Village · above the Wye
Clyro
Cleirwy
Francis Kilvert was curate here for seven years and wrote the best account of Victorian rural Wales that exists. Almost everything in his diary is still recognisable.
Between 1865 and 1872 the curate of this parish walked its lanes, visited its cottages, fell in love unsuitably several times, and wrote it all down.
Francis Kilvert's diary is the finest record of Victorian rural life in Wales, and it survives by an unlikely margin. His widow destroyed some of it. A niece destroyed most of the rest after William Plomer had made his selection for publication in the late 1930s. Three notebooks out of twenty-two or so remain.
What Plomer printed is enough. Kilvert noticed things: what people wore, what they ate, what they said and how they said it, who was ill, who was drunk, what the hedge looked like in April. He was a sentimental man with a genuinely observant eye and no apparent interest in making himself look good.
Why it matters here
Because the parish is still legible. Kilvert's Clyro is a Radnorshire village of scattered farms and a few dozen cottages above the Wye, and the lanes he walked to visit the sick are the same lanes.
He also recorded, without quite realising it, a society on the edge of disappearing. The people in the diary are the last generation before the agricultural depression, before the railways emptied the parishes, before the schools and chapels started closing. Read alongside the census returns for the same years it becomes a very precise picture of what was lost.
His account of the poor of the parish is unsparing and not always comfortable. He was a clergyman of his class and time and it shows. He was also frequently and evidently distressed by what he saw.
The rest of the village
There was a Roman fort here, on the ground at Clyro Court Farm, part of the network holding the middle Wye. It is recorded but not visible.
There is a castle mound behind the village.
Clyro Court is a Victorian mansion of 1839 built for the Baskerville family.
Now
A quiet village a mile from Hay, with a pub, a church, and a Kilvert connection that is marked but not overdone.
The Wye is below and the road to Hay crosses it on a bridge that Kilvert used constantly. Offa's Dyke Path passes a mile east.
Sources
- Kilvert, F., Diary, ed. William Plomer, 3 vols, 1938–40.
- Coflein (RCAHMW), records for Clyro Roman fort and the castle mound.
- Cadw, Cof Cymru designation records for Clyro.
- Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, on Kilvert and the parish.