The monk was in thrall to the Middle-Ages. He felt his was a time when few people knew their place. The Middle-Ages were a time in which, he felt, he would have known his. A time when his tastes, his religion, would have been the norm and his status unquestioned.
The monk was seeing something frightening on the horizon. He had a sense that a plague was coming. An epidemic of murder. Had he, through his magical operations, opened a door that had let it through? When he turned over a single tarot card, the psychic equivalent to licking his finger and holding it up to check the wind direction, he was seeing signs of death and war at every turn: The Tower, The Hanged Man, The Devil, Death, The Moon. His family would not be untouched by the coming calamity.
in 1898 he decided to sell, for £159,000, the land the council wanted to build a civic centre . Perhaps he thought this might heal what was to come, acting as a counter-balance to whatever malign forces he had released into the twentieth century. Instead of growing calendulas and peas, his land would become a garden of culture and peace. Perhaps the monk was looking for a legacy. Whatever the case, he was certain his family would no longer control Cardiff in the twentieth century. At his insistence the existing layout of avenues was kept and at the centre of the development Alexandria Gardens was created, which is now a garden of remembrance.
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