Careg Iago (Jacob's Stone)

from Songs from the Tin Tabernacle: A Roots Romance

If a eulogy could be written in praise of a place, rather than a person, then I think I made a start here with these few lines that may emerge in new song lyrics for music to be heard once again in our re-imagined Tin Tabernacle, as I began to pull together an accumulated mass of photos, old family correspondence, parish & baptism records, old maps, plans & census returns…

Stone of Jacob

A keepsafe

Watches the cattle

Guards the well

Empty eyes on Eryri

Holds our truths

When we talk of our roots, Careg Iago always comes to mind. There’s a roofless & overgrown ruined farm tenement cottage a few miles northwest of the Menai bridge to Ynys Môn (Anglesey) right by the Pentraeth Road, close to Four Crosses. Its fields slope south facing across to the Menai Straits and the mystical Welsh mainland mountains of Eifionydd & Eryri.

In the yard amongst the tumbled stone and scrub you can still uncover its own dark & very deep well, whilst 1830’s tithe records for this land in the parish of Llandysilio put its area at 22 acres and 22 perches: here Careg Iago is simply the name given to field numbers 12 & 12a with a tithe value of £3.15s.3p. Now its a designated historic place-name with first recorded evidence of a dwelling in the 1841 census, although I think the cottage dates from a lot earlier. A later rather grand 1880’s stone house now also named Careg Iago was built across the yard from the tenement cottages, and family notes say my great grandmother Martha Menai Francis had this new house built after receiving an inheritance.

This place has great resonance for me. My great grandmother Martha, the youngest of the ten children of Elinor and Henry Jones who farmed here from 1850, was born in the farm tenement cottage in 1858 and she took over the farming single-handed after her last remaining brother Henry (jnr) and then her mother Elinor died in 1881/82.

My great grandfather Benjamin Menai Francis joined her here from Caernarvon after they married in 1884. Their first child was my maternal grandfather Hywel Henry Francis who was born here in 1885, and this is where he remembered his mother Martha singing and playing harmonium to him as a child. The family left for England in 1893. Two generations further on, when I was just five years old we had a family holiday in North Wales along with my elderly Francis grandparents. It was the summer of 1953. We visited Careg Iago, and there’s a stony place in the fields across from the house where we sat together in the sun for what became a final Francis-Bowring family photo.

We sat on this ‘stony place’ near the now abandoned farm tenement cottage, on the boundary of field no.12 recorded as Careg Iago in the old C19th tithe document. It is actually part of a larger granite outcrop warmed by the sun and surrounded by rough pasture. For me, this huge rocky mound is the ancient mythical Stone/Rock (Carreg) of Jacob (Iago). The etymology says that as a Welsh & Galician variation of the Latin ‘Iacobus’, the name ‘Iago’ is rooted in the Hebrew ‘Jacob’, which means ‘Supplanter’, and that this was indeed the name of two early Welsh kings of Gwynedd..

Its now April 2024 and much of this ongoing research and my interpretations of what I’ve uncovered has now been shared with both the Welsh and the Yorkshire singer-songwriters in anticipation of the writing, arranging & recording process for our upcoming Songs from the Tin Tabernacl. A kind of lyric-writing methodology is emerging between us: maybe the Bard in me is watching my back as I write myself some evocative but sketchy and loosely structured verses as first drafts awaiting the touch of the songwriters’ craft and some amount of Welsh translation. All along, a filmmaker shadows me, from early days in Barnsley Archives to Ynys Môn treks, tracking our moves towards the June release of a doc-style music video.