The Wall

There is a Wall in Staffordshire, a Wall in Northumbria; there is also a Wall Bank and a Wall Hill. There are Walls with additions, such as Wallasey, others that have lost one of their doubles, like Walmer, and which are not walls but Welsh - respectively, island of the Welsh and lake of the Welsh, curiously enough, given that Walmer is in Kent. Not all Walls that have been similarly added to or stripped of an "l" are Welsh; Walsall is Walh's valley, Waltham, an estate by a wood. The Walls of Staffordshire and Northumbria are specific walls - Roman.

The town of Muro is also a wall. The name means "wall". It is not Welsh or Walh but also Roman, or so it is believed. There seems to be some debate. The Arabs kept the name, nonetheless, and in the process of their occupation also granted the name of Albufera to the wetlands that stretched further than they now do. Albufera was once Al Buhayra, but is still, primarily, a piece of nature that belongs to Muro. The resort of Playa de Muro sounds exotic with its Spanish title, less so when one translates it as Wall Beach. Yet it is, of course, Wall Beach that most people - tourists - know, except those who believe that Wall Beach is part of The Hill, or Alcúdia to give it its currently correct name; the Arabs were responsible for that as well.

Travel from The Hill along the coast road, pass through Wall Beach, turn right at the Home of Picafort and head off to Wall, and you pass the woods that conceal what will become the Wall golf course and also pass richly terracotta brown earth that grows potatoes and other vegetables and which provides, together with the earth of Sa Pobla, the country kitchen of northern Mallorca. Take this road to Wall, and you eventually arrive at a roadside industrial estate, a garage and a Pepsi distribution centre. Like other towns of the north - Pollensa, for example - in which the outskirts are non-resplendent, the entry to Wall is misleading. It threatens drabness, a lack of scale, functionality rather than grandeur. But unless you turn your back on Wall and drive off through the agricultural lands towards Sa Pobla or take the road of broken tarmac for Palma, you cannot avoid going into the centre of Wall. And you need to really go into the centre, to the square to which, on one side, lies the town hall and, on the other, the parish church.

How inadequate parish church sounds. It is reminiscent of demur English countryside and understated small scale. Because if the entrance into Wall hints at little of scale that lies within, you cannot miss, once in the centre, the colossal presence of the Muro parish church. It is the most forbidding, impressive, massive of the local town churches. In Pollensa, on the Plaça Major, the church there is a vertical elevation of Gothic Hammer horror. It should, you feel, topple on top of you. Its sudden rise from the town's main square is the Munch scream of a shock that accompanies its appearance and encounter, but it is town house church by comparison with Muro's, wrapped in the surrounds of the Plaça. Alcúdia's Sant Jaume can only truly be appreciated from a distance, from the ruins of Pollentia or from further away, a colossus on the landscape. In Muro, the church assails you in its isolation and with its sheer leviathan magnificence. It is a beast of religiosity.

People - tourists - don't go to Muro, much. They should. If only to be dwarfed by the church. The sadness of the centre and the square with no cafés between the church and the town hall is that they concreted it over. It needs to still be dust. Were it to be so, it would complement more colourfully the sandstone of the huge blocks that constitute the church. In hottest summer, as the temperatures nudge a hundred, this square, given back to dust and sand, with the brooding threat of the church, would be man with no name land, spaghetti western Mallorca. They may have spoiled it, placed plastic chairs around the edges of the square, on which old men sit and talk away the odd hour, but the centre, because of the church, is still an astonishing manifestation of unexpected scale. You should go there.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Christina Aguilera, "Beautiful", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-USUDzycRvM. Today's title - no prizes for this or for knowing which "another" should be added.

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