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| Travels, Travellers, Rivers, Mountains, Towns, Nations , Wales and Further , August 6, 2025 |
Place, and writing about place, have been important in the making of the cultural image of Wales. Many of these articles and reviews were written for Wales Arts Review (2012-2024).9 January 2025: Andrew Green “Voices on the Path” “Voices on the Path” is a book of a replete 352 pages. It has 51 illustrations and is produced on paper of quality. It is a lucid, far-reaching study of an important part of the collective experience of Wales. The subtitle is “A History of Walking in Wales.” If the world speeds up, and much human busy-ness with it, the act of walking remains much as it has been. The impetus is various: necessity, pleasure, enlightenment, curiosity.” * * * * 22 July 2022: Jim Perrin “the Rivers of Wales” Dwyfor, Teifi, Wye, Cynfal, Dwyryd, Glaslyn, Dyfi, Dysynni: “Rivers of Wales" is a complement to "the Hills of Wales" (2016). Hills and river exist in symbiosis. The valleys make the uplands and the uplands make the valleys. The upland terrain works as a giant sponge, soaking up the rain. In Perrin's metaphor the high land acts "as midwife to many rivers. Mynydd Hiraethog, Y Migneint, Waunygriafolen...all these have their river-children." * * * * 10th July 2022: “An Open Door” “An Open Door” does not begin promisingly. The editor has a bee in his bonnet that travel, and its writing, are a hegemonic domain for the rich. “Prior to the mid-twentieth century, leisured travel was largely the preserve of a wealthy elite.” The Reverend Kilvert in his journals from Clyro was complaining about the excess of tourists. The platform at Aberystwyth is of its huge length to accommodate trains with eighteen carriages packed with visitors in the town's Edwardian heyday. * * * * 3rd November 2019: Adam Somerset “The Road to Bwlch Y Groes” John Malchair, Catherine Hutton in the Upper Dyfi Valley “Now the country becomes suddenly Welsh and we enter a region of Mountains, here English is an acquired language and much wors spoaken than French in England, by no means so common…The trees are small and twisting often More picturesque than luxuriant timber trees.” * * * * 1 November 2019: Adam Somerset “In the Steps of George Borrow” Machynlleth to Dinas Mawddywy “George Borrow was not at ease when he was here. “At Dinas Mawddwy I stood single. The people eyed me as a phenomenon, with countenances mixed with fear and inquiry. Perhaps they took me for an inspector of taxes.” * * * * 4 June 2019: Rebecca Loncraine “Skybound” “The flights in the glider start in the Black Mountains, the place of the family home, and move to New Zealand and Nepal. The book is clear in its motivation. The treatment for her first illness was gruelling. “My life had unravelled” she writes. A partner had gone and she was four stone lighter. Her hair was wiry and she bore a scar from surgery The result “made me feel excluded from nature...rejected from the natural order of things...broken and scarred”. Metaphorically “the ground had already disappeared from beneath me”. The response was to fly. “I have been needing to find a language, a context, through which my suffering can speak.” * * * * 08 August 2018: Menna Elfyn “Absolute Optimist” “Absolute Optimist”- the description is by Phillips of herself- is a significant addition to the public record. The entry for Wikipedia is crisp but gets to the core: “Eluned Phillips (27 October 1914 – 10 January 2009) was the only woman to win the bardic crown at the National Eisteddfod of Wales twice, a feat she accomplished in 1967 at Bala and 1983 at Llangefni...She died of pneumonia, aged 94, at Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen. At the time of her death she was the oldest member of the Gorsedd of Bards.” * * * * 03 August 2018: Kathryn J Cooper “Exodus from Cardiganshire” “Among the counties of Wales Ceredigion has experienced the largest population drop through emigration. Among the thousands who departed was Anna Lloyd Jones from Blaenralltddu, near Rhydowen. She, with her parents and 6 siblings, sailed from the thriving port of Cardigan in 1844. In 1867 a son was