by Oliver Balch
Above, he had his own living room. I imagine the gentle-spirited churchman sitting here daydreaming by the fire. Perhaps a much-leafed compendium of William Wordsworth’s poetry open in his lap, the Bard of Rydal Mount’s soft lyricism wafting up off the page, intoxicating the devoted admirer with its pastoral fumes.
His private bedroom was located in the attic, through the window of which swallows would occasionally come ‘dashing … and rustling round the room’. There was no bathroom in the house, a fact borne out one chilly Christmas Day when Kilvert trudges outside with his towel and discovers his bath frozen over. He breaks the surface and climbs in, bravely ignoring the sharp edges of ice that continue to jut out from the tub’s sides ‘like chevaux de frise’. Even by the standards of Victorian grit, Kilvert has to admit that the experience was ‘not particularly comforting’.
Such hardships did not put off a keen Kilvertian from taking up residency in the same house a century later. Mr A. L. Le Quesne, a schoolmaster from Jersey, had stumbled on the Diary in a second-hand bookshop during a lonely posting in Hobart, Tasmania. For the homesick teacher, Kilvert’s beatific descriptions proved ‘one of the shaping encounters’ of his life.
So much so, in fact, that a little over a decade later, Mr Le Quesne, by that time a teacher at Shrewsbury School, decided to actually move to Clyro. His timing was well chosen. The year was 1970, exactly a hundred years after Kilvert started his diary and thus the marker for a number of centenary celebrations.
As serendipity would have it, he found Ashbrook House on the market. The avid Kilvert fan took a look round but was left sadly disappointed. As he recorded in his own diary, he found the property ‘big, grim [and] shabby’. Still, the temptation to follow in his hero’s footsteps proved too great and he bought it all the same.
Le Quesne ended up staying several years, an experience he recounts in an intriguing book called After Kilvert. In it, he spends much of his time tracking down places referenced in the Diary and the account is at its best when he’s sniffing around old cottages or retracing Kilvert’s routes across the hills.
All is not what it was, he quickly discovers. Buildings have been lost, paths ploughed up and woodlands cut down. Yet he pursues his quest earnestly and with great enthusiasm, and the result is a touching homage from one diarist to another.
Le Quesne’s encounter with present-day Clyro lacks the passion he harbours for yesteryear’s version of the village. His disaffection starts with Ashbrook House, which he quickly realises is in even worse repair than he first thought. The plumbing is primitive, the proportions ‘all wrong’ and the air damp. ‘Awkward looking’, ‘desolate’ and ‘socially abnormal’ feature among his summary adjectives, with the best he can dredge up being the house’s ‘fascinating varieties of level’.
He is no less disappointed by the village as a whole. Far from the rural Arcadia conjured up in the Diary, he judges Clyro bereft of either coherence or character, ‘a ragged street of odds and ends’ in which nothing relates and the buildings ignore each other.
Revealing a latent snobbery, the public-school educator looks with particular distaste at the sight of retired Birmingham businessmen moving into the area and building themselves ‘lavish, suburban-looking bungalows’.
Although Le Quesne couldn’t have known it at the time, these incomers from the West Midlands were but the early pioneers of an urban exodus that would see Clyro’s boundaries spread. Today, the electoral roll abounds with surnames ‘from off’, names unheard of in the parish until now. Januszewski, Littlefair, McNamara, Doyle, Balch.
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Leaving Kilvert’s lodgings behind, the group begins to drift off along the road in the direction of the church. Opposite the little side lane beside Ashbrook House stands Bridge Stores & Post Office. Petite and pokey, it occupies one end of a twin-roofed stone cottage. Notices advertising plumber services and dog trainers fill the large square window at the front. A ‘Closed’ sign hangs on the door. It won’t be open again until Monday.
Mrs Hood, a stalwart of the Women’s Institute and fount of information about all local goings-on, has run the shop for close to thirty years. Every weekday morning, at about ten minutes to nine, a cluster of old ladies gathers on the doorstep. Ostensibly they come to buy their daily newspaper, but the ritual is really about sharing news among themselves. For some, it may be the only interaction they have all day.
