Cled
Yn nhwf y drain, mae’i fedr o – yn gwynnu
Yn gân wrth ei gofio
Hwythau’r cyll, ym mhlethau’r co,
Gan ei wên yn gwanwyno
“In the thorns’ growth his skill – blossoms white
Into song as it remembers him,
And woven the hazel rods still,
Under his smile here spreading”
Myrddin ap Dafydd (Mai 1990)
Spring comes late to the hills of north-east Wales, with huge snowdrifts killing lambs all too frequently. There is a freshness to the air and to the struggling green of these days where the frost has taken most of a morning to shake off. Catkins, daffodils and cuckoo flowers will soon be followed by whitethorn as May takes over with its more vigorous life.
In the May of 1990 it wasn’t only winter but Cledwyn that died, taken cruelly young. He was a locally renowned hedgelayer in the area around Pandy Tudur, the hill country that lies east of Llanrwst in north Wales.[1] This englyn – a short poem in strict metre – in his memory was composed soon after the news of his death was widely known in the community. This was in the not-so-distant days thirty-five years ago when no-one had mobile phones and hardly anyone owned a PC. The poet was another local in his early thirties, Myrddin ap Dafydd, and the poem circulated locally.
Here it is again, in my loose translation. Read it slowly:
Cled
“In the thorns’ growth his skill – blossoms white
Into song as it remembers him,
And the woven hazel rods still,
Under his smile here spreading“
It’s an elegy in memory of a member of a local community, composed for that same community as it mourned him. In the original Welsh, it was composed in an ancient strict-metre form that is particularly pleasing to the ear. And in the way it almost makes Cled and the hedgerow trees into one being, the hazels and whitethorns actively remembering Cled’s work and his gentle character, it stands in a long and profound tradition of what we might call ‘nature poetry’ in Wales. There is something slightly jarring about the poem if you are familiar with the conventions, both old and modern, of poetry written in English. It feels, perhaps, both slightly naive and also intriguing; too personal and yet not personal enough, lacking the rawness of grief. Where is this poem, in fact, coming from?
The Welsh word cynefin is about how we can be at home in our landscapes, how we can dwell in a patch of this world alongside other species, for a time. It is not an infrequent word in the language, and if you looked it up in the dictionary you would find three basic translations into English:
- haunt, usual abode; 2. habitat (of animals, plants, &c.); 3. sheep-walk, tract of open (mountain) land on which a flock has been settled.[2]
In other words, it speaks to where people live, and the place that they call home; where wild animals live; and the place where domesticated flocks live, in a cultivated landscape.
This is a book that sets out to explore why something as apparently insignificant as a poem like ‘Cled’ might turn out in our age of climate crises, political volatility and gnawing anxiety to be a doorway into a different world, and through that to probe the real significance of the word cynefin. I want to suggest in this book that both ‘Cled’ and the word cynefin are only two visible elements of a much larger iceberg of hard-won wisdom and experience that we need to pay heed to: the lessons from over a thousand years of Welsh nature poetry that turn our commonly accepted ways of thinking and of relating to the world inside out.
***
The extent and depth of the ecological crisis is now overwhelmingly clear; perhaps it has been so for a while already. Huge volumes of ink and countless terabytes of data have already been expended in the effort to explain its complexity and analyse possible solutions for human society. Vast global strategies have been adopted and even more have been ignored or reneged upon; valiant protest movements have been both birthed and killed. In the space of a few short years a phrase like ‘net zero’ has gone from being settled consensus to conspiracy-laden. Still the global number of insects plummets relentlessly,[3] the ocean dead zones grow,[4] and wildfires spread.[5] These terrible phenomena are occurring alongside growing immigration numbers globally,[6] huge spikes in mental ill-health across cultures and societies,[7] and wars and rumours of wars.[8]
These are enormous civilizational challenges viewed from whatever side of the political spectrum one finds oneself. In many ways, their sheer breadth transcends the ordinary set of political solutions available within politics as usual, even while politics-as-usual fails to provide ordinary, day-to-day solutions to political problems. The widely recognized weight of bureaucratic inertia prevents meaningful action; and where those bureaucratic structures are rejected and thrown out, chaos and further impoverishment for many people [KV4] seem to be the only discernible results. Political norms and social structures creak at the seams, and the rise of AI leads the vast majority of working adults to worry about the future both of work and of society.[9] In what is surely a response to this feeling of futility, the number of novels referring to “apocalypse” has risen sixfold over the past few decades.[10]
In other words, most of us perceive that our varied predicaments are somehow interlinked. Together they put us in a plight that is cultural in nature, perhaps even spiritual. And to respond to such a plight we need cultural resources that are deeply time-tested, and which come from outside of the settings and managerial classes that have led us unto this predicament. This is where a thousand-year-old tradition of more-than-nature poetry from the north-western margins of Europe can, I think, help us.
