Bred of Heaven (35 page)

‘Preseli,' I say. ‘No need to climb that.' Preseli is the mountain in Pembrokeshire that loomed over my grandfather's childhood. Silence. Maybe I should just compile the list in my head.

‘The Black Mountain.' Now I'm being provocative. E— has a soft spot for the Black Mountain, though she's not been up it. (No point.)

‘Aren't we doing that tomorrow?'

‘That's the Black Mountains. Plural. Totally separate.'

We keep going. Fields come and go, and kissing gates and ODP signposts. We refuel on
bara brith
at the moated White Castle, scene of dire conflict once, now stormed by tots unstrapped from car seats. Will this afternoon ever end? A squad of shiny horseflies have mistaken my sweaty head for dung. The mind grows heretical.

‘Snowdon.'

‘What?'

‘You heard me.'

‘Why Snowdon?'

‘Too big.' My mood is marvellously foul. ‘And crowded.'

That's one thing I will say for day two. We meet barely a soul. This corner of Wales is ours, all ours.

We roll in at six o'clock, lower limbs as flexible as marble. The list of what's still to come is suddenly daunting, starting with day three: Llangattock Lingoed to Hay-on-Wye: 19.5 miles. Then Hay-on-Wye to Kington: 14.5. Kington to Knighton: 13.5. Knighton to Churchtown: 12 (strenuous hills!). Churchtown to Buttington Bridge: 16.5. Buttington Bridge to Trefonen: 16.3. Trefonen to Llangollen: 13. Llangollen to Bwlch Penbarras: 18.6. Bwlch Penbarras to Prestatyn: 20.7. Apparently the path crosses the border nine times.

The distances look increasingly monstrous but compared to others who have trekked across Wales they are nothing. ‘A walk of six and thirty miles from Caerwent to Usk,' noted Warner breezily. On another day: ‘We set off for Rhaiddar-Gowy, a town at the
distance of thirty-two miles.' One morning they did eleven miles before breakfasting in Abergavenny. Borrow perambulated no less stridently. ‘Having now walked twenty miles in a broiling day I thought it high time to take some refreshment.' One day he left for Holyhead, ‘seventeen miles distant', at four in the afternoon. He walked the fourteen miles from Llangollen to Ruthin and then back again. ‘I always walk in Wales,' he advised an Italian staying in the same hotel in Snowdonia. ‘Then you will have a rather long walk, signore; for Bangor is thirty-four miles from here.' He boasted that he could cover four and a half miles an hour.

And then there is Kilvert. Saturday, 26 February 1870: ‘A lovely morning so I set off to walk over the hills to Colva, taking my luncheon in my pocket, half a dozen biscuits, two apples and a small flask of wine. Took also a pocket book and opera glasses … Very hot walking.' After a twenty-mile round trip, he was back in time to dress for dinner.

Francis Kilvert served as curate in Clyro in Radnorshire for seven years from 1865. The diary he kept of his daily rounds, much of which was destroyed – it's presumed by his widow – was exhumed and published in the 1930s. It is a priceless record of country life in Victorian Wales. Kilvert had a huge relish for oral history gleaned from elderly parishioners, the more sensational in flavour the better. But long swathes might have been written in any century. The local characters who live and breathe in his pages – wizened peasants, mannered gentry and voluptuous farm girls, wassailers and drovers fighting outside the Sun Inn in Clyro – are somehow timeless archetypes. He also had an extraordinary eye for the rural rota, for nature's intoxicating variegations, the turn of the seasons from crushing heat to withering cold. As he walked tirelessly about the Wye Valley, his response to the world around him gilded his prose with lush Wordsworthian tints.

Of the parish's scenes of solitude he wrote, ‘There dwells among them a spirit of quiet and gentle melancholy more congenial and akin to my own spirit than full life and gaiety and noise.' Kilvert developed such a profound attachment to the Black Mountains and the hills around Hay and Clyro that, although he was no Welshman, they have since become known as Kilvert Country.

