In the film of Bruce Chatwin’s novel On the Black Hill, the opening sequence sees a hang-glider floating over the Welsh and English borderlands shifting from the outer edges of the Brecon Beacons Mountains down to the Wye Valley near Hay.
The viewer’s eye moves in the breeze attached, as it were, to the hang-glider, skirting close to the ground as it moves upwards over the mountainsides and down into the valleys. Starkly barren moors give way to deeply green hillsides with medieval churches nestling among groups of trees. A cloudy wetness floats above and moistens the ground below. When the sun breaks through it lends a silky pixilated sheen to the landscape.
