SAVE COWBRIDGE CATTLE MARKET

Here we are preparing to set off

Every Tuesday big lorries loaded with bleating livestock descend on Cowbridge, destined to be bought and sold under the auctioneer's hammer.  The sales are quite a sight and visitors often go along to hear the incomprehensible babble so beloved of auctioneers the world over as your man in the Barbour jacket leans over a pen full of grey, recalcitrant sheep, occasionally poking at them with some species of stick and spouting his unique language.  Eventually the lorries and trailers that have been parked on the flat ground at the rear of the market come up again and the sheep, or what not, go off on return trips to new homes or, in some less fortunate cases, go off on single trips to the abattoir.  Welsh lamb being always at a premium

Of course, the market is not what it was.  Not since Foot and Mouth, not since the general decline in agriculture.  Nevertheless our market is one of only three in the whole of South Wales - the others being at Carmarthen and Abergavenney; and Abergavenney's market is under threat, we hear.

As indeed is ours!  That was why 'up to 1,000 people' - according to the television whose voice is always to be believed - led by the Mayor, the Town Crier, various elected notables and an ancient tractor - gathered yesterday to protest against plans by the Vale of Glamorgan Council to sell for housing and their own gain the land on which the market stands.

Now there has been a market in Cowbridge since medieval times.  When Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, in 1254 granted Cowbridge its first official Charter, he did so on the basis that this was a market town.  The clue is in the name after all, which is also reflected in our Welsh name 'Y Bont Faen,' which means 'The Cattle Bridge.'  In those medieval times the site now occupied by the Market, which lies just outside the town walls, was used for archery practice.  The roadway is still called 'The Butts'   The market moved here in 1954, seven hundred years later, (the yeomen archers having disappeared by then) and the land being in the ownership of the Cowbridge Rural District Council, the successors of the Council set up under Richard de Clare's Charter.

Sadly, twenty years later Cowbridge RDC became absorbed in a newly created Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council based in industrial Barry a dozen miles away, a town with which Cowbridge has always had an uneasy rural-urban relationship.  But the Vale Council, which of course is dominated by Barry with a dozen times the population of Cowbridge, now owns the land on which the yeomen of Cowbridge once practised their archery and on which generations of farmers have sold their livestock ever since; and the Vale is short of cash.  So it is proposing to sell the site for housing.

True, the Council has allocated land elsewhere in the Vale for a new market - but as no-one has money to build a new market, this isn't a real solution at all.  If the Cowbridge livestock market closes then the lorries full of animals will have to rattle away on a round trip of almost 100 miles to Carmarthen - which won't do the animals, or the environment, any good at all.

But beside these threats the town will suffer in a wider way if the cattle market site were to be sold off.  As you might imagine it is not easy to practise archery in small spaces.  So the cattle market site is actually quite large. This makes it easy on a market Tuesday to accommodate the lorries that bring the beasts here and then take them away again.  And as the market is usually finished by midday and only operates once a week, the market operators kindly make their acreage available to supplement Cowbridge's limited parking facilities by some 200 additional spaces.  All these would be lost if the market site were to be sold, making it even harder for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Moreover, our theatre is located at the furthest end of the Cattle market site.  (It is even called 'The Market Theatre'). The Council have generously told us that we can stay where we are - and so can the nearby Scout Hall - but of course they are proposing to take away our parking. Now many among our audiences are elderly and some are disabled. If we had no adjacent car parking we should not be viable any more.  Which sounds very much as though the Council wish to close us without obviously being seen to do so.  I imagine the same thing applies to the Scout Hall.

Here we are at the Cattle Market site.  Our Theatre stands on the far side of the cattle sheds

Next door to the Cattle Market site are the Town's playing fields.  These also the Vale Council has its eye on and calculating what they might be expected to fetch as building land.  They are not yet in any plan, but ask the simple question where people who bring their children to play rugby or cricket games on the playing fields leave their cars, and the answer is of course on the Cattle Market site and if this is sold and the parking lost then the utility of the playing fields is hit as well.  If they are no longer used, then, the Council will argue, why not sell them?  Already the Council have abandoned the upkeep of the public lavatories, formerly provided for those using the fields and attending the Cattle Market.

If only Cowbridge could run its own affairs again.  We have a lovely Town Hall and an oak panelled Council Chamber. In his ceremonial robes our Mayor looks like a medieval monarch.  We have aldermen in top hats that are the envy of any of our twin town visitors.  But this ancient council is powerless over anything more important than a park or a cemetery.  That they oppose to a man and woman selling the Cattle Market site is of no consequence.