We approach Kilvert Country at the southern foot of the Black Mountains. The route to Hay-on-Wye is long and high. And rain is confidently predicted. We start early. At eight in the morning after a mile or so I am pleased to report that I look over my left shoulder and can see the indisputable notch in the summit of the Skirrid. They call it Holy Mountain though its forked profile looks much more like the wrathful work of the devil. We cross the road and the railway that lead into England and head sharply upwards. As we gain height, clouds close in, rain spits, sheep scatter. Heather smothers the tops and the mountain falls away on both sides. Nowhere can there be a clearer sense of walking along a frontier than on the Hatterall Ridge. Hang-gliders or suicides have a clear choice up here: to hurl themselves into England or into Wales. National temperament seems written into the landscape. To the right, England exudes a rolling, self-satisfied contentment while Wales retreats towards the horizon in a series of wild convulsions.

Through binoculars I look out obsessively for Waun Fach, the summit of the range whose pimply peak nature in its wisdom has made visible only if you're this high up. Thanks to the weather it's all change. Cumulus crashes against the eastern wall of the ridge like a gigantic wave. Gusts of wind push clouds across the protean mountainscape as if drawing curtains back and forth in front of a stage set. One minute you see nothing, the next the Vale of Ewyas is laid at your feet. Llanthony Priory materialises at the floor of the valley, another Cistercian relic open to the skies. ‘On our left we
passed the noble monastery of Llanthony in its great circle of mountains,' recorded Gerald of Wales coming down the valley from the other end as part of the Archbishop of Canterbury's great caravan of proselytisers eight centuries earlier. It's less a circle, in fact, than a long narrow canyon ‘no more than three arrow-shots in width'. Gerald noted approvingly that the abbey was ‘roofed in with sheets of lead'. Thanks to the Reformation, you now have to imagine the roof.

There's something perfect about Llanthony. It's rumoured that St David lived there as a hermit, which was enough to persuade one and then another hermit to follow suit until an Augustinian monastery was endowed, then a priory built. One night in 1327 it housed the dethroned Edward II, shortly to be murdered. The young Turner captured Llanthony's lonely ravishing essence, then Walter Savage Landor bought the estate in 1807, fired by dreams of picturesque rural seclusion. But his stay was short-lived. When he vanished irascibly abroad, he left his creditors and Mother Nature to continue the process of dilapidation.

In the spring of 1870 Kilvert made a memorable pilgrimage over the Gospel Pass from the north. The day trip brought out his hottempered side. ‘What was our horror,' he exclaimed, ‘on entering the enclosure to see two tourists … postured among the ruins in an attitude of admiration.' One of them was pointing out features of interest among the remains. ‘If there is one thing more hateful than another it is being told what to admire and having objects pointed out to one with a stick. Of all noxious animals too the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, illbred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.' He and his companion had the long walk home to Clyro to calm their nerves. ‘We were rather tired with our 25 miles' walk, but not extraordinarily so.'

The Offa's Dyke Path continues for mile upon mile along the
ridge, past Lord Hereford's Knob to the rounded summit of Hay Bluff from where the spectacular work of the Wye, the valley carved by its passage as it wanders carelessly off into England, now becomes apparent. We can see most of Radnorshire. Somewhere down there, buttressed on the other side by yet more hills, are Kilvert's haunts, Hay-on-Wye and Clyro. Off to the left is the northern flank of the Black Mountains, lined up like ships' prows as if forever jostling for position. The only way from here is down, four sapping miles across long sloping moorland.

Hay is asleep in August after the second-hand bookshops have closed. Those who have walked over the ridge are soon asleep too. Three days and fifty-three miles are up. We are officially acclimatised, as is clear from the furious pace set the next morning as we cross the glistening Wye and head into the hills above Clyro. I hope Kilvert would approve of our failure to visit his church and point sticks at his memory. Instead, we pass along his wooded paths. ‘The beauty of the view was indescribable,' he said of the valley. Behind, the Black Mountains stand sentry on the horizon. After a few steep miles we reach the village of Newchurch, where Kilvert one May morning was slightly disgusted to find the clergyman's young daughters busy castrating lambs. ‘But I made allowance for them and considered in how rough a way the poor children have been brought up, so that they thought no harm of it, and I forgave them.' Kilvert had a soft spot for young girls. To one of them in the Newchurch school he offered a kiss for every correct sum. He doesn't specify her age, but it's clear she flirted with him outrageously. ‘Shall I confess that I travelled ten miles today over the hills for a kiss, to kiss that child's sweet face? Ten miles for a kiss.'

