First Chapter below, Read more on Substack https://thelandtookitselfaway.substack.com/
The village is thinning, and people are beginning to speak in hopeful tones about places they’ve never seen. In a windswept village on the Welsh coast in 1819, the earth, once familiar, now resists its own people, as the commons are vanishing, enclosed by landlords eager to charge rent for what was once shared. This is land enclosure: not just a change in fields, but a slow, grinding theft of livelihood, of belonging.
Elinor is already considered strange: chronically ill, shifty, single, and often seen skulking near the stream. She lives in a smoke-choked cottage with six siblings and a bedbound father, barely tolerated and quietly blamed for taking up space. She has been quietly constipated for 30 days. When, at last, her body gives in, in the worst possible time and place.
The result is catastrophic. When the village dissenters discover the scene, they mistake it for a deliberate act of radical protest. Elinor, too mortified to confess the truth, is swept into the rebellion.
As boundaries tighten and hunger grows, rumours drift through chapel pews and tavern smoke: a ship bound for the New World.
Told through shifting voices, Dai the seething shepherd, Ceridwen, rebellion leader and angered out-of-work ploughman’s wife who has no patience for theory, and Mrs. Prys watching from her window like a sentinel, recording sins in her ledger, convinced that moral rot is spreading through the village.
This is a story about misread signs, inconvenient bodies, and the desperate, furious acts people will do to survive. As the village divides between those who fight and those who flee, the question grows louder: what does it mean to stay, and what does it cost to leave?
Image: The Eagle Tower, Caernarfon Castle, Bartlett, William Henry, 1850
20th February 1819
From the hilltop, the town looked half-sunk. Sea mist curled through the valley like breath, rolling thick over the rooftops and hiding the bay altogether. Only the masts of a few small boats showed like grey needles lost in wool. The sea itself couldn’t be seen, but its presence was felt in the air: salt at the tips of teeth, damp on the seams, a low pull in the stomach like weather coming.
Smoke lifted from three chimneys, one a bit crooked, the others barely trying to be straight and one stout that mostly disappeared into the mist before it could do anything. On the far side of the valley, the sun began, dragging gold across the opposite sloping hill like someone hauling on a winch rope. It hit the chapel roof first, then the widow’s windows, then the long wall of the post office where the old shop sign had been painted over.
Further out, beyond the farm tracks and the last of the blackthorn hedges, there; a rose a hill shaped like a tit. Not a poetic breast or a goddess mound; just a tit, full and lopsided, even a smaller nip-like lump atop, like it had been dropped by accident when god shaped the county. The locals called it Mammoth Mam, or sometimes just Tiddy Hill, after enough cider. The soil turned strange near the top. Sheep wouldn’t graze there. The mist made her look almost holy. Or like something waking up.
There Dai stood with his crook balanced across his shoulders, trying to count the sheep, but they weren’t moving. Not grazing. Not panicked. Just still. Heads turned toward the fog, ears twitching like they heard something he didn’t. The sheep wouldn’t go near the eastern pasture. Again. He’d tried rattling a tin can filled with horseshoe nails and an old tooth, he tried whistling, salt, and finally stepping into the field with oats in his palm, coaxing them like they were bloody pets. He sang to them with a voice his mother used to say could lull a cough out of a baby. Nothing. They huddled at the gate, eyes wide, ears twitching like they heard something he didn’t. Stupid beasts! He spat in the grass and scratched his jaw where the bristles always came in roughest. No blood. No tracks. Just birdsong and air so thick it felt like milk in the lungs.
He stepped into the sun, blinking. The conjunctivitis in his left eye hadn’t cleared since last winter's yuck got in it. The damp in the longhouse didn’t help. He rubbed at it constantly, but that only made it angrier, even more raw and weeping.
The wood pigeon sang the same five-note song it sang every day.
‘Hooo… hooo-hooo… hooo… hooo’
Dai squinted towards it.
“Christ Almighty, know any other songs!” he cursed at it.
