Jonathan Coe on the Long Mynd

Photo © Dave Pickersgill 

Thanks to A Portfolio Life for posting this passage from Coe's novel The Rain Before it Falls:

Places like this are important to me – to all of us – because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century....It is all immaterial, all irrelevant...You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted you there.

Coe is right and there is something of this quality to much of the Welsh Border.

I remember once walking from Kington in Herefordshire up to Offa's Dyke. I had the feeling that if I met a Dark Age warrior coming towards me we would just nod to one another and continue on our way.