Despite their loyal custom, business is slow these days. There’s a Texaco filling station on the bypass road that now stocks newspapers as well. Mrs Hood is an indefatigable woman but retirement inevitably looms. When that day comes, Clyro’s only shop will almost certainly close and the ladies will lose their excuse to meet.
I stroll along at the back of the group. Immediately on the right, beside the pub, a road leads up the hill along the bank of the brook to a small close of about six family homes. One belongs to a young couple with children. The rest are occupied by retirees ‘from off’. Back down on the village’s main strip, there are a few stone cottages pressed up against the road. They are similar in style to our place; thick walls, small windows, squat roofs, bombproof.
Behind the last is the wooden lychgate into the churchyard. The wych elms under whose splayed boughs Kilvert would have passed thousands of times are no more, replaced by an entry guard of tall, stiff-backed yews. Close-pressed and unwavering, they man the initial section of the pathway towards the church.
A stone wall, about shoulder high, runs along the two sides of the graveyard that abut the road, protecting the rest of the church’s ‘sleeping folk’, as Kilvert calls those buried beneath Clyro’s consecrated ground.
On a triangle of grass in front of the gate is a framed information stand supported by four metal legs. Bearing all the hallmarks of a local tourism initiative, the rectangular message board provides blurb about the village’s history and an illustrated map of suggested walks.
‘Croeso i Cleirwy’, the banner at the top reads. ‘Welcome to Clyro’. The etymology of the village’s name is disputed, but it’s thought to mean ‘shining’ or ‘clear’. The discovery of prehistoric flint arrowheads and a stone axe-head suggests there’s been a human settlement here for several millennia. The signwriter laments the loss of the castle, but dates the overgrown earthworks opposite Pottery Cottage to the late eleventh century.
In a separate column, a short section is dedicated to the village’s famous curate. Its tone is laudatory. As a landmark of social history, Kilvert’s practice of documenting daily life compares to that of Thomas Hardy’s novels. The last line makes me wonder if Hay’s second-hand booksellers might not have had a hand in financing the message board. The Diary is still in print, it states, and, to quote the marketing trope, available ‘in all good bookshops’.
The society’s schedule will see the tour group circle back to the church at the end, so the members don’t tarry and instead continue on their way down the main street.
A little in front of me is the Kilvert Society’s chairman, a good-humoured man from the Vale of Aylesbury. He is describing to the elderly man next to him the plans for a ‘do-it-yourself’ church service tomorrow morning. A retired clergyman from the tour group has volunteered to lead it, while Mrs Hood and her fellow parish ladies will lay on tea.
His companion thinks this a splendid idea, although he wonders if the congregation might turn out to be a bit thin. A light breakfast might be best, the chairman sagely advises. Leave some space for the sandwiches and cake.
John, whose learned coattails I am still clinging to, points to a short row of terraced houses on our left. There are four in total, each two rooms wide and two deep. They are fronted in grey, uneven stone and look directly onto the churchyard. A horizontal ribbon of brick divides the top from the bottom floors. The same brickwork is etched around the doors and windows, only this time the design is erratic and uneven, creating the effect of glue squeezing out beneath an envelope flap and then setting hard.
The properties were s
lung up quickly and on the cheap shortly after Kilvert left Clyro, John informs me. On a brief return visit, the long-bearded cleric found them ‘hideous’ and ‘huge’. They dwarf and spoil the village, he writes in his diary. If Kilvert had had his way, they would have been built further back from the road and equipped with ‘pretty little flower gardens’.
We continue on, past the former police station (now a private residence) and the former milking sheds of Stock’s Farm (now the vehicle service and repair workshop of Ashbrook Garage), until we reach the end of the squiggly main street. Here the road curls sharply left, while the pitch to Rhosgoch branches off to the right, first hugging the western edge of the churchyard wall before swerving away up the hill.
