To walk into the green folds of hill country north of Llanfyllin is a kind of time travel. It’s not to return to the past, it’s to wander into a time that belongs so intimately to others, to trespass into a country of countless generations of people and trees within this tangle of road bends and stream banks, through secretive valleys in the reach of hills.
The outsider’s gaze flickers across the scene in rapid eye movements, so the mind can translate dreamlike strangeness into familiar forms. Often this process of assimilation fails, and what may appear familiar only heightens the enchanting weird. Across a cattle grid, along a track through an open pasture of watchful sheep, with old oaks and woods below Grave Hill, something appears that holds that intimate time of place in itself. It arrests and draws the senses to reveal itself slowly, becoming a recognisable thing, yet concealing mysteries of what it might also be.
On a rise above the track is a group of trees together on an outcrop of rock. Its boughs from craggy trunks dome above roots that have prised a slab of stone from the earth. This is a tableau of three crab apple trees. It looks as though there may have been one central tree that decayed, leaving outer trees to grow into the space, with a couple of outliers that will do the same in the future.
Crab apples are often claimed to live for 100 years, but this one must be many times older. In Celtic culture, crab apples are second only to oaks in mythological significance. But that cannot be captured in a few often repeated lines about fertility rites from fragments of translated narrative, and it does not acknowledge the culture of living timbers with rot holes full of the stories of beetles and fungi.
Serpentine roots fit the legend that the crab apple is protected by a guardian worm. Leaves falling gold on the ground hide the last of the treasure, a small, cidery-coloured moon of an apple. In the peel and pulp of this sour, wild fruit lie the healing, bioactive compounds of apple vinegar; the rolling scrumpy intoxicating ancient people, badgers and butterflies; and the exploding pips that reveal the lover’s name when thrown into ritual fires of crab apple wood.
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