So in case anyone reading this is moved by our plight, which could so easily one day be your plight too, could they please write to the Vale of Glamorgan Council and tell them to leave the Cowbridge's Cattle Market site alone.  Because you want to come and visit, don't you?  And if you do come and visit I am sure that you want to be able to park your car.  And perhaps visit Cowbridge's Theatre.  And, you never know, you might even have animals to sell, too.  Or, in the middle of the night when the cars and lorries have gone and the site is just the big and empty square that it ever was, you might be tempted to take up your longbow again and practice your archery.

ON A BICYLE MADE FOR TWO

My neighbour Annie and I used to work for the same consultancy firm back in the nineties and we both became friendly with the firm's librarian and researcher, Verna, who worked in the company's Edinburgh office.  We all used to meet once a year at the Christmas Party - a dinner and disco affair at some country inn in which we (and spouses too) were put up for the night.  The party went on until lunch the next day.

I hadn't seen Verna and her husband for more than a dozen years, although we had exchanged Christmas cards.  She and her husband are great cyclists, or rather they are great tandemists, possessing two tandems (lightweight and heavyweight - obviously -) on which they tour, not only their own country, but other people's as well.  They have even ridden across part of America, I understand.

Thus far they have never managed to tandem into Wales however, so it was with great pleasure that Annie informed me that they had announced their intention to come and that she was putting them up for a couple of days. We all had dinner together last night and they asked me if I could provide an itinerary of about 30 miles for them to cycle around today.

We are blessed here in the Vale of Glamorgan with a wealth of interests.  What to choose? I sent them to a Neolithic burial cairn (two if they don't mind a small detour); a power station; an interesting old stone town and the site of Wales' first monkish university;  the castle bought and restored by newspaper proprietor Randolph Hearst which now houses an international school and has gardens that run down to the sea; the lightouses and spectacular seascapes at Nash Point; the village of Ewenny whence came the yew wood for the longbows for Agincourt and the interior of whose priory was captured in a painting in the 1780's by Turner and which hasn't change one jot since;  the haunted Pwllgwrach, around which you can hear foxhounds baying on windy nights in winter (legend has it that at the same time that Turner was painting his picture of Ewenny the then hunt master at Pwllgwrach was being hunted and torn to pieces by his hounds for the crime of getting a poor servant lass in the family way and, according to some accounts,  murdering her as well).  Until recently the house was lived in by the Agatha Christie's nephew to whom were bequeathed all the rights to 'The Mousetrap.'  

The house also boasts a quintail, which, in case you don't know, is a bit of jousting equipment - a white metal figure with a sword that can swivel around a vertical pole.  This you gallop towards with your lance under your right arm and the object of the exercise is to strike the quintail in its exact centre.  If you do this then nothing happens: you can count yourself lucky and proceed to the jousting tournament. But should you miss and strike the quintail off centre then the device swings around and the quintail clobbers you with its sword as you go past.   Thus at the price of a sore back you progress.

I did offer them the Roman silver mines as well, but as these lie on the A48 (which Verna thought sounded excessively like a main road) they eschewed them.  In fact you can't actually see anything; you have to be told that somewhere in that bank beneath the gorse bushes you may discover a drift, long since collapsed or filled in, where once folk with names like Caractacus and Spartacus hacked their way into the limestone in search of silver for their goblets and lead for their central heating.

We shall have to see how the intrepid couple get on.  They are coming here for aperitifs this evening and no doubt some tapas type food as well and if the sunshine continues we shall sit in the garden.  Judging from the clouds however the weather forecast may be right and at seven o'clock we shall be watching the rain.

I cannot leave the subject of tandeming, however, with mentioning that I once had a chance to ride (and unfortunately wreck) a four-wheeled tandem, made from two ordinary bicycles welded together and with some clever linkage that turned the handlebars in parallel.  It was like a four-wheeled tricycle, I suppose, and was painted a rich burgundy colour.  Sadly, one day when I was riding the contraption alone - my friend who had built it had ridden it over to my house - I went around a corner too fast, whereupon the wheels simply buckled.  The sensation (to continue with the jousting theme) was not unlike a horse falling beneath you. You see you can't lean over on such a four-wheeled contraption and a bicycle wheel has no sideways strength.  So that was the end of my tandeming career and I have never been on another multiple person machine, although Verna did say that she would let me have a go on hers.  I wonder if she should trust me?

The picture, I am afraid, is not from the family collection but is courtesy of the ever dependable Wikipedia