The flock wouldn’t go near it. Not since the new fence had gone up before the slope. The one that split the pasture angled through the valley like someone had drawn it on a map without walking the land first. That bit of the field used to open into the lower paddock. Now it ended in posts and wire and an iron latch, no one asked him about it. The sheep didn’t understand the new shape. Neither did he. He let them graze where they would. He couldn’t force them. Not without a dog, his Collie Teg had gone half lame three winters ago.
She still followed him out of habit one ear cocked, the other twitching with old mutton ghosts. Her eyes were marbles of sea glass, gone milky with age, she didn’t see shapes so much as movement now. But she still stared at him like she understood everything. She’d memorised his footsteps, the shape of his shadow, the way his coat smelled of lanolin, mud and smoke.
That morning, she made a go of it, limping after the nearest ewe with all the pride of her younger years. The sheep didn’t even flinch. One of them sneezed in her direction.
“Bloody useless, you are,” Dai muttered, not unkindly, and scratched behind her ear. She leaned into his hand, she didn’t hear the words, only the gist. He kept her around because he didn’t know how not to.
This had all started the week after the second rumour of the ship. When Iwan’s boy said his uncle had heard a man at the tavern mention sails bound for the New World, people started talking like it was real. Like a great ship; bigger than the ones they knew, one big enough to carry a whole parish.. was waiting beyond the fog, quiet as judgment, holding a list of names and a hunger for those with breadless bellies.
Dai didn’t believe it. Not properly. But he’d had dreams. The kind that stank of salt and old rope. Dreams where his sheep walked straight into the sea and didn’t ever bleedin’ come back. As a boy, he used to imagine stowing away, hiding in a barrel with a crust of bread and coming out on the other side of the world, sunburned and useful. He thought he’d be a cabin boy, or a gunner, or the one who tied the sails in storms while everyone else cried below decks. He used to tie knots in baling twine and pretend it was rigging and drew compass roses in the dirt with a stick. He once asked too many questions in the chapel about Jonah and the whale. But no one he knew left. Not really. Just a few boys to Cardiff, and a rumour of one cousin who sent a letter all the way from the Jersey Shore that arrived sopping wet.
That was before the sheep. Before the land came to matter more than the sea ever did. Before he learned that the best way to be left alone was to stay exactly where you were.
Now, he dreamed of water only when something was wrong, like Elinor.
He’d seen her by the stream again, washing something. It could’ve been clothes. Could’ve been nothing. She didn’t look at him again, which was worse than if she had.
Last time he saw her bent over, hair falling forward, she was washing something pale in the water, linen, maybe. She didn’t look up. She moved like she cared who might be watching. And he hadn’t meant to stay. He hadn’t meant to stop. But he did. Later, behind the barn, with one hand braced against the stone, he went at himself with his hand as frantic as a mutt against a leg, jerking, manic. He thought of her, not her body; he swore that to himself, swore twice. But her not looking. That was what undid him. That she didn’t care. She must know.
When it was done, he pulled his hand away and looked down, the breath still snagging in his chest. And there it was. Soft now. Shrivelled, the flacid thing. Like a newborn baby bird, blind, wet, gasping, curled against his thigh, all pink and recently born. He thought.. Useless, Pathetic, Sinful. It was something that should’ve stayed hidden in the dark. He hated it. Hated that it wanted. Hated that he wanted. He wiped the worst of it off on the hem of his homespun and didn’t look again. After, he’d crossed himself hard. He spat twice. Washed his hands in the trough. He didn’t go near the stream again that week.
But it festered. The guilt. The watching. The way his mouth dried when she passed. So he told the priest. Not the whole of it, just… enough. That there’d been a stirring. A lapse, a weakness.
The priest nodded. He didn’t ask for more.
"It’s her," he said. "That girl draws the eye like sin. She walks without shame; You’re not the first."
And just like that, the guilt turned to righteousness.
Not his fault.
Hers.
The devil never looked how you expected. He crossed himself when she passed after that. Being sure to touch the tips to the latitude of his shoulders. Not because he believed she’d cursed the flock, but because it felt wrong not to.
