Hay-on-Wye

Hay is on the Welsh side of the Wye by a few hundred metres and has spent most of its history being fought over by people who cared a great deal about that distinction.

The town had two castles. The earlier motte is at the western end near the church; the later stone castle, with its Norman gateway and the Jacobean mansion built into it, sits above the square. Both are Norman and both are there because this is a crossing point on a river that was, for a couple of centuries, a live frontier.

The name is the interesting one. Y Gelli Gandryll means the broken or shattered wood. The English name comes from the Norman French haie, an enclosure. Two names, two languages, both describing woodland management, neither derived from the other.

Being burned

Hay's medieval history is a list of times the town was taken. William de Braose held it and lost it; his wife Maud is the subject of a great deal of local legend. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth took it in 1231. King John burned it. Glyndŵr's forces burned it in 1401.

Fragments of the town wall survive. The town settled afterwards into an ordinary border market, and by the middle of the twentieth century it was in the same position as every other small mid-Wales town: the farming was consolidating, the railway had gone, and the young people were leaving.

Books

Richard Booth opened a bookshop in the old fire station in 1961 and then kept opening them. He bought the castle. He bought stock by the container-load from American and British institutional libraries that were disposing of it, and he filled buildings across the town.

The argument he made, repeatedly and with a great deal of noise, was that a town like Hay did not need light industry or a development grant. It needed one thing it could do better than anywhere else, and second-hand books would do.

On 1 April 1977 he declared Hay an independent kingdom and himself its king. It was a stunt, it was reported everywhere, and it worked exactly as intended. Booth is generally credited with inventing the "book town" model.

There are fewer bookshops now than at the peak. There are still more than any comparable town anywhere.

The festival

The Hay Festival started in 1988, reportedly planned round a kitchen table, and grew into one of the largest literary festivals in the world. It runs for eleven days at the end of May on a site outside the town and brings in tens of thousands of people.

The relationship between the festival and the town is not uncomplicated. The festival site is not in the town centre, the accommodation prices for those eleven days are what they are, and the number of houses in Hay that are second homes or holiday lets is a live local issue rather than a historical one.

Nobody seriously proposes doing without it.

What is there now

Hay Castle, restored and opened to the public in 2022 after decades of dereliction and two serious fires, now run by a trust with galleries and a bookshop in it.

The bookshops, including the honesty bookshop in the castle grounds where you put coins in a box.

The Wye, and the bridge. Above the town, the Gospel Pass climbs over the Black Mountains to Llanthony, the highest road pass in Wales and one of the more spectacular pieces of driving anywhere in Britain.