On the south corner of the junction sit two of Clyro’s oldest cottages. The Historic Settlements Survey for Radnorshire defines the semi-detached pair as ‘cruck-framed hall-houses’. Dating back to the Wars of the Roses, the buildings were heavily modified in the nineteenth century. Gabled fronts now point towards the road, jutting forward at an angle perpendicular to the original curved timber roof.
Unlike the Victorian terrace, the semi-detached houses have space for a modest front garden. Shrubs sprout up from behind a low fence of blue railings, one of which has beautiful leaves of heraldic purple and sprawling, overexcited stems. Beside it, a magenta pink rose is just coming into bloom, its petalled puffball buds the match for any knight’s fleur-de-lis. A collection of hard-wearing pot plants occupies three tin buckets laid out alongside the steps. Kilvert would have approved.
Two signs attached to the wall identify the properties as No. 5 and No. 6 The Village. Next to No. 5 is a second sign that reads ‘Ty Melyn’. The habit of christening homes with Welsh names is common across the village. One of the new builds on the former orchard is called Tan Lan, for instance, meaning ‘Under the Bank’; a suitable counterpoint to Penlan (‘Top of the Bank’), which peers down from above.
Though clearly not Welsh, Pottery Cottage also marks a recent addition. The official address is No. 1–2 The Village. As with Ty Melyn, the number of the house is followed simply by ‘Clyro’, as though the road name were superfluous. On reflection, I’m not sure if the road running in front of us even has a formal name. I think of it as the ‘Hay Road’, but there’s no sign to that effect and the maps refer to it merely by its official road number (the rather uninspiring B4531).
This proves confusing for our guests, of whom there is a regular stream thanks to a small Bed & Breakfast business that Emma has set up at the far end of the house. The guest room is located in what used to be Dworski’s pottery workshop, which after his departure was converted into a warren of dark and dank cubbyhole rooms. On exchanging contracts, Emma had these later additions removed to create a sun-dappled space with a pitched roof running up to the rafters and an exposed oak crossbeam spanning wall to wall.
When our time at the farm cabin came to an end, the former workshop was the only habitable space in the house so we moved in there. For six months we cooked on a camping stove outside and washed up with hot water from the bathtub. The boys adapted quickly enough to eating outside and sleeping head to toe on a single mattress that we stored against the wall during the day and laid on the floor at night.
One place that has never changed its name or questioned its status is Clyro village hall. Built in 1929, it sits upon a low bank opposite Ty Melyn. A stout rectangular building with a grey tiled roof, the hall is positioned side-on to the main street and consequently looks askance at the village as though it would rather peek out on Clyro’s residents than look them straight in the eye.
The bottom half of the village hall is kept hidden by a neatly trimmed hedge, behind which rises an unruly cherry tree, its wild tentacle branches aiding the hedge’s camouflaging mission.
Several of the tour group have crossed over the road junction to the main entrance gate of the churchyard. Digital cameras appear from bags and are pointed inexpertly towards the bucolic scene in front.
Of all the possible perspectives, this is the one that reveals St Michael and all his angels at their finest. The crenellated tower imprinted on the deep green canvas of the hill. Sheep encircling the belfry like Velcro stick-ons. The cockerel suspended in surprised flight just above the ridge, a strip of powder blue beneath his feet.
*
As they take their visitor snaps, I head across to the hall. Access is via a gate on the road, which leads to a ramp up to the entrance door. Inside is a rectangular room with wood-panelled floors and an elevated stage area at one end, the scene of primary school concerts and junior nativity plays. At the other end is a small kitchen alcove, from where tomorrow’s tea will be served. The door is locked.
Back on the road, there’s a community bulletin board. Directly opposite it, as though in opposition, stands the church noticeboard. The latter includes the name and phone number of the vicar followed by several spaces for information about the upcoming services. A piece of white paper is pinned to the wooden board in the ‘This Sunday’ column. The page carries the word ‘NONE’ in bold black capitals.
In Kilvert’s time, Clyro’s resident vicar was a Mr Richard Lister Venables. He was a man of private wealth and owner of a large estate at Llysdinam, near Newbridge-on-Wye. As such, he had the means to employ his own curate to help him officiate at Sunday services, as well as taking weddings, funerals and baptisms. In return for his efforts, Kilvert received the less than princely stipend of £100 a year.
