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A couple of saucy Welsh faggots provide the energy a traveller needs to tackle Offa's Dyke.
Faggots are traditional Welsh luncheon fare resembling large meatballs. Served with sauce, gravy and peas they're tasty and filling, particularly when accompanied by a pint or two of Brains, one of the best brands of beer in Wales.
“It’s Brains You Need” is the brewery motto. As for faggots, visitors to Wales who sample them are often startled later to learn the ingredients. A typical authentic faggot recipe calls for much pig offal - hearts, lungs, spleens and livers in particular.
These innards are diced with fresh, lean pork and mixed with chopped onions and apples, wholemeal bread, mixed herbs, salt and pepper before being baked in an oven for half an hour.
Sustained by faggots (or sandwiches for the squeamish), an explorer can set out to strip away the mysteries of Offa's Dyke, a great earthen defensive rampart running 70 miles along the border of England and Wales.
Offa’s Dyke is an English historic landmark of similar significance
to Hadrian's Wall and Stonehenge. Only recently has it been “discovered”
by visitors and walkers. The dyke is well worth a visit. It was built
on the orders of the ruthless Offa, Saxon king of Mercia (now the English
Midlands) in the 8th century AD. Originally, the Dyke was a 25ft turf
wall with deep, V-shaped ditches on either side and a few little diversions
such as sharpened stakes to skewer the unwary. The spikes have long gone.
Offa was so powerful a king that European rulers of the period, such as
Charlemagne, treated him virtually as an equal. He did much to unify England
into one country – and his word was law throughout his lands. When
he made you an Offa, you didn’t refuse.
Today, Offa’s vast earthwork passes through some of the most attractive landscapes Endland and Wales can offer, so to speak. Offa's Dyke Path was opened in 1971 and interest has grown every year. While the Dyke held the warlike Welsh at bay for centuries, it is coming under increasing pressure from the feet of walkers and local sheep.
Since 1982, an Offa's Dyke development officer, based at the Offa's
Dyke Association's centre in Knighton on the England/Wales border, has
overseen the care and improvement of the path. The officer also said a surprising number of visitors from overseas are walking the dyke.
Germans and Dutch are the most keen, he says, and Australians are next, ahead of French, Americans and other nationalities. Mr Saunders thinks it is the name “dyke” which makes the landmark so popular with the Dutch, Holland being a country brimming with dykes.
Before the days of cars, Offa's Dyke was so far away from civilisation,
few people visited. Today, it generates more than £2 million a year
in tourist revenue for local economies. Far from being off the beaten
track, it has become a beaten track – in parts, anyway. New footways
are being added to keep walkers off the more fragile and exposed parts
of the dyke.
Obviously, most visitors don't walk the whole length. The Offa's Dyke
Association centre is open all week in summer and five days a week in
winter. The path doesn't follow the dyke exactly; they run side-by-side
much of the way and cross several times. When for practical reasons the
path can't follow the dyke, the route has been chosen for scenic grandeur
alone.
As there are no written records from the time the dyke was built, archaeologists interpret its design and purpose from what they see today. The dyke is an earth bank up to eight metres high, often with a ditch alongside. Researchers believe the earthwork marked the western boundary of Offa's kingdom, beyond which lay the lands of the Welsh princes. The area has been the scene of ferocious battles and the dyke is dotted with fortifications and ruined castles guarding strategic valleys and border market towns.
The high ground gives commanding views of the mountains and valleys of Wales, and the detailed and enchanting patchwork of English and Welsh fields, hedges, oak woods and hay meadows which result from traditional farming methods.
A dyke walk offers plenty of pleasant places to stop. Try the Ostrich Inn for a refreshing point at Newland, or pause at The Devil's Pulpit, a great flat rock affording spectacular views north over Tintern Abbey, a stunningly atmospheric ecclesiastical ruin on the west bank of the River Wye. Founded by Cistercian monks in 1131, Tintern Abbey was completed by the early 14th century, becoming the richest abbey in Wales, an achievement reflected at the time in its soaring archways and in the lavish tones of its majestic stained-glass windows.
But the Abbey aroused the wrath of Henry VIII, who in 1537 shut it down,
kicked out the monks gave the whole thing to The Lord of Chepstow. Neglected
and abandoned, the Abbey crumbled into ruins. The British Government bought
it in 1900 to be kept as a monument.
The ruins were made famous by the poet William Wordsworth, one of the
great voices of English Romanticism, in his last poem of Lyrical Ballads
(1798).
Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
are worth quoting:
. . . I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
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