By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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in birth, life, or death. There are several caves and mounds associated with him or his battles. I would pass at least three on the way to Hay.
In the meantime I followed the A470 winding south towards mid- Wales. I soon reached Lake Trawsfynydd, and in the distance, on the lakeside edge, I could see the solid mass of the old power station. It started service in the 1960s, but was decommissioned in 1991. What do you do with a retired power station? Turn it into a film set, of course. It was the location of Camelot in First Knight. They built the town on the shore of the lake and transformed the front of the power station into a castle.
Shame they had to build a mock castle, seeing as real castles abound in the region. I had passed four already on my journey from Gaerwen – Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Criccieth, and Harlech.
Every time I see the turning to Harlech, ‘Men of Harlech’ comes into my head. The song commemorates the men who defended the castle during a long siege in the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. It is one of the few Welsh songs that has crossed the border into England. It achieved worldwide – or at least, Hollywood – fame when it was sung in the film Zulu by the men of the Welsh regiment fighting in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.
Did they sing it, really, in 1879? The song was first published in 1860, and the regiment didn’t officially adopt it until 1881. It seems unlikely. But it was a great film moment, nonetheless.
I had to make a decision after Trawsfynydd. Should I turn east and cut across through Bala towards Welshpool? Or should I keep going on the A470 south through Dolgellau and on towards Builth Wells? Linguistically, there was no contest. Welshpool is in marcher country. England is just a mile or so away. And marcher country is an excellent breeding ground for interesting accents. But time wasn’t on my side. I had to go ‘straight down the middle’, as they say in Wales.
Marcher has nothing to do with marching. It comes from Old English mearc, which meant ‘boundary’. That’s why people talk about ‘the Marches’, referring to the land on either side of the Welsh–English border. The modern word mark is related. Offa’s Dyke closely follows the modern border, going back and forth across it several times.
Offa was the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia between 757 and 796. He built the dyke to protect his kingdom from invasion by Welsh barbarians. It reaches twenty feet in height in some places along its eighty-mile length. One end is at Prestatyn in the north; as you travel south it passes Llangollen, Chirk, Knighton, Hay, and Monmouth; the other end is at Chepstow. It isn’t continuous. Offa may never have finished it; or maybe he decided to save unnecessary labour and let other natural obstacles fill the gaps.
The earthworks are especially prominent at Knighton. Indeed, the town’s entrance sign now has the caption: ‘The Town on the Dyke’. It boasts an excellent information centre.
Beware. If you look up Offa’s Dyke on an Internet search engine, you may need to do two searches. They spell dyke with an i in American English.
The name Welshpool means exactly what it says: ‘Welsh’ + ‘pool’. But the pool in question is not just an area of water. The original thirteenth-century borough was called Pola, and this developed into Pool. The region was known for its marshy land – the flood-prone River Severn is not far away – and in Welsh the local name is Y Trallwng, meaning ‘the sinking land’. But when the railways developed in the nineteenth century, the railway companies felt that travellers would get confused with the other Poole, in Dorset – so they changed the name to Welshpool, and it stayed.
I had already visited Welshpool a few weeks earlier, as it happened, as part of the same BBC project which had brought me to the sheep market in Gaerwen. On that visit I ended up in a different kind of market (fruit and veg), in the town centre, talking to one of the stallholders. What I was hoping to record was evidence of a mixed accent – one displaying features of both Welsh and English.
And that’s what I found. Here was a man who had lived all his life in Welshpool, but if you didn’t know that you might have placed him further south over the border in Herefordshire, or maybe even Gloucestershire. It was the phonetic quality of the r sound after the vowels in such words as car and heart that did it. He didn’t make it as a trilled sound, which is what you would expect to hear further into Wales. Rather, he curled the tip of his tongue back, producing a darker sound, more like a West Country or American r than anything else.
But it definitely wasn’t a West Country accent. Several of his vowel sounds were Welsh, as was the general lilt of his voice. And when I asked him if people recognized where he came from when he went on holiday, he was quite clear about it. ‘They always know I’m from Wales,’ he said. ‘But they think it’s Cardiff.’
Did everyone in the town have this ‘English r’, I wondered. And almost as soon as I had formulated the question, I had it answered. A customer arrived, a schoolfriend of the market-man. He too had lived in Welshpool all his life. They were the same age. They seemed to have similar farming backgrounds. And yet he had no trace of an r after vowels in his speech.
That’s one of the fascinating things about the way people speak along country borders. Because they are exposed to two ways of speaking, they make all kinds of different choices from the array of sounds that surround them. Even quite short distances can produce a noticeably different accent. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the two friends lived on opposite sides of the town.
I asked them whether they could tell the difference in the speech of someone from Welshpool itself and someone from nearby. ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘Someone from Llanfair Careinion sounds much more Welsh than we do,’ the market-man added. ‘I sometimes have difficulty understanding what they’re saying, when they come into the market.’ That village was just five miles to the west. ‘And if you go that way across the border,’ said his friend – gesturing vaguely towards England – ‘they’re even more different.’ That was only three miles away.
Professor Henry Higgins came to mind, from Shaw’s Pygmalion. He announces himself as a practitioner of phonetics: ‘The science of speech. That’s my profession, also my hobby. Anyone can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue, but I can place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ And presumably in Welshpool, also.
Two streets? In parts of Victorian London, this might not have been too far from the truth. Accents identify communities, and there would have been areas abutting each other which displayed major social differences, and thus different accents. Then as now, Mayfair and the East End are two hugely contrasting linguistic worlds.
Higgins would have had an even more enjoyable time today. There are over 350 language communities in present-day London, and when people from these ethnic backgrounds speak English their accents inevitably reflect features of their mother-tongues. Nor is it just their accents. Words and features of grammar from their mother-tongue enter their English as well, producing new hybrid dialects – Bengali English, Hindi English, Chinese English… It’s all a natural process. Increased language variation is an inevitable consequence of an ethnically diverse society.
Phoneticians are having a great time trying to disentangle the multiple influences which operate on modern English accents, but it isn’t easy. The situation has changed dramatically in the past century. Until relatively recently, most people lived their whole lives in one place, and rarely travelled. They would encounter only the occasional visitor with a different regional accent. As a consequence, their local speech would change little during their lifetimes.
Today, people are always on the move. Commuting over long distances is normal. And even if you don’t commute, innumerable accents and dialects enter your home every day through radio and television, the telephone, and, these days, Internet telephony. People move house more than ever before. Formerly isolated villages now have their eye on attracting tourists. Second homes are everywhere. It is unusual to find a village which does not have some incomers. And incomers do not usually adopt the accent of their new hosts wholesale, as my Gaerwen shepherd illustrated.
But