christened Frank Lincoln Wright. He later changed his name in honour of his Welsh ancestry to Frank Lloyd Wright” * * * * 19 June 2018: Bettina Harden “The Most Glorious Prospect” Plas Newydd, Tan-y-Bwlch, Penrhyn, Hafod, Picton, Dynevor, Stackpole, Margam “Its subject is 16 gardens of Wales. North to south it covers Baron Hill, close to Beaumaris, to Piercefield in the Wye valley. Those in the north include Plas Newydd, Tan-y-Bwlch, Penrhyn. Those south of the Severn are well-known names: Hafod, Picton, Dynevor, Stackpole, Margam. Among the illustrations there are some highlights. Alice Douglas-Pennant painted Powys Castle garden in beguiling watercolour in 1892. A print of Devil's Bridge from the nineteenth century gives the location a harmony and elegance lacking in 2018. An unknown artist of 1667 renders Llanerch from an aerial view. In a piece of eye-bending perspective the round pond is rendered vertically to show off the statue of Neptune.” * * * * 29 May 2018: Russell Davies “Sex, Sects and Society” “In the late 1930s almost ten percent of the population was on the TB register. Clement Davies was author of a scathing report on the provision of services. Wales contained seven of the top ten counties for deaths. Some of the remedies- the injection of olive oil, creosote, copper cyanvirate, pig-spleen extract- were themselves lethal. Across rural Wales the rule stood: “coughing in, coffin out.” * * * * 20 February 2018: Alan Phillips “The Cinemas of West Wales” “Most of the venues have gone to demolition or other purposes. But in a culture of visual excess some cinemas in the west are thriving. The Memorial Hall in Newquay is once again showing films. The Lantern House in Tywyn has revived a beautiful historic building. Mark Bond and Geoff Hill have decorated the interior with murals from cinema's history; Don Corleone, Laurel and Hardy, Hitchcock are among the vivid figures who look upon the new audiences. The 1877 Gerlan Chapel in Borth has become the opulent Libanus cinema-eatery.” * * * * 29 January 2018: Horatio Clare “Icebreaker” “His engagement was sparked by a friend from school days, Pekka Isosomppi, later at the press office of the Finnish Embassy in London. Isosomppi is a name that is distinctive and Clare goes on to depict a people of the same distinctiveness. He starts on land with the sharpest of eyes. In the architecture of Helsinki he discerns strains of Prague and Trieste. He touches lightly on the history: Mannerheim’s declaration of independence from Russia in revolution, the Winter War of 1939-1940 in which the Finns held off Soviet invasion remarkably. Clare greatly likes the modern society of 2017 and its governmental initiatives are compared admirably against those of Britain. As for the individuals they, and their language, are not as we.” * * * * 17 January 2018: David Lloyd Owen “A Wilder Wales” Milford, Tregaron, Tenby, Monmouth, Llanberis “David Lloyd Owen's work has been considerable. His book's subtitle is “Travellers' Tales 1610-1831.” His book of 445 pages distills the writings of thirty-six authors over two centuries and groups it into ten themes. The original accounts exceed two million words. His authors include two women although that lively and percipient author Catherine Hutton comes outside his time scale. The observations cover every variety of mood and tone.” * * * * 18 October 2017: Simon Raven & Paul Scott India * * * * 15 October 2017: Barney White-Spunner “Partition” India * * * * 09 November 2016: Jim Perrin “the Hills of Wales” Moel Mamau, Penycloddiau. Y Twmpa, Carmarthen Van, Carn Ingli “From Mynydd Moel he walks down a southern slope and sees the view that Richard Wilson saw for his 1765 painting in London's Tate Britain. The Perrin eye on an eighteen inch by two feet canvas is as sharp as the eye that roams rock and field. Wilson's work is “all russets and Payne's grey with the palest blues and greens and a touch of gold on foreground boulders which root its conceptual diagonals firmly in the landscape.” The writing often takes on an compelling quality of incantation. A bravura passage on walking in moonlight begins with “All was silence. Shadowy secrecies of the night held sway.” He