Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Parish Boundary Walk
In the beating weeks the parish warden walks his fourteen stones as he has walked them for thirty years, and finds this year, with the award map against them, that the stones agree with each other and with a boundary he has never once beaten.
- dated: "the beating weeks"
- narrator: "Dai Bevan, parish warden"
Monday in Rogation week.
We set out at eight from the lychgate, myself with the whitewash pot and the satchel, Mr Emlyn Vowles the clerk with the minute book, and five men of the council. The little ones walked as far as the first stile and were sent home over the step with a shilling for the bus, the custom here keeping them to the near grounds. The beat runs fourteen stones from the ford stone to the old cross on the Cefn road, and the proper work of the day is to whitewash each stone, read the boundary at it aloud, and let the clerk enter the beat in the minute book against the year. I have walked it thirty-one times, my father before me some forty, and the stones do not move, which was the comfort of the walk.
Wednesday.
A thing I tried today, this year carrying the award map in the satchel and the thought of it on me. At the third stone I stood my ash plant and sighted along, and got the fifth stone and the ninth in one row, dead true. Walking on, the tenth and the twelfth came into a second row the same. Fourteen stones, spaced out along hedges and ditches by men with spades and no chain between them, and yet the runs sit straight as a theodolite had set them, and the kink where the line turns at the ford is the same kink in both runs. I said nothing at the time. Mr Vowles only noted the beat in the book as he always does, well walked.
Friday.
This morning I took my rule to the award in the clerk's office while he made tea. The parish on the award is our fourteen stones and no more, all set down and purple-inked, except for one plot that stopped my eye: the Out-Field, a detached piece a mile beyond the Cefn cross, belonging to us still by the paper, bounded on the north by the old course of the Alun. No stone stands on it. No warden living has beaten it, nor in my father's time, nor his; the perambulations Mr Vowles reads out in church never name it. I laid my rule along the plotted stones and carried the line on across the fold of the map, and it went, straight, over the six fields, and dropped onto the Out-Field's boundary at the old course of the Alun, and followed that boundary true, kink for kink, the ford kink agreeing with the river's kink, to the half-inch of the award's own scale. I measured it twice. The clerk asked was aught wrong with the map, and I said no, it was square, which is true so far as I know it.
Sunday after Ascension Day.
The beat is entered well walked for the thirty-second year, and the stones whitewashed, and the men had their bread and cheese at the cross as the custom gives. Off the paper I know my bounds, every drain and every stile. On the paper there is one boundary of ours I have not walked and my fathers did not, and yet the stones I do walk stand in agreement with it, straight runs to straight runs, kink to kink, as if the two were one line drawn by one hand and only the middle folded away. The question I set down here is for the winter and the wardenship: whether the year must come when the Out-Field is beaten like any other bounds, whitewash and reading and the clerk's entry, and if it must, what answer of stone or of river will be found standing along it to agree with me.