A Newport Journal
by Laura Wainwright
Photo: Buzzard on the Wales Coast Path, Newport.
Buzzard
What begs you to break it
with sticks, rocks, a small aimed heel?
Is it that this blue-hour’s glass,
slippery and thickened
three nights with the moon, won’t return
your gaze; won’t register your tread
when they’ve found it at the lunar poles
and on Mars?
On Mars!
Or maybe you suspect the treachery
of transfiguration,
the determination to dissolve
or be ether. So you strike
early: splintering stillness,
our breath’s thermal currents
inseparable again where we stand;
sensation rising from my feet.
And what begs you,
buzzard, to wait, undaunted
at your frozen post,
through all this
destruction?
Photo: Lichen, Gwent Levels, Newport.
Photo: Frozen pond at Fourteen Locks, Rogerstone, Newport.
Photo: Allt-yr-yn Nature Reserve, Newport, in December.
Photo: Coed Melyn, Newport, in Autumn.
I recently found myself scrolling through the comments section of a local online news article. The headline read: ‘Carpark full at Newport beauty spot’. Police had expressed their concern that people were flouting the lockdown rule to exercise close to home.
I had an idea of what I would find. ‘I didn’t know there were any beauty spots in Newport’, the first commentator remarked.
The truth is that there are many sad sights in Newport. As the boarded-up shops in the city centre and the sleeping bags in doorways attest, Newport bears the scars of the economic downturn and now also the Covid-19 pandemic. Seemingly condemned to live – both economically and culturally – in Cardiff’s shadow, it has suffered from poorly-targeted investment and infrastructure policies that have prioritised the car above all else.
‘Look, there’s the castle’, I tell my young children, pointing out a forlorn, fenced-off ruin, rain-dark and ambushed by traffic.
Photo: Newport Castle, City Centre.
Contrary to popular belief, however, there are many ‘beauty spots’ in Newport. There are the bracing green spaces of Ridgeway and the woods and meadows of Allt-yr-yn Nature Reserve; Coed Melyn, off Risca Road, with its eponymous autumn palette and evening light; and Gaer Hill Fort – the site of an historically important early Celtic settlement and Iron-Age hillfort – which commands views over the River Ebbw, the Docks and the Severn Estuary.
Other examples include the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal at Fourteen Locks in Rogerstone, and in Bettws where my children go to school; Newport Wetlands and the villages of Nash and Goldcliff on the Gwent Levels; and the curving river Usk in Caerleon.
But other ‘beauty spots’ only reveal themselves when we are prepared to look more closely – to see beyond limiting, preconceived views and ideas. When I take the children out for walks in the city, I seek out these reluctant tableaus. Sometimes my sons are rowdy, indifferent, preoccupied with hitting things with sticks. But there are always small revelations.
This winter we have observed bark and bramble in Allt-yr-yn, made mythic with frost; the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal, coal-faced under January ice; lichen thriving like upside-down coral on the trees and in the hedgerows of the Gwent Levels. And in the city centre, the pathos and pertinence of a graffitied underpass mosaic; and a flock of sanderlings combing the river’s drab, littered banks.
Photo: February sanderlings, Usk River, Newport City Centre.
Image: Underpass mosaic, Newport City Centre.
I will always remember, one freezing dawn on the Newport section of the Wales Coast Path, a very different bird: a buzzard – like those I can remember coasting over the old Cardiff road and the Gwent Levels when I was as a child – perching just a couple of metres away, unconcerned by our unruly presence.
I thought of the poem, ‘Buzzard’, by Ted Hughes. ‘O beggared eagle! O down-and-out falcon!’ Hughes writes. ‘Mooning and ambling along hedgerow levels, / Forbidden the sun’s glittering ascent’.[1] Hughes’s buzzard, ‘hopeless-careless, rag-wings, ragged trousers’,[2] might also be Newport. But the buzzard I photographed that morning was also vital, self-assured and, yes, beautiful. And the city I see still quietly dreams its ‘high dream’.[3]
Photo: Winter brambles, Allt-yr-yn, Newport.
[1] Ted Hughes, ‘Buzzard’, in Ted Hughes: Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), ll. 6-8 (pp. 601-2).
[2] Hughes, ‘Buzzard’, l.ll.
[3] Hughes, ‘Buzzard’, l.14.