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

A journey from Cardiff by boat across the Bristol Channel to the island of Flat Holm raises the question, ‘What do we want here?’ Fr Dean reflects on a pilgrimage with Matt Batten

“There’s an easterly wind from Newport,” said the skipper as I enquired about the weather.  I didn’t blame Newport.  I don’t think they were responsible for the wind or the waves or the sickness that overcame Matt as his face became a pallid green half-way through the journey from Penarth to Flat Holm.

I had noticed a break in the excited chatter we’d exchanged since we met that morning for Mass at St Mary’s.  The weather didn’t look good, but we were on an adventure, a personal pilgrimage, just the two of us, with the weather against us.

As we made our way across the waves of the Bristol Channel on board the Lewis Alexander, Matt had stopped moving around from taking videos of every moment and matter. He’s a ‘Comms Guy’ through and through, always looking for the angle, a new way of sharing something in a fresh way. For now, he had stopped. There was silence, apart from the chug of the boat, the sound of the sea.

As I turned away from my own view of the horizon and the grey sea which rose and fell and crashed against the boat, I saw him, sat there, looking, well, rather unwell, as grey as the sea.  He rushed to the side of the boat and stayed there for some time. There, he had his own ‘private’ moment.

Afterwards, we chatted about the journey of St Cadoc all those years ago, back in the fifth century, and how his coracle must have crashed on the waves which made the journey difficult and dangerous.  We marvelled at the faith and adventurousness of the Celtic Saints who pushed out from the familiar in search of something more.  We always want more.

No wonder that when St Cadoc, after his own Flat Holm pilgrimage, sent his fellow pilgrim, Baruc, back to collect a forgotten prayer book, that Baruc succumbed to the waves.  His body was washed up on the mainland, his name given to another island which welcomed his body. 

That island, Barry Island, is now a playground for day trippers and holiday makers, armed with candy floss and popcorn, and whose fingers smell of the metal of money dropped into the slots of the arcade games. There, the only sickness comes not from the sea but by the fall and rise of Fairground rides as they look for excitement. We always want more.

We arrived at Flat Holm, and were greeted by a battalion of birds, gulls who gathered in great numbers as the boat chugged onto the shingled shore.  I misinterpreted their cry as a welcome, a wing-flapped applause, an avian benediction.  Instead, they said ‘Go home, stay away, leave us alone, this is our home. What do you want here?’

What do we want here?

At the water’s edge, we were welcomed by the new Warden of Flat Holm who began his job just four weeks earlier, and we spent much time with him.

We talked about the island and nature and the environment and the beauty of the island, the harshness of life here.  But we also had conversations about the street and urban issues and young people. We talked about our backgrounds and our experiences. There, in seclusion and beauty, we talked about poverty and the lack of aspiration and opportunity, about politics and refugees and communities, about the direction of the country and how we all fitted in.  A pilgrimage is never an escape from life.  It’s an embracing of life, offers a new perspective.

From Flat Holm, we could see the city of Cardiff, from afar, across the rising grey waves.  Even though there were the grim, grey clouds, pushed across by the easterly wind from Newport, we could see the tips of buildings, the eclectic gathering of steel and glass, the shape of the city.

What do we want here?

That’s the question, waiting for an answer.  Whoever comes here is just dropping by as a visitor, a passer-by.  Each of us needs to be respectful of the home into which we step, and those who live here – the wildlife – allowed a time, a place, to be at home, and thrive beyond the steel and glass of the city’s staggered life.

Here, on Flat Holm, nature takes priority.  This is nature’s home, and we need to tread carefully with respect, with love, and to discover what it means to be at home in the world.

On the way back, as we gazed over the boat’s edge, I asked Matt what colour is the sea? He thought it brown. Yes, at times, it seemed brown, but then grey, and then the froth of broken waves which gave it a hope, an ambition to be a different colour, something new. We always want more.

The journey back was smoother.  Perhaps Newport was kinder to us as we were homeward bound.  It held back its wind, and we washed in through the Barrage from the flat tops of Flat Holm with a relative ease.

It had rained that day, across the island.  We hadn’t noticed the rain, just the easterly wind along the journey.  And the memory of the flat-topped island which welcomed us for a while, and asked us ‘What do you want here?’

If you’d like to join us for pilgrimage to Flat Holm then check out our pilgrimage pages at www.southcardiffministryarea.co.uk/flat-holm