Writing Powys

Two literatures run through this county and they hardly overlap.

The visitors

Giraldus Cambrensis came through in 1188, recruiting for the Third Crusade, and wrote the Itinerarium Kambriae afterwards. He is opinionated, gossipy, credulous about miracles and extremely sharp about people, and he gives the earliest sustained description of Powys we have. He also, memorably, excommunicated a bishop in a churchyard at Kerry in 1176 and wrote that up too.

The picturesque travellers arrived from the 1770s. Once the Grand Tour closed during the French wars, the English middle class discovered Wales, and a substantial literature of tours followed — waterfalls, ruins, and a good deal of nonsense about bards. It is unreliable as description and useful as evidence of what visitors wanted to see, which was more or less the opposite of what was actually happening in the county.

Francis Kilvert is the exception, and the best writer this county has produced by adoption. Curate at Clyro from 1865 to 1872 and vicar at St Harmon in 1876 and 1877, he kept a diary that records what people wore, ate, said and died of, in a border parish on the edge of the great depopulation. Most of it was destroyed by his widow and a niece; three notebooks survive out of twenty-two or so. What Plomer printed in 1938 to 1940 is enough to make it the finest record of Victorian rural life in Wales.

Bruce Chatwin wrote On the Black Hill in 1982, about twin brothers farming on the Radnorshire border across eighty years. It is a novel and it is closely observed, and a good many people in that country reckon he got it right, which is not the usual verdict on an outsider.

The inhabitants

The other literature is in Welsh and it is not about landscape at all.

Ann Griffiths of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa near Llanfyllin, who died in 1805 at twenty-nine, wrote hymns of a theological intensity that put her among the major religious poets in any language. She wrote almost none of it down; it survives because her maid had memorised it.

John Ceiriog Hughes managed the Van Railway from Caersws and was one of the major Welsh lyric poets of the nineteenth century. A working railway manager who was also a national poet is not an anomaly — nineteenth-century Welsh literary culture ran through chapels, eisteddfodau and periodicals rather than universities, and it produced a great many people like him.

Samuel Roberts of Llanbrynmair edited Y Cronicl from an upland parish for decades, campaigning against tithe, landlordism, war and slavery, and led an emigration to Tennessee that failed.

Dafydd Llwyd of Mathafarn, near Cemmaes, wrote prophetic verse supporting Henry Tudor's claim in the years before 1485, when Welsh poetry was doing real political work.

The subject matter of that tradition is God, politics, obligation and loss. The hills are where it happens, not what it is about — which is close to the reverse of the visitors' literature.

Hay

The two streams meet, sort of, at Hay-on-Wye.

Richard Booth opened a bookshop in 1961 and kept opening them, arguing that a small border town did not need light industry but one thing it could do better than anywhere else. He declared Hay an independent kingdom on 1 April 1977 as a publicity stunt and it worked.

The Hay Festival started in 1988 and became one of the largest literary festivals in the world. It brings tens of thousands of people to a town of fifteen hundred for eleven days each May.

Whether that constitutes a literary culture or an industry built beside one is a fair question and locally a live one.

Where to read it

Welsh Journals Online and Welsh Newspapers Online, both free through the National Library, hold the nineteenth-century periodical culture in bulk — the poems, the obituaries, the arguments and the emigrant letters.

Kilvert's diary is in print. So is On the Black Hill. Giraldus is available in translation and is much funnier than his reputation suggests.