Far off Things

"I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon on Usk in the heart of Gwent. My greatest fortune, I mean, from that point of view which I now more especially have in mind, the career of letters. For the older I grown the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in early childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted land.

As soon as I saw anything I saw Twyn Barllwm, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in that region before the Celts left the land of Summer. This guarded the southern limit of the great mountain wall in the west; a little northwards was Mynydd Maen - The Mountain of Stone - a giant rounded billow; and still to the north mountains, and on a fair, clear day one could see the pointed summit of the Holy mountain near Abergavenny.

It would shine, I remember, a pure blue in the far sunshine; it was a mountain peak in a fairy tale. And then to the eastward the bedroom window at Llanddewi Rectory looked over hill and valley, over high woods, quivering with leavage like the beloved Zacynthus of Ulysses, away to the Forest of Wentwood, to the church tower on the hill above Caerleon.

Through a cleft one might see now and again a bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the cliffs of Somerset beyond. And hardly a house in sight, look where you would. Here the gable of a barn, here the glint of a whitewashed farm house, here blue wood smoke rising from an orchard grove, where an old cottage was smugly hidden, but only if you knew where to look.

And of nights, when the dusk fell and the farmer went his rounds, you may chance to see his lantern glimmering a very spark on the hillside. This was all that showed in a vague dark world, and the only sounds were the far distant barking of the sheepdog and the melancholy cry of the owls from the borders of the brake."

An extract from 'Far off Things' by Arthur Machen