Things Found on the Mountain

By Diana Powell

In a remote valley in the Black Mountains farmer's daughter Beth is a child of nature, utterly at one with the rugged landscape as she tends the farm's wayward sheep. But change is coming to the mountains, the modern world enters in the form of the construction of a reservoir in a neighboring valley. Parts of the mountain are literally taken away to build the dam, there are people, machinery, noise, the subjugation of nature. Change arrives too with the First World War, emptying the mountains of young men including Beth's beloved brother Daniel, who goes 'missing in action'. Their mother turns to religion, their father falls silent. Beth takes to the mountain, and solitude. The arrival of Eric Gill's colony of catholic artists means more change, and more tension with the families of the valley. Although wary of these newcomers Beth meets Gabriel, an apprentice letter carver, who draws her out of her solitude and who also loves the mountain. When the colony relocates to England Beth faces a heart-wrenching choice between her home and the person she loves. Things Found on the Mountain is a Hardyesque coming of age story. At its heart is the dramatic landscape, which suffers, like Beth, a loss of innocence. This moving novel will appeal to fans of Sian James and Maeve Binchy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781781727232

Diana Powell

Diana Powell was born in Llanelli and read English at Aberystywth. She lives now in Pembrokeshire. She won the Allen Raine Short Story Award in 2013 and the Penfro Festival Short Story Competition the following year. Her novella, The Sisters of Cynvael, won the Cinnamon Press Literature award and will be published in 2024. Her stories have been shortlisted in several competitions. ‘Whale-Watching’ won the ChipLit Festival Prize, was runner up in the Society of Authors Tom-Gallon award and featured in Best Short Stories 2020. Powell also won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2022. A novella, Esther Bligh, was published by Holland House in 2018 and a story collection, Trouble Crossing the Bridge, by Chaffinch in 2020. Powell read at the Llangwm and Abergavenny festivals in 2022.

Book preview

things found on the mountain

A child, cradled in the Giant’s Heel, on top of Y Ffwddog. Her. Daniel, lying beside her, watching the fret of the clouds.

‘Who would ever want to leave here,’ he said, ‘where everything you want from the world is all around?’

‘Yes.’ A word she knew, an answer she knew. Knowing it from the thrum of the mountain beneath her, from the rush of air on her face, scouring inside. But what was it? What was here?

‘Yes?’

He laughed, leapt up, lifting his arms to the sky, spreading them out, turning them, him around.

‘Air!’ he said. ‘All the breath you need! Water. Water, everywhere. There, to begin with. Look!’

He pointed to the Grwyne below them, their favourite stream, moon-struck water dancing down the valley.

‘The earth. The rock beneath us, giving the mountains their shape. Stone, all the stone we need.

‘Sounds, the words of the place. Or silence, when you prefer.

‘God. Whatever kind you want, or need.

‘Birds, beasts, the trees, the flowers…’

‘Sheep!’ Another word she knew. Her offering.

He laughed again. ‘Yes, sheep. Sheep, sheep and more sheep!’

‘You.’ Daniel, her brother. Love.

‘Everything. Just as I said. Everything, altogether, sometimes. Mixed together, like the cawl bubbling in the She-giant’s cauldron! The giants – from its stories, along with the hidden knights, the Witch, the Tylwyth!

‘All from the mountain. All being the mountain.’

Death. They had forgotten about death.

When Daniel went, he said the other things would be left, he said she should remember them. It was something she tried to do every day.

sheep

Sheep led her to them. To him, the man, first.

Always that one, the shape-shifted ewe, the mule-headed one present in every flock, choosing the first snow of the winter to wander off, down the ridge, into the trees; to choose it, just as the lamb was due.

She followed easily enough – snow meant tracks, down into the birches, down towards the Monastery, a place half-eaten by ivy and thorn. Yes, the sheep might head that way, knowing there was shelter beneath its broken walls. She, herself, used it often enough.

She heard the noise then, saw lights; corpse candles beckoning between the boughs she might have thought, if she believed in such things. No. Poachers? – not in this weather, no.

The noise said grinding metal, straining cogs, a vehicle. Man.

