Cilgerran Castle & Teifi Gorge

I've been on holiday! 

Day 1 of my holiday was in Wales, in the South West of the country. I visited Cilgerran Castle in Pembrokeshire with Raven. Raven, though Irish, lived in Wales for over 20 years and has been teaching me snippets of Welsh vocabulary. 

Afon - River

(Hence the River Avon in Somerset, West England, as 'f' is pronounced like 'v' in Welsh)

Pysgod - Fish

Raven drove in the sunshine across the Welsh countryside along narrow winding roads with spectacular views until we got to this small village above the Teifi Gorge. We went down a particularly steep and narrow lane to a car-park down beside the river where there were some remarkably posh stone-built public toilets with a sheltered display on the outside wall of informative plaques telling of the river's history in both Welsh and English. As it was Easter Sunday afternoon and actually sunny, it was quite busy with families out to enjoy the outdoors.

Path above the River Teifi

Photograph by the Housecat

We strolled along the riverside and up the wooded slope, and rapidly I figured that a long skirt and even low-heeled granny-boots were both a bit impractical as I snagged my skirts on brambles and walked very carefully up the many steps indeed. Raven rather enjoyed photographing every interesting thing he came across, as did I. In the end I took over 100 photographs that afternoon, even if I am only showing a few here on this blog entry - things could get rather slow on the loading time otherwise! We walked past an old slate quarry and up alongside the river. 

Taking notes
Photograph by Raven of Chance Photography

I sat for a bit in this wonderful slate-encircled seating area amongst the trees, which if I go again I will note as a nice picnic spot. In the photograph I am writing in a notebook I bought especially for this holiday, to take notes for both my diary and my blog. 

The Sally Gate
Photograph by the Housecat

We walked beneath the castle for a bit, looking up at the towers and in through the 'Sally Gate' as I heard someone call it. I over-heard a father tell his son that it was not named after a woman called Sally but thus called because one sallies through it! I took several photos of the gate, but I liked these two detailed photos most of all. 

A closer detail of the gate.
Photograph by the Housecat

At this point I could hear distant strains of music on the wind. I couldn't make out quite what it was that was playing (I presume it was a radio or other recorded music) but it sounded like a woman singing in Welsh. It seemed quite beautiful and a bit magical to hear just these snatches of wonderful singing. Anyway, around this point I dropped the pen I had borrowed off Raven, so I didn't take many notes for a while! 

Castell - Castle

Tŵr - Tower

(These two are quite similar in both languages)

We then walked a bit further along and down to the river at a different point. Raven skimmed stones and I walked on the shallow shores where the water was an inch at most above the water and had a go at skimming stones too, but I am quite useless at this! 

Raven at the River Teifi
Photograph by the Housecat

I was wearing a scarf about my hair because even though it was sunny, it was a bit breezy and my hair kept blowing into my eyes. At least you get to see the skull scarf I was wearing, which is a cheap one from Primark, but does have a nice lace-like skull pattern on it. 

Looking out across the Teifi
Photograph by Raven of Chance Photography

After a brief hunt for the lost pen, we walked up to the castle and entered it properly. The castle is pay-to-enter and owned by the National Trust. Raven paid for my entry and I used my entry money to buy my little niece a children's book called 'The Little Dragon' and deep plum-coloured quill to carry on my note-taking with. 

Tower and cloudy sky
Photograph by the Housecat

There has been a castle on the site since around 1100CE, but the castle in its present form was built between the 13th and 14thC, with a lot done in 1223 by William Marshal Jr. (See, reading those plaques in the Castle grounds is educational!).

Walkways within the castle
Photograph by the Housecat

One of the wonderful things about visiting the castle is that you can walk inside the buildings as it is reasonably well preserved for a ruin, and as bridges have been built between the remaining stairwells. Raven took a photograph of me from above - he on a walkway, I in the base of the tower.

The Housecat with camera
Photograph by Raven

All the roofs are gone, as is often the case with ancient buildings as the timber rots once the slates or tiles fall or are salvaged (I would imagine slates at this castle, as there is so much of the stuff locally) but the stone, if built well, seems to withstand the centuries so much better. I took the photo below looking upwards in one of the towers. 