continues with evocation of Camus' “invincible summer” of the heart and Bach's Partita in D. On the Glaslyn estuary he remembers that it was for Shelley the view without peer. Perrin looks in the same vein towards Moel Ddu “fading at twilight into milky indigo shadow, all detail lost of woods like old brocade across its flanks.” * * * * 17 August 2016: “A Companion Guide to the National Museum of Wales” Penarth, Swansea, Nantgarw, Brynkinallt, Gower, Blaenau Ffestiniog “The one hundred and fifty mini-essays roam across history and aesthetics, biography and art history, quotation and matters of technique, ownership and commercial passage. Oliver Fairclough opens with six pages on the stages of formation of the institution itself. In 1882 William Menelaus, manager of the Dowlais iron and steel works, is donor of thirty-eight paintings. James Pyke Thompson, a director of the milling firm Spillers, is creator of Turner House in Penarth and owner of extensive watercolours, oils and ceramics. Chemist Robert Drane is instrumental in building the collection of ceramics, including the porcelains from Swansea and Nantgarw.” * * * * 01 July 2016: “Coleridge in Wales” Machynlleth, St Clears, Laugharne, Creselly, Bala “Coleridge was steeped in the Idealism of Schelling. But before he was in Germany he was here. He and Wordsworth reinvented poetry with their collaboration “Lyrical Ballads” but four years previously, in 1794, he was here in Machynlleth. Leaving Cambridge University he set off on a walking tour of Wales. In a place that was little visited he conceived a utopian concept of “pantisocracy”, a government by all and for all. His idea was an egalitarian community on the banks of the Susquehanna river in Pennsylvania. His friend Robert Southey cast doubt over the project’s viability.” * * * * 16 November 2015 “A William Condry Reader” Ponterwyd, Rhandirmwyn, Aeron, Dyfi, Llanidloes, Ynyshir “Condry’s book “the Natural History of Wales”, found in a Hay-on-Wye bookshop, was her first introduction. Researching an opera for children she read the minutes of the Kite Committee. Condry would attend its meetings, his journey from Ponterwyd to Rhandirmwyn made by bicycle. To know what that entails requires attention to the landscape. Gwyneth Lewis celebrates attention, that quality that Simone Weill elevated in her spiritual writings. “William Condry’s attention to the world around him has shaped my sense of the Welsh landscape.” Underlining quite why such attention- “clarity and depth of field”- matters, she writes “I see little distinction between the skills needed to be a good writer and a good naturalist.” * * * * 12 November 2015: Angela V John “The Actors’ Crucible” “The Actors’ Crucible”, a study of the extraordinary profusion of actors that has flowed from Port Talbot, is a change of direction, as well as a book of personal association. The opening line of her acknowledgements reads “this subject crept up on me and took me over”. A further thanks, unusually, is given to her publisher for the deviation, albeit temporary, from the book she was supposed to be submitting.” * * * * 03 August 2015: Trevor Fishlock “A Gift of Sunlight” “The Gwendoline and Margaret Davies Charity has produced in “A Gift of Sunlight”- handsomely produced by Gomer- a book to tell the story of the unique bequest that is the foundation stone of the national collection. The charity’s chosen author Trevor Fishlock does justice to his mix of turbulent history and boldness of aesthetic judgement- driven by a belief in the ennobling quality of beauty- of great wealth joined to modesty of living and personal humility. That blue of the dress, comments Fishlock in his attention to the fine grain of the detail of history, owed much to the astonishing leaps in the chemistry of the time. Fishlock tells of the eighteen-year old prodigy William Perkin in his reeking workshop in London’s East End. His experiments with coal were intended to find artificial quinine to combat the malaria that was endemic all over the Empire. Instead he discovered a brilliant dye that did not fade, the source of his subsequent vast fortune.” * * * * 22 June 2015: Jon Gower “Gwalia Patagonia” Gwalia