Dai caught the flicker of the priest’s turned head, the way he didn’t quite meet his eye, and took it for judgment. He thought maybe it was for the thoughts. Maybe for not coming to chapel every week. Maybe just for being the kind of man who couldn't keep his flock in line.
The priest, averted his eyes as Dai left. Not for the sake of decency, he’d heard much worse confessed under breath, but because of that eye. Red-rimmed, leaking, pink as raw meat. It repulsed him. weeping down his cheek like a melted berry. Unnatural. Sickly.
‘A pious man shouldn’t have to see such a thing!’ he thought.
He could stomach sin. He could not stomach pus.
With Sin named, blame reassigned, burden lifted. Dai left the vestry with his shoulders squared and something dangerously close to peace blooming in his chest. He’d come in dirty. He left righteous. It was lighter outside than he’d remembered. He walked toward the pub with a small smile, and the taste of the stale incense caught in his throat. The tavern would be warmer than the Church, Dai hoped, the ale would be cold and plentiful.
The air stank of wet wool, pipe smoke, and sticky dried cider soaked deep into the wood. The floorboards muttered under boots. Then something strong, sweet, slightly resinous; someone had been rubbing bog myrtle between their palms again. The poor man’s cologne. Dai hated that smell. The fire fought against it all, but couldn’t win. He stepped inside and shook off the chill. He nodded at the barman, already halfway to a tankard. As he passed the hearth, a voice called out from the far bench by the fire:
“How are you keeping, Dai?”
“I’m alright. Can’t complain.”
“Well good, ‘cause nobody’ll listen!”
Laughter, dull-edged and familiar. Someone raised their tankard in his direction without really looking at him. He smiled, just enough. Took his seat by the fire like he’d earned it. The coat on his shoulders still smelled faintly of the trough-iron water, something colder than sin, but at least his conscience was clean. He’d been to confession. Let the priest name the fault and pin it on her. He didn’t need to think about it anymore.
‘You seen this Dai?’
And then he saw the sign.
Tacked fresh to the wall beside the bar, corners still crisp. Big black letters like the words written were a shout:
NOTICE TO ALL RESIDENTS FOR AMERICA.
THE FAST-SAILING BRIG, THE ALBION OF CARDIGAN.
SAINT JOHN’S. (NEW BRUNSWICK)
NO LATER THAN APRIL.
All interested parties are advised to make necessary preparations and report to the dock by sunrise on the day of departure. Passage is granted to those of good character and standing within the community. May the Lord guide and protect all who embark on this journey.
Signed,
The Parish Council
He didn’t know what it said at first. He squinted at it, nodded slowly, pretending to understand, until someone spoke the letters aloud. He could sound out numbers on a receipt, but this? He couldn't read. This was ink written for other men.
The fire hissed. Someone muttered something about debts and fast ships. Dai said nothing. Just drank deep from the tankard and kept his eyes on the flames.
The Albion. Someone had underlined it in charcoal. Twice.
“Old Evan’s boy signed up already,” said Griffith, wiping foam from his moustache with the back of his hand.
“Didn’t tell his mam,” said another. “Just walked down and gave his name like it were a harvest rota..”
There was a murmur at that, not quite approval, not quite scorn.
“I don’t see what’s so wrong with staying,” muttered Dai Thomas, quieter than usual. “This land fed us fine until they started fencing it like bloody Jerusalem.”
The room stiffened. He kept speaking.
“My grandfather grazed three hills. Now I’ve got a rectangle the size of a piss puddle, and if I look at the boundary stone wrong, they fine me for trespass, in the paddock I was born on.”
“That’s the Crown’s land now,” said someone near the window.
“Is it?” Dai snapped. “Funny how God and the King keep giving each other gifts.”
Laughter at that. But bitter.
“They say the land is promised, but no one in the bible bothered asked to who.”
“It’s not the land’s fault,” muttered the mason. “It’s the bastards who hold the deeds. Who build fences in the night and say it’s order.”
“Aye. And call it salvation.”
Tankards clinked. Someone refilled theirs with a little too much force.
“They say the ship’s going to Canada,” someone added. “Free land. Real wild country. Trees so thick you can’t see the next man. Nobody telling you where your pigs can sleep.”
