Inspiration from a dream and a stone
by Ingrid O'Donnell
The mountain Cader Idris in Southern Snowdonia, Wales, UK has legendary mystical associations: if you sleep on the mountain you may receive inspiration, or go mad, or end up dead! This blog describes how the artist and poet Alyson Hallett was inspired to write a poem about an unusual quartz stone she encountered on the mountain and then to go on to create a world-wide piece of performance art, along a theme of ‘stones that move silently across the world’.
Of course, other artists have been inspired by Cader Idris too, most famously perhaps Richard Wilson’s Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris (1774) above, currently on display at The Tate https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wilson-llyn-y-cau-cader-idris-n05596
More recently, Bedwyr Williams’ Tyrrau Mawr, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SVJ91Mq5g0 envisaged a modern city of “cold gleaming glass and concrete towers” on these slopes — Aled Gruffydd Jones continues “‘Tyrrau Mawr’ shocks. It is a raw, brutal work. For the first few moments I assume it to be a still image, before I slowly realise that it pulses, like a living thing, the clouds blowing to the north-west, as does the smoke rising from the dark tower in the centre, the water in the lake lapping gently. In its twenty-minute cycle from evening to dawn, the light constantly changes position. Its stillness, the hard stone of the mountain, the sun’s reflection lighting up in sequence each detail of the ‘great towers’ brings a calmness to the composition that renders it exquisitely beautiful. It reminds us of the melancholy of a cathedral… Where Richard Wilson made Cadair Idris look serene and almost pastoral, Bedwyr Williams renders it terrifying.” (Aled Gruffydd Jones https://curioustravellers.ac.uk/en/furious-traveller-beauty-and-horror-on-cadair-idris/ )
And, as Gruffydd Jones points out, Bedwyr Williams has chosen an apt setting for his nightmarish cityscape as “Cadair Idris is no mere contrasting, if picturesque, background here, not an empty stage where the architectural drama unfolds. It’s a place of myth and memory. Idris was a giant of learning, master of both the ancient arts and the cosmic sciences. The hell-hounds of the Mabinogi hunted his mountainsides, and the long skyline is inscribed with stories – of religious zeal, poetic gifts and madness”. Cadair (or Cader) Idris has long been renowned as a special place of magic and inspiration.
And then, there is John Elcock’s choice of subject matter, like Hallett, he also, from a whole mountain of stones, seemingly chose to paint the same quartz erratic — perhaps applying some artistic license on the location or the time period – as we shall see time and space are not constant for glacial erratics https://www.johnelcock.co.uk/paintings/quartz-erratic/
The story of Hallett’s inspiration and interaction with the mountain is gently beguiling: “Inspired by a dream dreamed shortly after my grandmother’s death, this project has evolved from an acorn of an idea conceived on the slopes of Cader Idris into an international public art adventure.” (Hallett www.thestonelibrary.com)
Hallett doesn’t mention it, but the dream aspect of her story is particularly relevant to her inspirational encounter on Cader Idris. In local folklore, there is a well-known legend that anyone who sleeps on Cader Idris will awake to find themselves a poet or a madman — that’s if they are lucky enough to wake at all! (Koch 2006). Hallett describes how dreaming at the foot of Cader Idris provided the initial inspiration for her unusual art project.
Combining Hallett’s different accounts, but using her own words, the adventure can be recounted like this:
“A few years ago, I was driving through North Wales. We stopped for the night at the base of a mountain and pitched our tent in the far right-hand corner of a field where two rivers meet. Listening to the babble of water we watched a full moon rise between two distant hills. I slept well. As we were leaving the next morning I looked up at Cader Idris and said, ‘one day I will come back here and climb this mountain alone’.
A year later, on a Wednesday afternoon in August, my maternal grandmother died.
As I lay dozing in bed I remembered a voice that had spoken to me in my dreams. “It’s time to go and climb Cader Idris” the voice said. How curious, I thought, thinking there was nothing else to it. But the idea of climbing the mountain instilled itself into every waking moment and so I cancelled work appointments, hired a car, packed a tent, some food, good walking boots and set off for North Wales.
The foothills of Cader Idris are beautiful beyond reckoning. Ancient oak trees, fast, gurgling stream, light flickering through a thick canopy of leaves. The further I climbed the more Wales spread out behind me, a vast array of hills, lakes every imaginable shade of green.
I had never climbed a mountain before and was uncertain why a dream might be directing me to do so now. It didn’t take long to find out.
About half way up I came across a huge, quartz rock on the right hand side of the path. It seemed utterly out of place and I had no idea how it had come to be there. A couple of minutes later a man came alongside me. He happened to be a geologist and told me that the stone we were looking at was an erratic, a stone that had travelled across the land in a glacier.
In essence, a migrating stone.
