Llananno

Not angels but bats in the rafters at Llananno, and the altar topped with a plastic sheet to keep the shit off. Even as I sat for an hour in the old church, the purlins scratched and rattled with movement. Once there was a small dispute, and a moment’s angry wailing which brought a streamer of cobwebs down on the pews nearby.

I’d gone to see the famous screen; the one with dragons rolling in foliage, belching fig leaves and brambles for five centuries without interruption. And sure – the carving work is sensational, complete with two-headed men and a lattice of patterns to make you gasp at the unexpectedly fine line between oak and lace. I could’ve stayed there and watched the sun creep over that screen for hours, but those rafters were more alive and urgent.

If the objective of church-crawling is to lose your mind, you cannot choose what it is you’ll see. The screen was the main event, but bats were the open door and I pushed at them instead. I closed my eyes and smiled at the image of newborn pups above me, cooried into their mothers, suckling up a night’s mosquitoes in a single pearl of milk. Time passed in this absorption, and a thin mist of aerial piss. 

A hand-written copy of R.S. Thomas’ poem Llannano was hanging by the door of the church as I left. I found it there with the colour draining from it and the felt-tip hand like child’s. It’s not his greatest poem, but it made me dizzy for a moment to know that I walked in a swirl of the old man’s wake. Of course he’d’ve come here; of course he knew Llananno. And it’s obvious that he could see this place with a more-than-religious clarity, observing its peace and the quality of its light – the nearby traffic notwithstanding.

Then afterwards I walked beside the Ithon which runs below the church, patterned with alders, glittering with damselflies and demoiselles like a steaming jungle river. Blackbirds called across the low water in the smell of cows and long grass. It was late afternoon, and deeply more than anything I’d hoped to find after a long journey.

And suddenly I was curious to see that stream shine at one or two in the morning; in the dumb time with all those bats unleashed from the nearby rafters, straining out the daily darkness, dipping down onto the water as a trout dips up to the air. That’s when a different regime might’ve transformed the place; nature out beneath its rightful sky and the church left truly empty to be peaceful or whatever it chose for itself. I might’ve had a look at the old screen then, and pawed it with my full attention; I might’ve sat alone in the gloom and found more of what I’d come to see than ever those misleading bats allowed me.

I will go back to Llananno, but isn’t it hard to experience a place cleanly without the baggage of your own imagined hopes? So, glad of every thing I’d found, I’m learning hard to work with what I’m given. And following this line, perhaps the night-time visit I’d begun to conceive is not a springboard for next time but a satisfactory end-point for now.