And there he was.

She watched, as he climbed out of the faulting truck. A scarecrow, topped with a flower-pot, stuttering in the fractured beams, a scarecrow who danced, and clapped his hands. And then another noise, a sound vaguely recognised. The cough of the pheasant? No, it was coming from his lips. Laughter, it was called.

The scarecrow jigged up the track, then melted into nothing, in the darkness and snow – the snow thickening beneath her…eira mân, eira mawr. Small flakes, big fall.

She turned back among the trees, back to her search for the animal. Blood led her now. SHEEP SHEEP SHEEP.

cynefin their paths

this way and that, up and down,

zig

zag

Sheep, sheep, sheep……

SHEEP

Sheep.

The sheep had taught her the mountain…beginning in her earliest years…following them through the yard, through the gate, up and along the ridge, using their cynefin for herself, until she was old enough to make her own.

Following the sheep following her brother, as he led them to the grass on the top.

‘Go home,’ he said, the first time he heard her, huffing behind him, legs shorter even than those of the least-grown of the flock; then picked her up, put her on his shoulders and carried on, up to the Ffwddog. Her first time on the heights, her first time of seeing, of feeling what it was, what she was to it all.

But to the sheep, it was nothing. Grass was all that mattered; grass, and whatever else they ate. She watched them balance on a needled spur, straining for a few stray blades, wavering over emptiness; or as they disappeared into a hidden ravine, in search of the last of the whinberries, mouldering in its depths.

She watched, and followed, until Daniel would find her, and claim her, grabbing the waist of her breeches or the hem of her jacket just in time.

She watched, and saw, and learnt.

She heard them, too. She remembered it as her first sound, after her mother, father, Daniel – the dogs, maybe, though the dogs, close to home, knew to keep quiet. The cockerel, yes. She woke one day to a mewling not so different from her own. Was there another like her in the house, she wondered? The noise pulled her down the stairs to the kitchen, like the winding of her mother’s bobbin. A scrap of a thing, a lamb, pushed in to the open door of the stove. The noise stopped there.

‘Just born,’ Daniel had said.

Later, she saw it happening – saw them as a sliver of pulsing red slime, saw them magick into white wool on stilts, fed them, her finger between their sucking lips, frothing warm, spittling milk.

Later still, they were hers. The noise was louder, then, all around her, demanding.

Sheep – the word she had given her brother, that day on the mountain.

‘Remember,’ Daniel told her, as he was leaving… as the cart came to the bottom of the track, with mouths above the uniforms shouting for him.

‘Remember the words.’

And so, yes, when she walked, after he had gone that first time, the words would go with her, as pictures inside her head. Air. Water. Stone. The birds, the plants, the beasts. The dipper, maybe, bobbing on a fern over the Honddu. The wagtail, further along the stream, where the stones elbowed each other tight, offering it hair’s breadth crevices to peck in. The tiny, pink bells of the cross-leaved heather colouring the ridge. The darker crane’s bill, straggling from the crevices in the walls. The rabbits, hares, foxes. The badgers in the wood. She was keeping them all for Daniel. It had bothered her that he was somewhere flat, with mud all around, trees and flowers long gone; no colour, sounds pummelling his ears… guns, explosions. Screams, of men, of horses. How would he breathe, she’d wondered? Later, she heard about the gas, so learnt that he couldn’t breathe, anyway, none of them could – that was something else she must do for him… stand on the heights, take in the air, hold it to her, feel it coursing through her. And she must look after the sheep – they were hers, for now; her father had said so. ‘Until your brother comes back.’ But he hadn’t.

Another uniform had come to the door. She didn’t need to hear what was said.

❋

Air. Water… the mountain. Even after years had passed, it was all that remained. Until… a scarecrow, dancing in the snow, down in the valley.

❋

But then, nothing. Nothing through the lambing, most done in the spring, the proper time and place, with sheep behaving as they should, not in some snow-struck drift. Nothing through the shearing, the early summer, the grazing; that side of the ridge quiet.

