PRESELIS: A perpetual and flexible allegory.

That the Preseli Hills, just inland of the coast of North Pembrokeshire, resound with the remnants of earthly tectonic activity, elemental erosion, glacial movement, and Neolithic life, is a first step towards their symbolic and allegorical function. They are ‘old fold’ mountains, originally folded by the forces of tectonic plate shifting and projectile molten rocks. Their diversity and weathering is testament to a history that stretches much further back than, say, the Himalayas. These hills are the relics of mountains or, put another way, are mountains in an advanced state of decay. Their age is evident in their journey towards flatness via the smoothing techniques that millennia of wind and weather have exerted on their surface. So caught in time, might the Preselis become what anthropologist Michael Taussig refers to as ‘the cinema compressed into a still?’ For Taussig, such an image resides in the beach of his childhood. He goes on to say that such a place might hold ‘a messianic moment of stillness in the flow of time, arresting thought and allowing reality to collide and roll over it in search of another and until then unacknowledged history in what often seems to be a political fight over the past and its meanings.’

As objects themselves, the Preselis have generated our own production of objects which have come to stand in for our hopes, dreams and failures. The very stones they are made of (particularly the dolerite slabs used for stone circles and burial chambers, and the quarried slate), as well as the images they have generated, have been discarded, rediscovered, re-discarded, refashioned - this is the role of history. Their generous provision of spiritual and practical resources drew Neolithic people to live there; brought about Celtic connections, such as the foothills containing an entrance to the Celtic underworld, Annwn; and providing a rich heritage used to fight the battle to preserve the Preselis from becoming a military training site. So it was the Preseli Hills, steeped in Celtic mythology, 'unspoilt nature' and roads' ends, that drew, or simply accommodated, those in search of something alternative - mixing a protest of sorts with what was felt to be a 'pioneering spirit'. Rocks rising up to meet a sky full of stars: ‘This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius’ (and here, forever ‘dawning’), where the Preselis might come to embody an age of enlightenment and modernization, as well as falling in with a Celticism that stood for centuries of oppression and opposition.

Indeed Celticism itself has, for a long time, carried strong suggestions of a counter-culture. Celtic scholar Joep Leerssen notes how this is tied to peripherality: both physically (by hills/mountains) and conceptually from the metropolis. He writes: ‘The idea that a periphery is backward, bypassed by history, lost in time, is constant and almost universal in modern historical consciousness. This mechanism has been demonstrated in Orientalist discourse.’ And so Celticism comes to represent ‘a primitivistic nostalgia for a more ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ past, which is seen ‘as a ‘culture of the past, one without future, one with a mystical otherworldliness, exiled from the mainstream of historical progress.’ Michael Taussig sees 'the rendering of the past in the present' as important, and residing in 'magically empowering imagery'.

It was such ‘magically empowering imagery’ that helped to secure the future of the Preselis from being removed from consciousness by the military. Letters of protest, recorded in Hefin Wyn’s book Battle of the Preselau: The campaign to safeguard the ‘sacred’ Pembrokeshire hills 1946-1948 (2008), claim that such occupation would not only remove people, physically, from their homes, but that Pembrokeshire and, especially, Welsh, roots would also be destroyed. Shortly after this successful campaign to preserve the Preseli Hills, they came under preservation of a different sort, with their inclusion in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, created in 1952. Identified as part of an area of ‘outstanding natural beauty’ with ‘important wildlife and cultural heritage’ it is no wonder they lure. Isn’t that the point of such branding?

The Preseli Hills, then, provide a symbolic backdrop to those drawn to its magic. Key sites – Dolwilym, Fachongle, Cwm Meigan, Rosebush – were reinvented in its shadows.

Click on images, below, to hear soundclips from interviews, 2012.

'It was not as big a break as we thought...'

'You gotta come down and see where we've been, what we've been doing...it's fantastic..'

'I'd always been hypnotized by Wales.'

'We were the first generation in hundreds of years not to have had to go to war..'

The importance of ancient knowledge.

'I was grateful for finding my people.'

'It was nothing like where I'd come from, which was rural, but...'

'We were just in the right place at the right time.'

'You gotta see this place!'

'Although we'd grown up in suburbia, we just wanted to be out of it..'

I was rebelling a against hard military school.

'I felt that English people were colonising Wales, and so...'

'I was rebelling against being Welsh.'

'My family were always weirdos...'