Country diary: We rise and fall with the treecreepers outside

Yr Elenydd, Ceredigion: In a tiny chapel I sit among the devout, one eye on the windowSoft breezes sift through last year's leaves. Beech-mast crackles underfoot. By the strait gate I enter Soar y Mynydd's chapel-yard. This is Yr Elenydd's focal point, at the heart of Wales's depopulated moorland, ever-threatened by reservoirs, off-roaders, conifer plantation, wind turbine "farms", or even, in former years, depredations visited on its spacious high landscape in what's now for Britain a historical common agricultural policy.Down a side-turning from the wild road between Tregaron and Abergwesyn, by Afon Camddwr, you'll find chapel and house. It's a place of pilgrimage. Snipe jag among rushes. Hill farmers on ponies gather sheep. I come each year to this heartening relic from the age of dissent to sit among the devout and listen to their eloquent, impassioned itinerant ministers from Gorseinon, Bae Colwyn, Gwaun Cae Gurwen, discoursing in yr hen iaith ("the old language") on predestination and Calvinist Methodist articles of faith. It gives a distant sense of how it might have been to hear John Bunyan - Bedford brazier's son, "tinker and poor man", author of The Pilgrim's Progress and pre-eminent demotic figure in 17th-century English religious literary culture - preaching to his wayside assemblies of faithful followers. But it's not for the doctrinal disputation that I'm at Soar y Mynydd today. Continue reading...