Patagonia” opens with a picture taken by the author himself. A lonely, tiny chapel against background of windblown trees and giant sky, it is perfect emblem for book and subject. A line on the adjacent page states that the book’s royalties are for donation to Ysgol y Cwm, Esquel. The single paragraph on the same page is indicator that this is more than a piece of commemorative year publishing tie-in. Jon Gower is a wordsmith. His book is “a visit to the site, in South America, of the most enduring overseas venture ever sustained by the Welsh.” * * * * 18 April 2015: David Fraser Jenkins “William Wilkins” “Wilkins’ infinitely painstaking methodology is a challenge to the camera. The gradual application of the paint, tiny stroke upon tiny stroke, is the opposite to what the camera sensor, however sophisticated, seeks. It searches for a certainty of line for its focus, precisely the element that Wilkins’ method dissolves. It is reassuring that Graffeg’s fine and deep images are simulacra rather than replications. The work itself remains triumphantly a Ding an Sich.” * * * * 11 March 2015 Horatio Clare “A Single Swallow” Brighton to Barcelona to Cape Town “In the iconography of tattoos a swallow on a sailor means five thousand miles travelled at sea, an occasional second swallow ten thousand miles. Clare touches on the sexual habits of his birds. Male display comprises “soaring and diving above their territory, singing and flaunting their tails.” If a female takes the cue “the male will land, fan his tale, give his enticement call and point out his suggested nest site with pecking gestures.” Fidelity over the years is not easy with a twelve thousand mile journey each year. Between a third and a half of all nests contain a chick from another father.” * * * * 03 October 2014: Dannie Abse “Goodbye, Twentieth Century” “A galaxy of poets gathers to celebrate his eightieth birthday. “The Presence” wins the Wales Book of the Year award for all the comically bungled ceremony. After a lecture given by Jan Morris a fan tells him how much he has enjoyed the biography of Philip Larkin, not that he has written one. Sombrely, brother Leo dies: “he can rightly be termed Britain’s top reformer of the twentieth century, having inspired nine Private Member’s Acts.” All have been “designed to heal troubled personal relationships… eschewed by more timorous politicians.” * * * * 17 September 2014: Glyn Rhys “A Celtic Canvas” “Glyn Rhys’ book on Carey Morris is a slim book of great elegance. Y Lolfa is its own printer and binder and has done its subject proud. Morris' work is all privately held with the exception of one portrait in Carmarthenshire's County Museum and four in the National Library. For the landscapes and less formal portraiture the reader is dependent on the quality of Y Lolfa's reproduction. The book has a format of eight by six inches with many pictures represented full-page. Those like “Daf'ir Felin as a Fisherman” and “Ann” are beautifully rendered with great subtlety of hue in the colouring.” * * * * 10 August 2014:John Davies & Marian Delyth “Wales: the 100 Places to See Before You Die” “Wales: the 100 Places to See Before You Die” is a heavyweight of a book, a kilogram and a half in weight. It has three hundred and sixty photographs of Wales in all seasons and a text of gravity from an author who conveys an impression of delight taken in the task. John Davies’ descriptions are richly detailed, with a light sprinkle of reminiscence, in a prose with a personal sparkle to it.” * * * * 04 February 2014: Isobel Williams “Edgar Evans” Gower, Swansea, Antarctica “Her opening chapters deftly capture not just the early years but the sheer strangeness of a hundred-years-past Britain. Evans is born on the Gower 7th March 1876, the fourth of eighth children. In 1883 the family moves to a standard two-up, two-down terrace in nearby boomtown Copperopolis, with a then population of fifty thousand. Williams conveys the flavour of the city with its unchecked pollution, poor quality water and perennial lurking diseases of typhoid, measles and scarlet fever. At age ten Evans is a “half-timer”, half school and half work, on a shilling a week. As a telegraph