I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years.
Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of Infinity; the Emperor deprived them of mountains. So where were they to go? ‘Scotland,’ Dr Tegai Hughes observes in an introduction remarkable for its dry humour, ‘might be more familiar and enticing, but Wales was a good deal more accessible.’ Accessibility mattered, for they were coming on foot; also, something which mattered almost as much to them, walking was socially acceptable there (there was, wrote De Quincey, ‘no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling’).
And Wales was cheap. Its inns cost a third of what English inns charged, though they soon caught up, as over the Border came the most bizarre invaders the old principality had ever known: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Shelley, with assorted wives, sisters, friends, radical politics, and, of course, notebooks.
Until then the only travellers in Wales had been drovers, itinerant preachers, and the odd English king at the head of an army (though James II, frantic for a male heir, did come to soak his testicles in a holy well: it worked). The men of the 18th century had taken a distant interest, for there was a lot to be interested in, like druids and bards and castle ruins. ‘The ruins came equipped with dimly understood historical associations,’ murmurs Dr Hughes. So Gray was able to write about Edward I’s massacre of the bards, which had never occurred, and Blake to declare that Adam and Noah had both been druids. But the Romantics were different: they bounded into Wales, the way the training SAS now bounds into the Brecon Beacons.
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