The Lime Kilns at Solva.

Solva sunset, by Alicia Almond (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicia__almond)Crossing the Severn Bridge in a haze of gold with thunderheads behind the western hills, the fields along the estuary are luminous flags of bright green divided by the deeper pencilled lines of hedgerows and Chepstow’s silver ramparts on the horizon. Seeing it magnificent like this, it’s clear how Wales became a land of kings – kings and dark-eyed women with witchcraft in their blood. Also, by the lime kilns in Solva, there was a tunnel leading underground with the rails of a narrow gauge track disappearing into darkness. That’s where they got the lime they burnt down by the water. And that’s where Tolkien’s dwarves came from: stoical men who weren’t scared out of their wits by the thought of going underground, who mined the bones of their land for wealth and were proud of their craft, their closeness to death, their kinship with stone and darkness. Tolkien’s dwarves are an imaginative response to one of the certainties of his world, of an industrial era in which it was unimaginable that the wealth and strength of nations wouldn’t depend on men going underground.