messenger boy he is obliged by decree of the Head Post Master to begin every day with musket training and drilling.” * * * * 21 January 2014 France: Monty Don “The Road to Le Tholonet” * * * * 07 January 2014 Paul Theroux “The Last Train to Zona Verde” * * * * 15 August 2013: Ann Drysdale “Real Newport” “Newport is a city more remarked upon by what it has not got. It has no fine visitor-attracting cathedral. St Woolas, Ann Drysdale narrates, was a parish church until 1921, then a pro-cathedral, and not a cathedral in its own right until 1949. The city castle is a rump marooned on a traffic island. It had a university in its own name, with a distinguished track record in media and arts, but that went in the winter of 2013 to join a larger agglomeration. The items of economic news that hit the headlines are more often negatives, led by retail’s most famous name shoving off for an out-of-town motorway-hugging mall.” * * * * 01 March 2013 Jim Perrin “Snowden” “The writing of Jim Perrin fits, or spans, the twin genres of travel and mountaineering. ‘Snowdon’ is both these, but in addition it comes clothed in scholarly regalia. It closes with a detailed, critical bibliography reaching back to George Borrow and Theodore Watts-Dunton. It is rich in idiosyncratic, occasionally battling, footnotes that regularly take over a half-page or more of the main text. ‘Snowdon’ is part treatise- just how ought these small zones of wildness to be treated- part tour through history, part homage to rock and scree, and their challenge to climbers, and part celebration of Snowdon’s sheer, unquenchable Welshness. To all this a dash of Perrin-esque polemic is added. “ * * * * 03 January 2013: Andrew Blum “Tubes. Behind the Scenes at the Internet” “Next Generation Data is a stone’s throw from Newport’s Tredegar House. The company is a beneficiary of the great Lucky Goldstar project, signed off in 1996 by then Secretary of State William Hague, which never came about. Next Generation is Europe’s leading provider of ‘premium carrier-neutral co-location data centres.’ Andrew Blum in ‘Tubes’ does not get to Newport but he does get to a Google data centre, or colloquially ‘a server farm’, on Oregon’s mighty Columbia River.” * * * * 10 October 2012:Martin Johnes “Wales Since 1939” Holyhead, Carmarthen, Swansea, Cardiff “The art in writing history is that easy swing between high affairs of state and the telling details of real lives lived. From the perspective of now it is difficult to conceive quite how far away is that world of just a handful of decades ago. Snobbery may be innate in human affairs but Johnes describes an age where it is rampant. The head of Swansea University objects to professors and lecturers featuring on the same radio programme. It is, he says, akin to the mixing of officers and men. He himself is naturally a socialist but his children are sent to Eton.” * * * * 25 September 2012: Jean Sprackland “Strands” Gronant, Point of Ayr, Clwydian Hills “The dunes of Gronant, beyond Point of Ayr, are among other things a protected home for the natterjack toad. The natterjack features early on in Jean Sprackland’s intense meditation on the stretch of dune and beach that runs between Formby Point and Southport Pier. She visits at night, switches her torch off, keeps quite still and exults in the din the toads make, ‘a riot of amphibian sex going on all around us, eternal and moonlit.’ * * * * 12 August 2012: Jonathan Raban “Coasting” Snowdon, Sugar Loaf, Scafell Pike, St David’s, Ramsey Island “The point of departure of his little ketch is not quite clear but he has an epiphany in experiencing the sheer island-ness of the British Isles. Five hours out from the Isle of Man he can see land in all directions, a small pointed atoll, a lumpier one, ‘a definite smoky pimple in the sea at 046 degrees and a smudge at about 012 degrees’. These are, in turn, the peak of Snowdon, the Sugar Loaf in the Wicklow Hills, Scafell Pike and the distant smudge the mountains of Galloway.” * * * * 24 July 2012: William Least Heat-Moon “River-Horse”/ “the Roads to Quoz” River Hudson to Oregon estuary “ts virtues are a relentless focus on the passage, the water, the obstacles, the sense