by Frances Thomas
When we think about the landscapes that influenced Wordsworth and his poetry, Wales doesn’t usually spring to mind. But he made many visits to Wales over his lifetime, and its landscapes and people contributed crucially to his imaginative growth. Francis Kilvert, the diarist, met an old man who remembered Wordsworth saying that the Wye above Hay was the finest piece of scenery in South Britain, that is, everything south of the Lake District. Coming from the mountain-man himself, this was praise indeed. Kilvert also met people who remembered Wordsworth, one of them telling him that he was a ‘remarkable looking man. He looked like an old shepherd with rough, rugged weather-beaten face, but his features were fine and high-cut. He was a grand man. He had a perfectly independent mind.’
Plas yn Llan, by John Ingleby, 1793. National Library of Wales
His first visit to Wales was in 1791, when he stayed with his friend Robert Jones in the family home Plas-yn-Llan in Denbighshire, and claimed to have walked over ‘the greater part of North Wales,’ a journey which found its place in his ‘Descriptive Sketches.’ He recalls climbing Mount Snowdon at night to see the sun rise, and some of this experience is incorporated into The Prelude.
Capel Curig with a View of Snowdon, Thomas Chubbard, 1796, Wordsworth Grasmere collection
Later, in 1793, a coach journey around Salisbury Plain that went wrong turned into a walking tour to Bristol, and then on to the Wye Valley. It was then he first visited Tintern Abbey. He didn’t write his famous poem then, but the impression went deep into his imagination. It was on this visit that he met, near Goodrich Castle, the little girl who assured him that, despite two of her siblings lying in the churchyard, ‘We are Seven’. He walked further up the Wye Valley, as far as Builth, and there he encountered a man who told him the story of a wild, but later repentant, man which inspired that strange poem, ‘Peter Bell.’
In 1798, he visited the Wye Valley again, this time with his sister Dorothy, his ‘dearest Friend,’ and at last one of his greatest poems began to take shape, as they visited Tintern together.
…For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused…
… A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things…
Wordsworth and Dorothy continued their journey – on foot, of course – along the increasingly beautiful Wye Valley, until they came to the village of Llyswen, near the town of Builth. Llyswen is still a pretty village, in spite of the A470 and the traffic that hurtles relentlessly through it. But even as late as the 1930s, it was a quiet place, and an elderly occupant of the house, Glanwye, where Wordsworth stayed, used to dive under the kitchen table in fear if a car drove by; his descendant remembers how they would run their herd of Guernsey cows up the main road. The house can still be seen in the village.
Llyswen church and Glanwye
In Llyswen, they were joined by Coleridge, and visited their friend John Thelwall. Thelwall was a radical in the days when that was a perilous thing to be. He was a supporter of the French Revolution and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. At home, as an ardent abolitionist, he would eat no sugar as it depended on slave labour. When Wordsworth and his family were suspected of being spies at Alfoxden, Thelwall was one of their visitors. ‘They go,’ said the man who spied upon them ‘on nocturnal or diurnal expeditions, taking notes on their observation of the terrain.’ Dangerous stuff, in the 1790s. In 1797, Thelwall and his wife moved to Llyswen. They leased the idyllic Llyswen Farm, just next to the village church. ‘Across one end of our orchard,’ Thelwall wrote to a friend ‘flows a pretty little brook, bubbling and babbling through a small romantic dingle to empty itself into the Wye…’ No wonder Wordsworth liked this spot too. Llyswen farm no longer exists, having been demolished in Victorian times and replaced by a grand mansion, Ty Mawr.
By now, Wordsworth and Dorothy were firmly settled in the Lake District. In 1802, William married Mary Hutchinson, and her sister Sarah came to join the Dove Cottage family. In 1809, Mary’s brother, Tom, with their cousin John Monkhouse, took on the lease of Hindwell Farm.
Hindwell Farm today, www.hindwellfarm.co.uk
Hindwell is a little village near Old Radnor, just on the border with Hereford. Sarah Hutchinson was the first person from the Wordsworth household to pay them a visit, followed in 1810 by William, who left Mary and the children at home, while he went to check things out. He was delighted by what he found: a beautiful still pool, and a fair consignment of his beloved hills. He wrote ‘The house is comfortable, and its situation beside the pool and the pool itself, quite charming and beyond my expectations…the view from the window is truly delightful and shows beautifully the great importance of still water in landscape…’
But in 1812, the Wordsworths were to experience the worst year of their lives. In April, William took Mary to Hindwell, and then went on himself to London. Mary travelled extensively around the villages of the border, and even got as far as Tintern. Unknown to William and Mary, their little daughter Catherine had died on June 4th. Letters from home telling them about the tragedy piled up unread while they travelled, and it wasn’t until June 11th that they got the dreadful news. And later that year, their lively and intelligent little son Thomas died after a measles infection. Dorothy wrote; ‘Wherever we look, we are reminded of some pretty action of those innocent children…there is no comfort but in the firm belief that what God wills is best for all of us.’
Thomas and Catherine Wordsworth
A happier time came for Dorothy in 1825, when she went to visit Tom Hutchinson, who, with his new bride, had left Hindwell, and moved to Brinsop Court, a rambling old house on the Hereford border. Dorothy passed many happy months there, writing her usual pellucid and sensitive descriptions of what she saw. ‘Larch green waterfall..’ ‘purple and ruby hues in sky and lake…’ These may have been her last happy days. By 1829 her health, and eventually her mind, began to fail. There would be no more of the wonderful imaginative descriptions that had so inspired her brother.
Brinsop Court, www.herefordshirehistory.org.uk
Wordsworth and Mary, of course, passed the remainder of their days in the Lake District. Yet there were moments, especially in William’s early years, when Wales seemed as enchanting a place as the Lakes. What would their lives, and Wordsworth’s poetry, have been like, if he had chosen to settle among Welsh hills and lakes rather than Cumbrian ones?
References:
Wordsworth in the Wye Valley, David Bentley Taylor, Logaston Press 2001
William Wordsworth, Stephen Gill, OUP 1999
Dorothy Wordsworth, Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, OUP 1985
Frances Thomas was born in Wales during the war, lived most of her life in London, and now lives in mid-Wales. She went to London University and is married to Richard Rathbone, a professor of African history. She’s written many books for young people, as well as a couple of adult novels, a biography of Christina Rossetti, and recently poetry. She has won the Welsh Books Council Tir na nOg prize and Scottish Arts Council award for her children’s books.
www.francesthomas.org
Featured image is ‘Looking down across the Miners Trail, Snowdonia National Park’, by Josh Kirk, from Unsplash
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