As we launch our new pilgrimage programme to Flat Holm in the tradition of the Celtic Saints of Wales, we begin to look at some of the Saints who have walked our land. Many of our saints are remembered just as names. Here Fr Dean begins to reflect on some of those Celtic saints and their connection with St Cadoc – and with us.
I am eight or nine or ten, dragged out to Evensong, my breath still smelling of tinned salmon sandwiches and ice cream from Sunday Tea. Cassocked and surpliced and sat in the choir stalls, waiting. On this occasion, we are joined by others as we celebrate our Patronal Festival which, each year, drags out a guest preacher from across the Deanery and beyond. Squeezed between the dirge of the Litany and the final hymn, the preacher climbs the polished pulpit. We know what is coming.
Each year, each preacher was stirred with the same confession. After some research, they told us, they could find next to nothing about St Cynon. Just his name.
Cynon is a name which clings to the valley which lies to the east of the Rhondda, and to various of its huddled villages like Abercynon and Trecynon. In the Rhondda and the home of St Cynon’s Church, his name is scraped into Ynyscynon, a name meaning ‘Cynon Island.’
It’s not and has never been an island. The name is a simple indication of a stretch of land near the river. Here water flows, growing browner by the mile as it makes its way to Cardiff, flirting with the Taff and spilling out at Cardiff Bay to fill the Bristol Channel and carry us across to Flat Holm.
But it was there at St Cynon’s Church that I was nurtured in the Christian Faith and where I first mouthed the name of an ancient Celtic Saint, now lost deep to the past. For us, he was always just a name.
It was nearby on Ynyscynon Football Field that one year we lingered with heads lowered and learned the art of defeat at the Rhondda Primary Schools Cup Final. Years before, above us on the hill, I had attended Ynysyncon Nursery, the first Nursery School ever to be opened in Wales, where I learned to sleep my way through the afternoon. Meanwhile, years later, at the Ynyscynon Hotel, a kick away from the goalposts of Cynon’s football field, I was provided with a place to down pints of gassy lager as I grew into adulthood.
Already I have veered away from Cynon, taken more delight in his name than anything he did – for we know nothing of what he did. He is just a name written into the landscape, thrown to a piece of land near the river, to a watering hole of lager topped proportions, a name associated with my own experience of defeat and sleep and growing up.
Cynon stands among the names of so many Celtic Saints whose names have been pinned to places. Some of his contemporaries have had their lives embellished, imagined by legend echoed through five centuries after their death. But most remain as landmarked labels, lost to the past. Just a name.
The gouged-out land of the Rhondda is green again, and the pebble-dashed walls of St Cynon’s Church in Ynyscynon sit sadly at the crossroads.
At one time, the whole of the Rhondda formed the ancient Parish of Ystradyfodwg which extended across the Rhigos to Neath in one direction and to Llantrisant in the other. Llantrisant’s own name refers to ‘the place of three saints,’ of Illtud and Gwynno and Dyfodwg, although there is no evidence of any church dedicated to Dyfodwg in the old Rhondda parish of his name.
St Illtud, though, was the founder of the earliest school of learning in the country, Llanilltud Fawr (Llantwit Major) which at its height had over a thousand pupils and schooled so many great saints of the age including St David.
Illtud himself had been a disciple of St Cadoc at the settlement he himself established at Llancarfan, near Cowbridge. There are so many connections to be made between those saints and us, as faith flows like water.
I remember the defeat on Cynon’s field, like it was a battle lost in legend, our green shirts suggesting a new springtime, but all we could feel was disappointment. We had thought then that our names would go down in history. We were only eleven. But we’d have been in good company if the only thing that had gone down in history was just our names.
To find out more about our Flat Holm pilgrimages check out our Flat Holm page here
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