A Return to Tranquillity

Green trees and a river

A river runs past it – the River Conwy

At the end of June 2022, I spent a few days on a birdwatching course at the Field Studies Council’s Rhyd y Creuau centre near Betws-y-Coed. On the final evening, I was determined to visit a place I’d not been to since I was a child so, despite the pouring rain, that’s what I did. After a 30-minute walk along the verge of the very fast main road – the Sappers Suspension Bridge short-cut being closed for repair – I found myself in the churchyard of St Michael’s Old Church watching a song thrush feed a plump juvenile amongst the ancient yews and old gravestones. The peace and tranquillity of that early evening in the churchyard made a strong impression on me, and I resolved to return. Fast-forward to May 2023: Eurovision is in town, delighting many thousands of people, but it’s time for this ‘bah, humbug’ individual to get out of Dodge. Where else but to Betws-y-Coed?

In thinking about it now, a few weeks afterwards, the holiday is a confusion of similar sublime images: rushing waterfalls, meandering rivers, green woodland – deciduous oak, birch and hazel and the ubiquitous cash-crop conifers – and fields, mossy stones, wide landscapes and blue skies. And birdsong, of course. Struggling up an almost vertical slope (slight exaggeration, but there were motivational signs and benches dotted along the route), the sound of my number one target bird, the wood warbler, was a joy to the ears – even if it could barely be heard at first over the pounding of my poor unused-to-aerobic-exercise heart.

bench, trees, rocky ground and a signpost

Halfway there – motivational sign, bench, and wood warbler singing

The sound has been described as a penny spinning on a table-top; it starts quickly and rapidly builds to a crescendo of overlapping notes with a wren-like trill at the end. This exceptional song is interspersed with short, single notes that are often run together:  ‘teuw’, ‘tew-tew-tew’ (or ‘deep’, ‘deep-deep-deep’, which might be a more helpful aide mémoire).

The wood warbler is the largest of the leaf warblers, and, in my opinion, the most attractive, with its olive back and sharply contrasting lemon face/throat and upper chest and white stomach. As with many of the spring migrants, it has flown a long way – from south of the Sahara, just like another leaf warbler, the willow warbler, although their close relative the chiffchaff may have only come from Spain or North Africa and some are overwintering in the UK these days.

Small olive, yellow and white bird on a branch

Wood warbler – image by Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

For a video of the wood warbler’s song and appearance, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ycu68-wqg.

At the end of the trail, Llyn Elsi was a panorama of trees and land gulls – a colony of black-headed gulls nests there. As I sat catching my breath, ‘cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo’ floated from the distant forest. It’s an atavistic sound that raises the hairs on the back of the neck, I find. I don’t know why! I can understand why hearing a lion’s roar might do so, but a cuckoo’s call??

A lake (llyn) surrounded by vegetation and dark clouds overhead

Llyn Elsi with the rain heading in

But back to the churchyard…

And again it’s birdsong that fixes itself in my mind: blackbirds, specifically, singing in early evening as I sit on a bench against the church wall and absorb it all. The dusk chorus going full pelt in a churchyard that has been deliberately left to nature: bluebells and other native wild flowers grow amongst tall grass, ancient yews and old gravestones, where last year I watched that song thrush provisioning its plump fledgling with a rich supply of insects without having to wander too far away from junior. The churchyard is a lovely example of sympathetic management of the local natural environment. Of course, nationally, not everyone approves of the ‘wild’ look, but thankfully it seems to be appreciated here.

An old churchyard with tall grass and bluebells amongst the tombstones

Beautiful bluebells and other wildflowers allowed to grow in the churchyard

The next day, the church was open to visitors and I took the opportunity to have a good look around and buy a little booklet which was packed full of information. The stone-built, slate-roofed church was built in the 1300s and added to in the 1800s. Inside lies the highly carved limestone effigy of a knight, Gruffydd ap Dafydd Goch (Gruffydd son of Dafydd the Red). The booklet says that he died between 1370 and 1380, held land around the area, and fought at the battle of Poitiers under the Black Prince, and conjectures that he may have been the church’s original patron.

A stone effigy of a knight with an information board above

Gruffydd ap Dafydd Goch

The yews in the grounds are thought to be 1,000 years old, whilst the tombstones go back to the late 1600s, and the churchyard is where the members of the 19th century artists’ colony liked to gather and paint (example of their work: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cox-a-welsh-funeral-betwys-y-coed-n04844).

Although the church has been superseded by St Mary’s on the main road (behind which starts the hike up to Llyn Elsi), it does hold a number of services/events each year:

Flower Festival –8th-10th September 2023
St Michael’s Day Service –29th September 2023
Candle-Light Carol Service –30th December 2023

See the website for more details: https://www.stmichaelsbyc.org.uk/ or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stmichaelsbetws.

And check out Caring for God’s Acre (@godsacre on Twitter) for more lovely church grounds that are being managed as havens for wildlife and people.

I visited St Michael’s churchyard every day of my short stay – it was a tranquil, peaceful and restorative place where nature thrived amongst human memorials to the dead, and if I’ve ever had a sense of the spiritual it was there.

Two ancient yew trees hiding an old church

Two of the ancient yews in the churchyard

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.