Review: Voices on the Path: A History of Walking in Wales – Andrew Green

Desmond Clifford

Since walking is a defining human activity, Andrew Green has essentially produced a history of human life in Wales, beginning with the earliest extant footprints from 7000 years ago and visible still on the Gwent levels.

Roads were few in ancient times and mostly built by conquerors, notably the Romans, to move troops quickly.  The interior of Wales remained largely inaccessible but most people never went further from home than they could walk in a day. Those who needed wider horizons – pilgrims, preachers, peddlers, poets – did so on foot or horseback.

Drovers were among the first long distance walkers driven by commerce to transport livestock to English population centres.  They were obliged to carry large sums of money, with obvious dangers, until modern banking transformed finance.

The superbly styled Aberystwyth and Tregaron Bank was created specifically to meet their needs.

Legwork

In the absence of any regular media, public characters became known through walking and appearing in different parts of the country. Itinerants like Dic Aberdaron and Thomas Williams, preachers like Howell Harris and Edmund Jones, botanists, archivists, scholars like Edward Llwyd, “the father of Celtic linguistics”, all owed their prominence to legwork.

We learn that botanist Thomas Johnson became, in 1639, the first recorded person recorded to climb Yr Wyddfa.

Something like a recognisable tourist industry began to take shape.

Visitors drew a variable response from local residents, then as now. In 1796, a Breton visitor, Armand-Louis-Bon Maudet, wrote of his walk, “I lose in some degree the denomination of foreigner, as Bretagne was formerly peopled by the inhabitants of this country.”

In a Wales without universities, travel was an important means of learning, acquiring new perspectives, consulting manuscripts, meeting people and firing the imagination.

Iolo Morgannwg is probably the most brilliant of Wales’ rich community of itinerant autodidacts.

England displeased him and it’s pleasing to note, in a self-defeating kind of way, that he was every bit as snooty and patronising as were many English visitors to Wales.

Celtic fringe

A long succession of English literary visitors found stimulation in Wales.

Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, Tennyson and, in later generations, Robert Graves and Edward Thomas had their sensibilities stirred.

Their primary relationship was with the landscape and few English writers seem to have engaged fruitfully with the people who lived there.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a thoroughly strange man, was more sympathetic than most.

It fell to Welsh writers like R Williams Parry, TH Parry Williams and Waldo Williams to synthesise landscape, people and philosophy.

This separation of landscape from community resulted in a widespread Victorian perception of Wales as “picturesque” and part of a Celtic fringe, wildly romantic but somehow not a real living community.

Elements of this sentiment linger and contribute to occasional clashes of expectations.

Political dimensions

AG works hard to include the female experience. He talks about the remarkable Catherine Hutton who left a lively account of her travels. Unlike many male visitors, she revelled in her encounters with local people.

Elizabeth Smith in 1798 became the first named woman known to have climbed Yr Wyddfa (but, surely, an unknown local did it first?).

Among Wales’s most significant walks was the 26 miles by Mary Jones from her home to Bala in search of a bible. She got one in the end and her example led the Methodist Thomas Charles to establish the British and Foreign Bible Society.

The industrial revolution created need for more and better roads. Walking acquired a political dimension as the turnpikes led to agitation and unrest.

For the first time, pedestrians competed for space with freight carriages, a competition which got worse until the arrival of the motor car made roads actively dangerous for walkers.

Walking became a staple of political and religious expression.

In 1839, some 5000 Chartists walked down the Sirhowy and Ebbw Valleys and gathered outside the Westgate Hotel in Newport.

Nervous troops fired into the crowd and killed at least 20 protesters.

Custodians

Miners, language campaigners, CND, temperance movements, the Salvation Army and other causes – in our own day, Yes Cymru – drew attention to themselves through marching.

Possibly Wales’ most famous ever walk was George Borrow’s in 1854. His riveting account, Wild Wales, apparently sold poorly at first but eventually found its market and has never been out of print since.

Borrow was interested in people and learned Welsh to help his mission.

He drew distinction between peasants, who he liked and admired as custodians of the land, and industrial workers who he thought were scum, a sad distinction which still echoes in a degree of mutual incomprehension between town and country.

Borrow was among Wales’s more sympathetic visitors and promoted the value of learning Welsh as a normal social adjustment rather than an exceptional adventure.

The Ordnance Survey began work in Wales in 1803 and heralded modernity.

Until then, directions were largely sought from people walkers met along the way.

With map in hand, the traveller was no longer dependent on locals. In our own generation, mobile satellite coverage has virtually killed the need for any human sources of knowledge and direction. It’s safer, more reliable and a crying shame.

‘Powerful symbol’

Progressively, we move into a world of managed footpaths, roads and, from the 1860s onwards, parks. Manuscript diaries and notebooks were replaced by commercially produced guidebooks.  HV Morton’s In Search of Wales appeared in 1932 and was a best seller.

A vast literature on Wales has accrued, including by some well-known authors such as Matthew Arnold and Paul Theroux, who were anti Welsh. Facts and prejudice are plentiful but enlightenment and comprehension oddly elusive.

As car usage increased, roads gobbled up more of the land. To some extent this has been mitigated by the creation of Wales’s three national parks (a fourth is in gestation) and other protected spaces.

Walking as necessity has declined, but as a pastime it has never been more popular.

In 2012, the Wales Coastal Path was opened, a legacy of Rhodri Morgan’s government; as AG says, “the path has grown in stature as a powerful symbol of an old Wales renewed.”

A more assertive Wales has reclaimed its geography and reconnected landscape with its human communities. Officialdom encourages Eryri for Snowdonia and Yr Wyddfa for the mountain peak; Bannau Brycheiniog takes precedence over Brecon Beacons.

Fresh stories

Are there any absences?  I was surprised RS Thomas, a noted walker and rich subject, has only a passing reference. There’s no mention of Sir Edmund Hillary preparing for Everest in Eryri and AG keeps largely away from military encounters, perhaps in the interests of manageability.

On the other hand, the author’s diligence has surfaced lots of fresh stories, including many lesser documented characters.

This is a rich, engaging book, well-ordered, packed with material and insights lightly delivered.

The publisher, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, should be congratulated for its ambition and vision. The book is enriched by engravings, photos and colour pictures; a complex production effort.

Alongside the paperback, the book would benefit from edited conversion into a glossy hardback edition for the under-served coffee table market.

In a well-functioning Welsh book market, it would be displayed prominently in the window of every book shop in Wales. It deserves to sell well and be read widely.

Voices on the Path: A History of Walking in Wales is available from Gwasg Carreg Gwalch’s site.