Knighton Landscapes

A morning visit to Knighton to see some of the h.Art exhibitions - a strange town, it reminds me of 1950s Ireland with its stone walls, people on the streets and old shopfronts, but is also strangely Alpine, surrounded as it is by steep hills of pine forest - and Victorian, with a fine town clock and a bank building with an Eastern solid cupola, strange things to see against pine forest and sheep fields. My mother's cousin raised his family in Knighton and I always wonder if I pass second cousins unknowingly; their presence haunts the town for me, their everyday walks, their ordinary journeys; my mother and aunt walking with their mother from the railway station in about 1955, walking through this Irish Victorian Alpine town that is half-Welsh and half-English on their way to see Ernest and the family. I took some abstract stone pictures of the school building today, which their children might have attended. It is now artists' studios, but the scuffed floors are the same, the heavy Gothic woodwork, the sunlight.