“An no chapel,” said another.
“No Mrs. Prys,” someone muttered. More laughter.
Dafydd sipped his beer and said nothing. The priest’s words still rang in his ears, mixing now with the smoke. Across the room, the sign fluttered slightly, as if catching breath.
Dai didn’t remember the walk home, not properly. After too many words and too much ale, the real feelings settled in like a cat swirling a blanket by the hearth.
The road was the same as always, but the fences had moved. Closer. Taller in places. Or maybe it was the ale. He kept seeing corners where there hadn’t been corners before. Kept tripping over rocks he’d stepped around for twenty years. The pub talk clung to him. Evan’s boy, gone and signed his name. Just like that. Like it was nothing.
Like home was something you could wipe off your boots.
Dai thought about what it would mean to stay. About what it would mean to go. About the way the priest hadn’t blinked when he said her name, like sin was a woman’s problem and confession was a man’s right.
The wind stung his eyes. It wasn’t cold, it was mean.
He thought:
Could I go?
Just like Evan’s boy. Just walk to the harbour. Say his name.
He could. He had hands. He could work. He’d worked every year of his life, hadn’t he?
But then he laughed. No sound to it, just hot breath condensing against the cold in his tache. His knees ached just from crouching. His boots were near split. His left eye began weeping again. Swollen half-shut, his lashes had crusted from the damp inside the tavern. He rubbed it, which didn’t help. He always rubbed it, but that only made it angrier. His back went tight if he bent too long.
Too old, he thought. Too slow. Too late.
Anyway, who’d take him? A half-lame, illiterate shepherd with no land of his own, no wife, no savings, a dog that couldn’t run and sheep that wouldn’t listen. The pastures had shrunk again. He’d lost another gate to rot. Last month, he’d sold his good coat to pay the farrier. This morning he’d eaten the last of the barley with watered-down milk and called it stew.
He scratched at his eye again, then wiped the lash gum off his fingers onto his sleeve.
If anyone ought to get on that bloody boat, he thought, it’s her.
Elinor.
The way she stalked about like a crow on the ridge, watching everything, offering nothing. No land, no dowry, no match. Not working, yet always drifting through hedges and fence-lines like a ghost.
She made people uneasy. Not loud, not mad, just wrong-footed. Didn’t blush, didn’t flirt, didn’t muck in like the other girls. Never carried a pail or swept a yard. Just walked too slow, or too fast, or not where she ought to be at all.
And when she did speak, rare as rain, it was sharp. Clever in a way that made your skin itch. Like she knew things she shouldn’t. Maybe that’s what got to him. She didn’t pull her weight.
And maybe he pitied her, in some part of himself. Her father coughing himself thin. Her mother turned brittle. Even her own family seemed to wish she’d go. Her mother spoke around her like she wasn’t there. Her brothers barked at her for breathing wrong.
But pity curdled quick when it met that stare. Sometimes he didn’t know why she rankled him so much. But she did.
Dai spat at the ground. He pulled his coat tighter and let the thought slip past like a draught.
‘No one starves in the New World!’, the barkeep had said.
But he wasn’t hungry for the New World. He was just hungry.
He passed through the gate no one locked, the latch hanging crooked.
That was when he saw the nest.
Crumpled in the mud at the side of the lane, barely a foot off the track. Fallen from a tree, maybe kicked, maybe dropped. Four chicks lay inside, not chicks, really. Just flesh. Skin stretched tight over bone, pink and wet and blinking, mouths yawning wide at the dark.
They looked… wrong. Like something the world had made halfway, then thought better of.
One of them opened its beak and made a sound; high and quiet, like a leak in the roof.
He crouched, breath hitching.
They looked like…
Like that thing in his hand! that day behind the barn. Warm, twitching, soft around the edges. Needing.
He stayed there a long time. Watching. Not moving.
One finger twitched toward them. Then back.
He thought, for a moment, about the weight of his boot.
The ease of it.
He decided not to test the thought.
He stood. Spat once, for the cold. Walked on.
Behind him, the lane filled with quiet again.