Trouble & Lichen

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Pictured: lichens on the slates of a field boundary just below Bryn Hall, Llanllechid, yesterday, on our walk. The slate itself probably quarried from the Bryn Hafod-Y-Wern quarry a short distance away, over a hundred and fifty years or more ago. The quarry was leased and worked by the Pennants of Penrhyn until the 1820s; the very same Pennants later to lock out their workforce at Penrhyn quarry in Bethesda, in Y Streic Fawr - The Great Strike - of 1900-1903, an industrial dispute over pay and conditions infamous throughout Britain at the time. The tactics of the quarry owner, the second Baron Penrhyn, were instrumental in dividing the populations of Bethesda and Tregarth [blog posts passim] over strike-breaking by workers from the latter village, already too impoverished to continue their actions against Penrhyn. That bitter community divide persisted well into the 1980s, when we first moved to the area, and many of those who lived through the strike were still alive to remember first hand.

I guess I see a curious parallel between the erosion over time of hostility between these two camps as generations passed, and the gradual colonization and subsumption of the spoils of that mineral that was at the heart of that enmity: the slate itself, by such an ancient and subtle organism as lichen. The point is that time and distance does heal to some extent, but the history at the root of everything remains, unforgetting. That the deeds of powerful men - usually men - and their money-oriented dynasties, can never be forgotten and forgiven through the progression of time is paralleled by the slate and the lichen: the confluence of conflict, retribution and reconciliation plain to see...

Comments

  1. Anonymous11 August 2023 at 11:45

    I don't think that we should forgive the sins of the past Kel. WE are living with the consequences of a sytem that gave ALL the levers of power to the few and they USED them to extract everything they could. The simple consequence is that the many are OWED by the few and just cos the actors are dead it doesn't absolve their decendants from their guilt! They are living OFF the sins of their fathers!!
    Joe

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous11 August 2023 at 18:30

      I was thinking rather more in terms of the continuously evolving dynamic between the two communities themselves, but point taken...

      Delete

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