I was fascinated by this. Gripped. Bewitched. I felt as if a door had opened onto a different way of seeing the world. Instead of being eternally fixed in place, stones were suddenly fellow travellers and movement was an essential part of their natures. I thought not only of erratics but also of the stones we place on graves, the pebbles that we bring home after a day at the beach. Was it possible, I wondered, for that pebble to want to be picked up and taken away as much as I wanted to pick it up and take it with me?
Stones are considered sacred in nearly all cultures.
I carried on to the top of the mountain and there, shrouded in thick cold mist and heralded by a flock of howling crows, I said farewell to my grandmother’s spirit.”
Hallett’s account has been examined in some detail by Peter Barry and William Welstead in their book ‘Extending Ecocriticism: New Readings in Literature, Visual Arts, Performance and On-Site Interpretation’ OUP 2017 and their interpretation of Hallett’s account makes interesting reading.
They comment on how the detailed precision of the initial camping location, ‘the far right-hand corner of a field where two rivers meet’ where the campers watched ‘a full moon rise between two distant hills’ seems important. This setting appears to initiate the quasi-mystical relationship between Cader Idris and just Hallett (not her companion), which results in her strong desire, to climb the mountain, even eliciting a silent promise from her to do so in the future. Some sort of revelation from the mountain is anticipated in return. Barry and Welstead go on to compare Hallett’s destined quest for revelation on the wilds of the mountainside with the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, noting that it is “in hired car, rather than on horseback that Hallett sets out for the foothills.”
As Hallett’s story progresses, Barry and Welstead compare the seemingly magical appearance of the geologist to a visionary messenger, bearing the promised revelation: even the erratic stone has travelled far from its point of origin and must accept separation from its motherbed, as Hallett must accept separation from her beloved departed grandmother; and even Hallett’s grandmother has journeyed on.
Barry and Welstead explain that “the way to climb a mountain is to keep going until you get to the top, but if you are a Zen Buddhist, when you get to the top of the mountain you must keep climbing, towards enlightenment. The closing in of the mist ensures this effect: “I carried on to the top of the mountain and there, shrouded in thick cold mist and heralded by a flock of howling crows, I said farewell to my grandmother’s spirit.” http://www.thestonelibrary.com/journal_extracts.html
Erratic
A foundling left
on the side of a mountain
basketless, swept from its mother’s side
to this unfamiliar hide
of turf and scree:
Moses stone,
scooped into the glacier’s
hardening maw
and held there by crystal teeth,
tight cupped
in pre-nuptial whiteness
so white and densely light
it was darker than black,
then lugged across land
by an unstoppable saw:
gorge maker, canyon maker,
the whole country
might have split in two
if the sun hadn’t applied its brake,
licking the glacier to river,
lake and leaving you,
little erratic, to wake
in an unfamiliar place:
a stone flown through solid air.
by Alyson Hallett
I know this quartz stone on Cader Idris and have often wondered about it. It is very different from its surrounding geology and must have come from somewhere else. Sure enough, a little further up the path brings you to a stretch of mountainside strewn with its quartz relations. As if to accentuate its exotic nature in its current resting place, the stone now sits fenced off from its SSSI surroundings, detained in an experimental restricted grazing plot — at least that’s what I’ve always thought, but maybe the fence is there in an attempt to stop the stone wandering further and setting up home elsewhere!
And so this stone, high on the flanks of Cader Idris, inspired a project celebrating journeys — not returning far flung erratics to their motherbeds as perhaps might have been expected, but assisting them on longer, more dramatic journeys. Hallett conveys them in suitcases across land and through the air, in a melding of landscape and performance art, to new environments: the USA, Australia, and the latest conveyed a 30kg stone from a limestone quarry near Bath to the Scottish island of Iona. You can read about Alyson Hallett’s art and poetry on her website www.thestonelibrary.com.
Today, Hallett’s migration project carries a particular poignancy about belonging, and what has the right to reside where, in a world where everything is (and always has been) in motion, even the stone beneath our feet.
References
Aled Gruffydd Jones https://curioustravellers.ac.uk/en/furious-traveller-beauty-and-horror-on-cadair-idris/
Alyson Hallett The Stone Library www.thestonelibrary.com
Bedwyr Williams, Tyrrau Mawr 2016 4K Video Installation at the National Museum Cardiff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SVJ91Mq5g0
John Elcock, Quartz Erratic https://www.johnelcock.co.uk/paintings/quartz-erratic/
John Koch (2006) Celtic Culture: a historical encyclopaedia. Vol. 1–2. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio
Peter Barry & William Welstead (2017) Extending Ecocriticism: New Readings in Literature, Visual Arts, Performance and On-Site Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Thanks to Camberwell Hattie is tired of lies and corruption @covid_long, James Dempster @cocktaillion, Stone Club @the_stone_club and Jonathan Morris @MorrisJonathan for giving me the encouragement to finish this blog post that I started 4 years ago.
© Ingrid O’Donnell June 2022