Talk, yes – more gaping mouths, spilling words out, instead of keeping them inside, safe. Talk come from Owen, the postman, who called every day, with no letters for them, except those put together to make the words falling from his lips. Owen who came, settled himself at the table and stayed too long, hitched his eyes onto her too much.

‘There’s new people coming to the old Father’s place. Artists, or some such, they’re saying.’

‘The Father’s place’ was the old Monastery, at Capely-Ffin, the ‘Chapel at the End’, a chapel within a church, and a chapel of its own, as if to muddle any outsiders, but soothing the needs of both religions for those living here. The last reach of the Honddu valley, before the road ran out. The Monastery was higher up the ridge, hidden by the trees, where she had seen the dancing scarecrow. She said nothing of this.

Instead… what was ‘artists’, she wondered?

But still, through harvest, nothing.

And then, after the hay was gathered, she helping with it, as did everyone for each other – noise, from the valley, that shouldn’t be there. Plenty of sounds belonged, yes, the bubbling of the stream, the sough of the branches, the cries of the birds. On Sundays, the voices rising from church and chapel. Comings and goings of a quiet sort, the farmers, the cottagers being the head-down kind, and still using horses, or horses and carts, more often than not. But then, this: loud, echoing.

It could do that – echo from one side of the slopes to the other, towards England, or wind its way up from river bottom to sky, all the way up to where she was watching the sheep, she, and the animals, quiet. She followed it down to the trees, seeing the place where the road gave out, the place where the truck had given out before. Seeing, but keeping herself unseen, moving from behind one trunk to the next, her footsteps treading silently on the mossy ground.

And there was the man/scarecrow again. What else could he be, dressed in some loose sacking, tied at the waist with rope… that hat? He stood there, laughing again. Laughing, and shouting, his arms swinging up, then down, his finger pointing.

‘Here! No, there! Left, left! LEFT, I said!’

The rain started then, leavening the mud that was already there, glueing it to the tyres of the lorry the man was directing.

‘Everyone out! Push, we must push! Hurry!’

She watched, as the sides of the lorry opened, and tipped bedlam out into the wet. Men, women, children, big and small; ducks and geese, dogs, chickens, goats. A pony. How could the pony have travelled in the lorry? No, he must have come along behind and popped out from behind. Followed by bags and sacks and trunks, and tins and boxes, tumbling, bursting, some of them, scattering their contents onto the ground. A cat. A magpie… no, two – no need for her to tug her forelock to it, for luck; but, still, a magpie for a pet? Magpies, here, were tied to trees as a warning.

A girl, her own age, perhaps, screamed as she chased a duck down the road. ‘Quick, Betty! Quick! It’s getting away!!’

Betty. A name not unlike hers. Beth, Betty.

There were more sounds then, such as she had never heard… the way they jumbled together, and slapped and jabbed at her ears, making her want to raise her hands to cover them. The coughing of the engine, the slushing of its wheels, the shouts, the screams of the girls, the calls of the animals. The man, always the man, yelling his instructions. Always, the laughter, careless of the rain, as it grew heavier, coming down in sheets, sagging the hats, sleeking the girls’ hair, their dresses to them, sluicing the mud around their feet, around the wheels.

‘PUSH!’

She must go, the sheep needed gathering. Why should she feel any need to stay? This – people, clamour, hubbub – was not for her. Not hers.

‘Air. He says they’ve come for the mountain air. Don’t know about that, with the house sunk deep in the shadow of the valley; though with half the roof and windows gone, there should be plenty enough blowing through! ‘The Grange’ is better, though, and some is staying over there. See, there’s all these different families, from what I can make out, not just the one. All wanting air. And God.’

Her mother nodded at that.

‘Not church, mind. Nor even chapel. Roman. Mass every day, Latin, that kind of thing…’

Her mother’s lips tightened then.

There was new talk every week now, brought by Owen, along with the post they didn’t receive, stewing over the table in the steam from his mug of tea.

‘…And peace. We’ve come to Capel because it’s at the end of nowhere. Y Fin! he said to me, laughing. Fin like what a fish has, he pronounced it. Peace to live, peace to work, he added… whatever