Writing’s just something I do. I fell for it early, and have chafed against it since.
Just now, I’m writing my fifth novel, set in sixth-century Wales and Ireland. It’s inspired by those Lives, those Celtic hagiographies, which describe how a soldier becomes a saint. I’ve never written anything so historical before, but, however hard I try to get past them, it seems to contain my usual preoccupations: Wales, churches, climatic upheaval, the relationship between people and the natural world. . .
At root, writing’s about trying to resolve your relationship with the world; so the things that impel me are mostly personal: the place I’m from, stories my mother told me when I was a child, the moral framework I grew up in. Those are the basic guiding forces.
My mother died earlier this year; so I’ve been thinking a lot about her influence. My brother and I would sit on either arm of her armchair while she read to us — The Lord of the Rings (twice), the Little Grey Men books by “BB” — or else told us local stories, which came, in a way, to populate the landscape. Most of my childhood was spent on an upland sheep farm in Wales, near the English border.
I now live on a hill in Bannau Brycheiniog [Brecon Beacons] with my children, a collie, and a goldfish. I walk, swim, write as much as I can, though recently I’ve also been making films: one about the River Wye and one, a feature, about the early life of the actor Richard Burton. Mostly, it’s all books and Wales for me.
I didn’t really mean to write Sarn Helen. The book’s named after a Roman road which once ran the length of Wales, and which I set out to walk after the first Covid lockdown in 2020. At the time, I saw myself only as a novelist — I had no thoughts of writing non-fiction; but somehow the road got under my skin. It raised questions I felt I had to answer.
After all those months of lockdown, to be back in the mountains was like seeing Wales with new eyes. On the one hand, I kept being struck by aspects of the climate and ecological emergency, from the barrenness of the hills to the damage caused by flooding in the Valleys. On the other, I kept encountering reminders of the Age of Saints: the fifth and sixth centuries, which you might call the roots of Wales. Somehow, in the way of writing, it felt to me that these two things were linked, though it took me a whole book to figure out how.
When you write any book it’s like it’s out of your hands: you have to be obedient to it. Yes, you create it, and your name’s on the cover, but it always feels like it’s a discovery, that it is its own thing.
Ultimately, the climate and nature crisis is not a scientific problem but a human behavioural problem. It’s about the way we choose to live, our dysfunctional relationship with the natural world. We urgently need a new code of being, and the Celtic saints embody numerous qualities which could be essential to that code — above all, in the way that they reverenced the natural world as an aspect of God.
The ancient churches — the llannau — of Wales are often sited, seemingly, to inspire a sense of awe. It’s as if they’re markers, a means to focus your attention on creation. They make no claim to human superiority.
To be at the llan is, I think, to get some glimpse into the minds of the saints. There are many of these places. My favourites include Rhulen in Radnorshire and Pennant Melangell in Montgomeryshire. And, in Ireland, Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry.
Much of Sarn Helen concerns the stories that we tell ourselves, and how those stories find purchase in our culture. Broadly, we seem to have little understanding of the transformation required of us over the next few years — hardly surprisingly, given its scale. We need models for that change, and history suggests that those models need to be local, indigenous, for change to endure.
I don’t have a commitment to the Church, per se, but I do think that Celtic Christianity could be vital to our thinking here in Wales, and broadly, that Christian teaching is invaluable — that this is a moment that the Church must rise to meet.
We’re failing to reverence the world around us. I’m always heartened by talking to Christians who take this issue seriously.
I’m heartened, too, by some of the things the new Government is doing; but in general, politicians are trapped in the electoral cycle, unable to focus on the long-term. Basically, it just isn’t possible to meet carbon-reduction and nature-restoration targets while continuing to live as we live at the moment. None of the current measures are staunching the collapse in biodiversity; global emissions are continuing to rise; everything forecast is coming to pass.
There’s a dishonesty in solutions which are really about keeping to business as usual rather than addressing the essential problem. I’m no great fan of heavy-handed government, but the threat we face is existential. We do need government to take a proper lead. If, for example, we hadn’t had food rationing during the war, you might wonder how we’d have survived.
For people closely involved in climate and ecology, it can be difficult not to despair. It’s essential that we don’t, of course, but often as you talk of some event of which experts have been warning for decades — desertification in Southern Europe, say — it’s hard to do anything but laugh. Such empty laughter is becoming too usual.
All of which said, the change we need doesn’t have to be cast as deprivation: that whole “You’re not allowed to eat burgers any more or we’ll all face disaster” thing. We do need a fundamental reassessment of how we live, but that could be inspirational. It could be about the wonders of the place where we’re lucky enough to live. There’s such joy and release for people when they get to spend time among other species — which is the awe, the praise for the world, that keeps bringing me back to the saints.
Reverence is innate to people. It exists in secular society, too — even if it is directed at things like youth and material success.
Activism is a difficult business. Plainly, conventional protest hasn’t brought the changes that the science demands. To attract public attention to the climate crisis requires ever more extreme actions, and these are being punished ever more severely. Extinction Rebellion marked a step forward — I will probably never do anything more important than be part of that — but that movement fragmented with the Covid lockdowns. Recently, I’ve been more involved in education and public speaking.
Arrest is stressful, conflicting, expensive, and, as things stand, I find it hard to justify, especially while my children need me; but I imagine I will go through it all again some time.
We’ve tried hard not to expose our children too much to the grimmer realities. They understand a lot, but, thankfully, seem able to get on with their lives. Currently, they are making music in the kitchen.
I hope that Sarn Helen will have some small impact on the culture and politics of Wales, as one piece of a greater whole. I tend to think of this broader movement for change as a murmuration, being particularly keen on starlings. This is the thing that gives me hope.
If I was to be locked in a church with someone, it would have to be with St Illtyd, in the tiny, sadly now demolished Llanilltud Church, on the hill behind my house. Illtyd was the sixth-century founder of Llanilltud Fawr [Llantwit Major] in south Wales. We know so little about the Age of Saints, and I’d love to know why he chose this site for his llan, his “place of resurrection”, and about his broader motivations. Also for his view on our current society. I would be the wiser when the key turned up.
Tom Bullough was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
Sarn Helen is published by Granta Books at £10.99 (Church Times Bookshop £9.89); 978-1-78378-811-8.
tombullough.com