent mix of other species – some are welcome like Wild Cherry, Oak, Silver Birch, Hazel, and Eucalyptus. Others are basically weeds – like Elder and thorn trees (probably evidence of ancient hedge locations or escapees from existing hedges). We’ll make sure we keep some of the Elder trees intact though – they make a really delicious country wine, especially when mixed with Sloes (the fruit of the Blackthorn tree). We made 35 bottles last year, all of which have mysteriously disappeared!

We have several plans for this woodland – as we clear the ‘weeds’ and start to coppice the Hazel, we will make charcoal from the clearings. My prototype charcoal making system consists of a 50 gallon steel drum, a shovel, a bag of sand, a long stick and plenty of hope! I also hope that some of you will be barbecuing on Tymawr-Farm charcoal next summer!

To heat the barn & hot water currently uses about 2000 litres of oil per year, which will increase when we move into the big house. I estimate that to totally heat the house with wood will require around 20 cubic metres of seasoned firewood per year. That’s 20 65ft Ash or birch trees – that kind of size of tree would be about 30 years old. We plan to fell and replant this woodland on a 40 year cycle – each year we would fell about 200 sq.m of woodland (that’s about 20 trees with the kind of density we have here), and replant with high-quality hardwood species. So we should be able to be self-sufficient and carbon-neutral for heating. Over time it may also be possible to create a surplus for sale, and diversify into related products like wood-chip, chipped bark, timber and so on.

Finally, I mentioned “Bailey Edward’s” messuage, the ruins of which were here near the pond in the late 19^th Century. We would love to put 2 cabins, yurts or similar holiday lets here in the future. We think it would be a magical place for families to come on holiday, build dens, enjoy the tranquillity, the peace of a wood fire and gaze at the stars. Our plan is to be up and running with some cabins here in 2015.

I’d also love to let our rare-breed pigs roam here, but as Jo pointed out with her usual wisdom, not many people would like to go on holiday right next to a pig farm!

Fig.5: Beautiful Saddleback Pigs!

(8): On the subject of the stars, let’s stop for a minute and have a look at the sky.

Look north to see the plough or big-dipper & Cassiopeia (the ‘W’ shaped one) – in Greek mythology she was the vain Queen of the Ethiopians, whose boast that she & her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the sea-nymphs brought down the wrath of Poseidon the sea-god who decided to unleash a fearsome sea-monster called the Cetus upon the country. In order to appease him, on advice from a wise Oracle, Cassiopeia decided to sacrifice Andromeda by chaining her to a rock to be eaten by the Cetus. Andromeda was saved in the nick of time by the hero Perseus, but Cassiopeia did not escape her punishment, and remains to this day imprisoned in her chair in the sky by Poseidon forever. So, the constellation is supposed to represent Cassiopeia tied to her chair – I can’t see it yet, but perhaps after a bit more cider it will become clearer?!

Look South to see Orion, the hunter in Greek mythology (see his dog).

(9): In the 1890’s when my Great-Grandfather bought this land from his uncle he may have adopted the then still fairly novel practise of having a Christmas Tree in his home at New Inn. We usually think of the Christmas Tree as something traditionally British but it actually only came to Britain in the 1830’s, imported from Germany. Queen Victoria married Albert, her German cousin in 1840 and the British public started to embrace German customs like this as fashionable. I’m sure this custom would have taken a while longer to reach rural Monmouthshire! We plan to allocate an acre and a half to Christmas trees here, and in 7 or 8 years we would love to ask you to come back and ‘pick your own’, hopefully with a glass of our cider, hopefully you’ll be able to go home with a boot full of well-seasoned firewood, charcoal and pork too!

Thank you! If you found this interesting please keep in touch and follow our progress on www.Tymawr-Farm.com!

References:

Casseiopeia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia

Chapel: www.glascoed.com Really interesting and useful resource covering family trees, history of old houses and churches and chapels in Glascoed.

Christmas Trees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_tree

Lime Making Process: www.newtonabbot24.co.uk/newton-abbot-lime-kilns-c622.html

Limestone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Monmouthshire

Noises, Badger: www.badgerland.co.uk

Quarrying: www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/50825-Glascoed-quarry-03-06-10

Various old indentures, conveyances and plans