From the Marches to the Sea: A photographic Journey - Taith ffotograffig
The landscape and literature of Mid-Wales; the greatest National Park that never was
A travelogue and meditation, in English and Welsh, the book pairs photographs and text in dialogue: the image grounded in the real, the prose pushing toward meaning.
It’s where my earlier photographic work and my later Simulist thinking meet — the moment I began to look at the world not just as something to be recorded, but as something that makes and remakes meaning.
Still in print, From the Marches to the Sea has quietly reached more than 2,500 copies sold, and judging by its near-constant circulation in Mid-Wales libraries, many more readers. A modest success that has proved there’s an audience for work that sits between art and landscape, photography and philosophy.
Cardigan Bay
Across fiction, poetry, and image, the work begins in the same place: with the act of looking, and the human need to make meaning.
Extract
Some say the weather in Wales is rarely good. They are wrong on two counts. Firstly, it is often, on a summer’s day, in the traditional sense, glorious. Blue skies, puffy clouds, insects buzzing among wild flowers in the stillness. Secondly, and much more importantly, for the rest of the year the weather is ‘not good’ only for those who have given up looking. When mist rises off lakes, when light scatters in clouds tumbling down through pines, when the land is cloaked with diamond shards some people call snow, when below the water’s surface fallen leaves flash golden, when the storm clouds march towards you across the sky, a dark shadowy curtain of rain below, when the clouds part for an instant and shafts of warm sunlight fan out over the horizon, when the air is so cold and the clouds so thick and dark that the bare-branched trees tum purple... then the weather is good.
Nowhere is this wondrous changeability more evident than in Radnor Forest. When the rest of Wales is damp and shivering on a near-zero night, the air may be crisp and clear, and the snow lying deep on Fronddyrys. The gritting lorries will come and go, but here, where a great wall of hills confront the weather spilling in from the West, tenaciously the ice will cling to the A44, making juggernauts slew and falter on the hairpin bends by Castell Crugerydd.
This is a place of towering ridges and stream-divided dells. On the heights are scatterings of sheep, white dots across slopes of billiard green. In the dingles, trees and magic…
Water-break-its-neck near New Radnor
…All lies balanced in this place. Hill/valley; exposure/shelter; danger/safety; fences/pathways; a gateway to east and west/a barrier to anyone who tries to pass; harsh weather and struggle/ wonder and magic.
From the Marches to the Sea by John Rux-Burton - available from Logaston Press
This is the English extract. I am happy to forward an extract in Welsh.
I would like to thank the wonderful Catrin Beard for her translation of the book into Welsh. Though my grandmother’s name was Pugh and I wear a red-shirt every match day (and I once dreamt I scored a try for Wales), I make no claim to the language… just the beauty of the hills… and the ‘windowed night.’