of history. Chapters start with quotations from Lewis and Clark and other travellers who have gone before. It is enlivened by small human touches. When a man appears to guide the boat through a construction area he records “I did a little jig.” * * * * 20 July 2012: Craig Taylor “Londoners” “Taylor is good on the city’s physical fabric. He opens and closes with the pilot’s view. There is a paradox to the view from above. Fly in on a sunny day from the Essex marshes and London looks a stretch of amiable greenery. Down on the ground an arboriculturalist tells him of the different soils and the ways in which trees deal with clay or sandy, gravelly affluvium. A character called Smartie remembers that London not so long ago had great swathes of dereliction. The Barrie Keefe-scripted film “The Long Good Friday” still stands up as a cracking piece of action but it also has the status of a fascinating historical document.” * * * * 30 May 2012: Jeremy Moore and Jon Gower “Wales at Water's Edge” Severn Estuary to Dee “Gower captures colour in words as much as Moore in image. He sees pewter clouds, a marl-coloured lighthouse, water of bottle-green stains, a night of richest velvet. Bird’s-foot trefoil is carmine-yellow. The petals of kidney-vetch are tiny purple fireworks. Cefn Sidan has a long history of shipwreck; its fate in an age of modernity is to be turned orange by a wrecked consignment of sun tan lotion.” * * * * 26 April 2012: “Real South Pembrokeshire” Caldey, Carew, Manorbier, Narberth, Haverfordwest, Cresswell “Yellowhammer” printed across two lines loses its hyphen so that the author admires “yellow hammers.” The Nantucket whalers were invited to Milford in 1792 not “in the last years of the seventeenth century”. The death toll at Landshipping’s mining disaster of 1844 is the wrong number. The future Henry VII was born in January 1457, not 1456. Jasper Tudor was his uncle, not his father.” * * * * 30 March 2012: Mike Parker “Real Powys” Presteigne, Llandrindod, Llansantffraid-yn-Mechain, Rhayader “Mike Parker, in the fourteenth of Peter Finch’s series for Seren, travels to every corner. He relishes a perfectly toasted tea cake in Presteigne’s Radnorshire Arms. He sees conference delegates buffeting in Llandrindod’s mighty Metropole. Llandod itself, reports a spikey footnote, has the County’s worst unemployment rate. He admires the marvellously jumbled architecture of Llansantffraid-yn-Mechain. When he rides the Heart of Wales Railway the conductor tells him he is only the third passenger he has ever picked up at Sugar Loaf Halt.” * * * * 05 March 2012: Jeremy Moore “Pembrokeshire Journeys and Stories” St Dogmael's, Gwbert, Fishguard, Pentre Ifan, Abereiddi, Nevern. “Jeremy Moore is photographer for “Pembrokeshire Journeys and Stories”, his images augmented by text by Trevor Fishlock. It is the best book on Pembrokeshire. Jeremy Moore’s contribution to this luminous celebration of Wales’ westernmost county comprises one hundred and eighteen photographs. Moore is not just present on coast and islands. He is witness to orchids, lilies and lichen. When sighting Skomer he takes the long view of veils of mist and the close-up view of a pertly posed puffin.” * * * * 30 August 2010: Biblical Art in Wales” edited Martin O’Kane & John Morgan-Guy Pontargothi, Pentrobyn, Llanfair Cilgedin, Robeston Wathen, Nebo, Bethesda, Bethel. “The geography of Wales itself has a biblical stamp. Nebo on the Lampeter to Llanrhystud road is one of several and it is the same with Bethesda and Bethel. There is a Caesarea and a Golan close to Porthmadog. Much of the art in the book comes from distinguished names. Jonah Jones adopted Catholicism as inspiration for his life work. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan alights on Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Annunciation of 2004 and Claudia Williams’ Madonna and Child of 1983 as examples of artists choosing biblical narrative for subject matter. John Selway in his fourteen Stations of the Cross in Abertillery has, she says, politics rather than faith for its motivation” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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