I realize that, at first, bringing Welsh poetry to bear on the great crises of our age may seem utterly mismatched, akin to fielding horse-borne cavalry in an age of drone warfare. Poetry is, after all, only words – and even when ranked alongside the other word-based pursuits we humans enjoy, a fairly marginal one. But that view of poetry is itself a highly parochial one, which emanates from the historically anomalous setting of late-modern Western society.[11] In reality, even today, words have deep power: the power of making and unmaking, of bonding and breaking, of life and death. For most of our human history, poetry has been the prime way that words have been deployed at their most powerful – from the shamanic through to the role of a Virgil in a nascent Roman Empire. At the times of greatest symbolic importance in our own lives and communities, special forms of words are chosen and used: at weddings and funerals, at international sporting fixtures and solemn state occasions. Creative ways out of predicaments and binds often come from left-field. When the elevator is out of order because of a complex telecommunications fault, the slow and winding staircase comes into its own. There is of course more to be said than that for why Welsh nature poetry seems to me to have broad and profound lessons for our age of multi-crises. I will spend the rest of the book gradually opening those up. But as celebrated 20th century Cambridge intellectual Raymond Williams said in a 1986 interview of the strange phenomenon of Wales more broadly, ‘I have been an active participant in the internal Welsh argument, but living so much in England, I have thought that the issues being explored are of much more general significance.’
[1] The poem and a brief eulogy are reproduced from Myrddin ap Dafydd, Cadw Gŵyl, p.66
[2] From Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru
[3] Wagner DL, Grames EM, Forister ML, Berenbaum MR, Stopak D. “Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts”. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Jan 12;118(2):e2023989118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023989118. PMID: 33431573; PMCID: PMC7812858.
[4] https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/ocean-dead-zones-are-growing-with-human-activity-exacerbating-the-problem/
[5] https://www.wri.org/insights/global-trends-forest-fires accessed 18 June 2025.
[6] https://www.unrefugees.org.uk/learn-more/news/refugee-stories/refugee-facts-2024/ Refugee numbers have more than tripled in the period between 2014 and 2024 according to UN figures.
[7] Global, regional, and national burden of 12 mental disorders in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019, The Lancet Psychiatry, Volume 9, Issue 2, 137 – 15
[8] I won’t provide a reference for this, given the dismaying possibility that more wars and rumours thereof will have been added to the list by the time you read this. At the time of writing the global reference list of war-zones includes Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, the Sahel and Yemen.
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/13/uk-workers-wary-of-ai-despite-starmers-push-to-increase-uptake-survey-finds
[10] See discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk96VvufQEg&t=10s. Of interest also are https://theluxuryofprotest.com/Apocalypses-re-Visioned and Hicks, Heather J. “Apocalyptic Fiction, 1950–2015.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. March 29, 2017. Oxford University Press.
[11] As anatomically modern humans we are closely related to all our human forebears. Recorded history – effectively the last three thousand years of activity in those parts of the world that have had writing for longest – accounts for only around 1% of our time on earth. Our bodies, minds and intuitions have been most deeply shaped by the 99%, and all the time that came before that. As a reminder, the way of life of all humans during that 99% of our story was of hunter-gathering, in highly social small bands – and entirely without anything resembling modern states or ‘civilization’. I point this out not to suggest that any return might be possible – but only to intimate that the assumption that our current way of life might somehow be obviously better suited to us as a species would seem a strange, probably hubristic starting point…