I SPENT the first half of Holy Week at St Deiniol’s Cathedral, Bangor, and witnessed a wonderful blending of the ancient and contemporary; or not so much a blending as a beautiful overlaying and interlapping of past and present.

The cathedral stands on the sacred ground where, in 525, St Deiniol gathered a Christian community and raised around it a hazel fence — the original “Bangor” — for shelter and sanctuary. Eventually, he became abbot of that community, and then bishop of a diocese that has some claim to be one of the oldest in the British Isles.

I was there as a visiting poet and preacher; for the cathedral had chosen to weave my poetry in and out of some of its Holy Week services. Although I was able to read my poems only in their original English, I was thrilled to hear them also read beautifully and melodically in Welsh by the Sub Dean, for whom Welsh is a first language. Indeed, all the services there were bilingual, moving seamlessly between the two languages; and translations were provided in the orders of service for speakers in either tongue.

The cathedral had commissioned Dr Siôn Aled, a crowned bard, to translate the full sequence of my Holy Week sonnets, from Palm Sunday to Easter dawn, producing a beautiful bilingual booklet. He made verse translations, maintaining the sonnet form, which were as much poems in their own right and language as they were “versions” of mine.

It seemed fitting to me that they should find this new form as Welsh poems, in a place founded by St Deiniol, since it was at St Deiniol’s, in Hawarden, as the wonderful Gladstone’s Library was then called, that I composed them. I was able to meet and talk with Dr Aled, and thank him for his work with my poems, and also hear from him how, in the Welsh poetic tradition, there was still a strong engagement with poetic form: something which I have been trying, in a small way, to revive in English.

It was not only the beauty of translation which moved me, but also a moment of consecration. At the chrism service, and the renewal of vows for the clergy and lay ministers of the diocese, they were also dedicating and consecrating a new nave altar-table: a beautiful and simple piece of furniture, a wooden trestle table whose design evoked both a carpenter’s workbench and the tables that one sees in some depictions of the Last Supper.

But here, again, the ancient and the new were interlayered; for they brought to the table, and placed within it, a little cache of the soil of Bardsey Island, the island of 20,000 saints, one of whom was St Deiniol, so that the dust of the saints carried with it the reminder of the communion of the saints invoked in the eucharist.

Best of all, though, was the line of poetry composed by the translator of my sonnets and inscribed in Welsh at the front of the altar-table. Its English translation reads: “From the blue slate abundance flows to fill afresh our llannau’s wells.” It was a beautiful evocation both of the miraculous stream flowing from the rock in Exodus, of Christ as the “stricken rock with streaming side”, and also of the slates of the Ogwen Valley and the River Adda flowing past Bangor and the “llanau”, the glades of the Celtic saints, and their abundant holy wells.

Receiving communion from that table, I felt that I had indeed come to a wellhead, a source, and, through it, once again, to the source of all things.