Still, even with two full-time clergymen serving just the one parish, church attendance was slipping by the time Kilvert became curate. With the second Industrial Revolution in full swing, confidence in scientific modernisation abounded. Steel railway tracks were being laid and the first battleships built. Intellectually and politically, meanwhile, continental Europe was seething with a spirit of modernism and revolution.
Much closer to home, the Church of Wales was facing serious competition for the first time. Since the Methodist revival of the previous century, Nonconformist chapels of all hues had sprung up throughout the length and breadth of the country.
Our corner of the Welsh borders crops up early in that story. While preaching in the open air behind the Old Black Lion pub in Hay in 1740, the Methodist evangelist William Seward was struck by a stone, causing his death several days later and thus providing the movement with its first martyr. Other free church proselytisers followed in his wake. Not just Methodists, but Baptists, Congregationalists and Unitarians too. As their popularity spread, so the pews of Anglican churches like St Michael’s began to empty.
The Diary sometimes carries a lament about low numbers in church. ‘Sadly few communicants,’ Kilvert wrote after one Holy Communion service. The Sunday in question happened to be his birthday, a factor that perhaps compounded his disappointment.
Even so, when he picked up his sermon notes and climbed into the pulpit, Kilvert could still probably reckon on a hundred faces or more looking back at him. All of them dressed in their Sunday best, all schooled in the liturgy, all suitably deferential to the young cleric in his flowing robes.
If Nonconformism dented the dominance of the established Church, then secularism today has almost flattened it. As with rural parish churches across the country, Clyro church counts on a faithful few to keep its doors open. Elderly folk mostly, drawn by faith and habit down the churchyard path and in through the chancel door.
One of Kilvert’s contemporaries developed a canny solution to the problem of falling audiences. The Reverend Jon Price, MA (Cantab), acquired the living over the hill at Llanbedr in 1859. The church was in a ‘ruinous state’ and had been without a vicar for almost a decade, an indication of its spiritual as well as geographic remoteness. There was no vicarage, so the new incumbent took to living in three bathing machines that he had delivered from Aberystwyth. When these accidentally burned down, he moved into a decrepit hut next door.
Kilvert paid a visit in July 1872, providing one of the Diary’s best known p
assages. On being welcomed inside, he took a seat in the ‘strangest interior’ he ever saw. The ‘foulness and wretchedness’ of the place left the visiting clergyman boggle-eyed. No grate by the fire. The table covered with crumbs and dirty cutlery, leftover meat and a ‘huggermugger confusion’ of discarded cups and saucers. Broken bricks and dust mixed with the cold peat ashes on the floor. ‘A faint ghastly sickly light’ stealing from the open chimney. Amazingly, the so-called ‘Solitary of Llanbedr’ would live amid this ‘wild confusion of litter and rubbish’ for another quarter of a century.
Today, Clyro’s vicar lives outside the parish and is responsible for not one but five churches. He is, to put it mildly, stretched. Once every couple of months he arranges a family service in the village that we try to attend in a show of solidarity. There’s no Sunday School, although once a quarter the church organises a child-focused ‘messy church’. Numbers differ, although the general marker for success is if the children outnumber the adult volunteers.
Over the decades, the village hall has gradually replaced the church as the nominal centre of communal life. No longer do the residents of Clyro gather for Advent communion or to lay flowers on the graves at Easter. If they can be persuaded out of their homes, it’s for the Chinese auction in aid of the hall’s upkeep or the annual Macmillan coffee morning.
I say ‘nominal’ because such occasions are sporadic and support for them variable. I scan the community bulletin board, which is encased behind glass in a wooden frame. No upcoming events in the hall are mentioned. There’s a notice about a history weekend at the end of the month across the river in Hay. In England, on the other hand, Brilley village hall is putting on a play, while Clifford has a concert planned.
As I scan the other announcements, I wonder if I’m not looking for the wrong thing.