The diaries of his that survive are a catalogue of pining for unobtainable females, some too grand, others too young. When he returned to England in 1872, he and the entire neighbourhood with
him seem to have gone into mourning (‘These people will break my heart with their affectionate lamentations'). Among the parting gifts he took away with him was
Wordsworth's Complete Works
. In 1877 he returned to the Wye as vicar in Bredwardine, just over the border. In his fortieth year, his search for a mate came to an end when finally he married. Within months he had died of peritonitis.

The path leaves Kilvert Country and rises onto Hergest Ridge, halfway along which we walk into England. I haven't made a note of how many counties you can see from the top but it's presumably several. I produce my opera glasses, as Kilvert would have called them, and survey the lumps and miscellaneous humps of the West Country: the Cotswolds, the Malverns, a couple of odd-looking paps somewhere off in Herefordshire. To the west, of course, the drama is altogether more operatic. A bunch of Brecon Beacons, the Black Mountains, possibly Pumlumon looking like a ne'er-do-well scruff in the back row. Somewhere to the north, faint shadows suggest themselves. The magnificence stills the tongue and swells the heart. And look, nudging out from round the side of the Black Mountains, now decidedly to the south, is the good old Skirrid – hurrah! – to which my feelings are now entirely charitable as it raises its two fingers out to piddling English peaks.

Sixty-six miles down.

The next morning the wind is raising its fists, and the skies have a thuggish edge. At the top of a blustery hill we keep our long-awaited appointment with Offa's Dyke, which has come along from England. It carves a field in twain, running in from the east. We reach it, take a left and follow it. And follow it. For miles and miles, for days and days. It's not much to look at, you think as you look at it. It's a mound of earth. It would hardly hold back a Welsh marauder. The dyke's footling size provokes comparable sniggers to those unleashed at the knee-high Hadrian's Wall.

In places the boundary is indeed unassuming. But 1,200 years on, at other points it is still very remarkable. Offa's engineers took care to heap the earth up from the Welsh side, so at its highest points a Mercian on the dyke would have towered ten feet over a Welshman in the neighbouring ditch. There are points over the next few days when I stand on the Welsh side and – imaginarily stripping away the foliage, the trees and bushes, the breaches in its flanks made by badgers and rabbits, the cows and sheep peacefully grazing on its grassy crest – I am looking at a Saxon prototype of the Iron Curtain.

There seems little doubt that where all it needed to be was a boundary line, that's what it was. Where it needed to be a fortification, it swelled to altogether more threatening dimensions. It did the trick, not just in the reign of Offa but for centuries afterwards. ‘There was a time,' Borrow's guide in Llangollen tells him, ‘when it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it. Let us be thankful that we are now more humane to each other.'

The dyke puts me a pickle. No aspiring Welshman should grow too fond of any symbol of English oppression. But the Welsh have long since adopted as their own the Norman castles erected to suppress them. Offa's Dyke, being predominantly in Wales, has also been subsumed into the heritage. Besides, nowadays you have a different physical relationship with it. In the old days Welshmen will have come at it perpendicularly. No one will have walked the length of it. So the scale of the achievement is really only clear to modern hikers.

The sheer obsessive relentlessness of it takes the breath away. The shape it cuts across the rolling landscape, admitting no impediment as it scales the likes of Herrock, Llanfair, Selattyn hills and
plunges down the other side, resembles the twisting track of a subterranean serpent. And everywhere it passes, the view to the west is unimpeded. If you were standing on the dyke, you would have seen the Welsh coming.

It was built, it is thought, in the final dozen years of Offa's thirty-nine-year reign, once Welsh resistance to Mercian supremacy in the borderlands had been quashed. The closest contemporary account is from the Welsh-born Bishop Asser's
Life of King Alfred
, written perhaps a century later. He refers to ‘rex nomine Offa qui vallum magnum inter Britannium atque Merciam de mari usque ad mare fieri imperavit' – a king named Offa who ordered a great wall to be between Britain and Mercia from sea to sea. Offa was evidently as ruthless as any of Wales's other conquerors. William of Malmesbury, the Anglo-Norman historian, noted after another century had elapsed that ‘in the same character, vices were so palliated by virtues, and at another virtues came in such quick succession upon vices, that it is difficult to determine how to characterise the changing Proteus'. In
Beowulf
, the great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is an encomium to another older Offa, a king who through military might had successfully fixed a border with a neighbouring enemy. One scholar suggests the lines are ‘hard to account for unless it was a compliment to his great Mercian namesake'. A thirteenth-century deed refers to ‘Offediche' in Shropshire.