Into the light!
Photograph by the Housecat

One of my favourite things about looking at ruins is it gives such a glimpse into how the building was built. The rows of holes in the wall of this tower are where huge wooden beams would have once kept the floors up, for example. The whole castle is built of quite small (relatively) and flat blocks of slate - the local stone - and it is interesting to see something other than roof tiles as an architectural use of slate. I also like seeing the 'fans' of slate above the windows - you see that done nowadays still! Slate is quite an interesting material, with a good variety of uses. 

Anyway, I hope the castle photographs are pleasing, as there is another castle post on its way tomorrow. 

Well Done Manchester Police and S.O.P.H.I.E

If anyone needs to know the importance of this in the UK, just look up the tragic, horrific murder of Sophie Lancaster and the vicious, violent assault on her boyfriend. 

And all the other cases that have got nasty enough to hit the news. 

I was not originally going to explain the good sense of including Goths and other subcultures into this legislation. Subculture, as I have mentioned before, is a life-altering choice as great as the choice of religion, and subculture, for many, is a stronger influence on daily life than local or national culture, but having read through comments on various articles reporting this story, I will.

Now I don't think the "hate crime" legislation as it stands is right. It has this rather specific set of groups of victims, and defines the hate crime by its victim rather than the hatred within the perpetrator, and I think it could be better worded to include any baseless hatred towards a random stranger due to a difference rather than personal attack. The kind of savage thugs that attacked Sophie Lancaster are liable to target anybody isolated, different, or perceived to be weak. Yes, they are as likely to attack someone for looking foreign, non-stereotypically gendered, of an unusual religion or disabled. It is just as vile and prejudiced to attack someone on the grounds of being ginger, or looking 'geeky' or having any other visually apparent difference, or even for having the wrong accent.  These things are unlikely to ever be added to the legislation. I also think that legislation that goes to further mark the victims out as 'special' is in itself divisive. 

It is the perpetrator that is more evil for being judgemental and prejudiced as well as violent, not the victim more special because they belong to a minority. 

The idea that anyone who beats up someone for being Goth or Punk or Lolita or Metal in Manchester will hopefully get penalised for their motivation and vicious intolerance of difference in the same way as the hate crimes already recognised as well as their violence is at least one good thing. This world could do with vast decrease in vicious intolerance, and the message that acting on it is wrong should go out.

I know that the hate crime legislation is partly there to promote a sense of safety amongst communities that have been traditionally the victims of institutionalised prejudice. I think the creative, self-expressive types who have formed the backbone of various subcultures (and proto-subcultures since at least the people inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts & Crafts movements) HAVE faced a certain amount of institutionalised prejudice that can best be summarised by when, at one of the primary schools I attended and before I was even vaguely Goth, I was fed up with being bullied and ostracised by my peers and got the response "well, they wouldn't pick on you if you weren't so different' as if I could suddenly change my IQ (high enough to have meant I was into secondary school things by the time I was half-way through primary), my personality (far more imaginative, I would say, than many of my peers) and my personal circumstances (terrible, and I am not explaining on the public internet). I am who I am, and I have tried being more "normal" - I couldn't deal with the stress of having to permanently act, to permanently maintain an elaborate charade of normality and the cost to my then quite fragile mental health was huge. 

Even with that, I don't think the Goth community has faced, in the UK at least, anything quite as bad as the legislated prejudices that have historically caused vast and terrible harm to people of different races and nationalities, gays, bisexuals and lesbians, transgendered people and those of non-traditional gender and gender expression, the disabled, and women. 

But that does not mean to say that we have not faced problems. 

People think I am brave because I go out of the house looking visibly Goth, as if this is some act of deliberate defiance. It isn't; I just do what everybody else does and go about my life wearing my ordinary clothes. I know my clothes look different, but that is it. I know people who adore their Gothic finery, their Lolita dresses, their cybergoth creativity, but only wear it to clubs and events and go there by car or hide under long coats. Some even only wear it at home. It's not just those who are afraid of being beaten up, or having insults yelled at them by strangers, it is those who find the stares and whispered comments, the being treated with suspicion and alarm, or as some strange curiosity rather than as a curious human. If this addition goes some way to make people feel more comfortable in public as themselves, then that at least is a good thing.