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The Clyro Tour

In the afternoon Mrs. Bevan, Mary and I drove to Clyro. As we passed along the old familiar road that I have journeyed over so many times a thousand memories swept over me. Every foot of Clyro ground is classical and sacred and has its story.

Kilvert's Diary, 23 March 1874

The village tour leaves from the steps of the Baskerville Arms pub.

We number about twenty in total, an even split between women and men. Most of the women are wearing dark glasses against the glare of the Saturday afternoon sun. The men are dressed uniformly in plain, long-sleeved cotton shirts, staples of their working wardrobes now redeployed for retirement. They are white-haired and stiff-gaited.

But they are all smiling. For the members of the Kilvert Society are a contented, amicable bunch. And, with the curate's former stomping ground beneath their feet and a steel blue sky above, today is a happy day.

Of the nine years covered in Kilvert's Diary, only the first two and a half encompass the young curate's time in Clyro. Yet it is during these years that we find him at his happiest and most effusive. A zesty, enthusiastic tone courses through his earliest entries.

The images he paints carry a palpable vividness. The clamour of geese, twinkling leaves, old-fashioned September fog, keepers' cottages, orchard banks, freshly dug red potatoes, crimson ball sunsets, melting hoar frost, trees thickening with bursting buds, dazzling snow, cider presses, purple grasses billowing like the sea.

The scenes feel very different from the output of a disciplined diarist who sits down at the end of the day to set down with diligence what's gone before. They are too bright and bubbling for that, too sprinkled with the present.

It's as though he has dashed to his desk direct from sleep, pen working furiously, grasping at the lucid fragments of a dream as they swirl around his head before the dawn light swoops in and snatches them away.

Kilvert's world-view leans undeniably towards the rosetinted and poetic. Even accounting for his florid style, the picture he paints of Clyro is enticingly dreamy. A rural idyll tucked away on the Welsh borders, protected by the mountains and cushioned from the present, a private garden of calm in tumultuous times. As a reader, it is difficult to resist the enchantment of it all.

The tour group moves off in a north-easterly direction along the sinuous main street that divides the centre of the village.

Behind us the square stone tower of St Michael and All Angels rises above the pub roof, the bronze of its cockerel weather vane transformed into dazzling gilded foil by the sun. A bank of low-ceilinged cottages huddles around the churchyard's outer wall. Scattered among them is a collection of newer brick buildings, which grow in number as the village spreads outward.

Two primary features define the topography of Clyro. The first is the precipitous hill at its back, which rises with a slag heap's sudden steepness directly behind the church. The hill is lush and green and populated by grazing sheep. Along its western flanks, a brook cuts down through Pen-y-lan Wood before coursing wilfully through an array of villagers' gardens.

Halfway up the pitch stands a pair of wizened oak trees, their upper sections bent over in a courteous, wind-blown bow. At either end of the village, two narrow country roads wind off into the hills; one to Cold Blow and the heart of Wales, the other to Newchurch and the fertile soils of Herefordshire.

The village's second defining detail is its bypass. Built in the late 1950s to divert traffic from the centre of Clyro, the now busy extension road cuts a straight path along the village's eastern edge. In Kilvert's day, open fields would have stretched out beyond it all the way down to the River Wye and the bridge into Hay.

Shortly after the bypass's arrival, an enterprising local farmer saw the opportunity to sell off some of his land for development and now two small housing estates occupy the far side of the road. The effect has been to divide the village between old and new.

Pottery Cottage finds itself on the new side despite being one of Clyro's oldest properties, an anomaly of uneven stone and timber amid an abundance of right-angles and red brickwork.

Across the bifurcating bypass, back in the heart of the village, the main street is quiet enough for us to ignore the pavement and stroll along the tarmac road. An archivist from Llandrindod Wells, a sprightly man with rolled-up sleeves and a knapsack on his shoulder, is leading the way.

He stops briefly by the pub car park and points out where the blacksmith's workshop would once have been. The smithy's fire and anvil are long gone, replaced by a square of asphalt and a pub garden with picnic benches and a child's slide.

I fall into step with a gentleman called John, a retired English teacher who lives in Bristol. Bespectacled and pale-faced, he sports a wispy white goatee beard and the whiff of academia. To quote the society's current chairman, John is the group's 'star turn'.

We had met briefly at the annual general meeting several months beforehand. The event was held in the timber-framed chambers of the Radnorshire Arms hotel in nearby Presteigne, a historic market town further up the border.

John had delivered the keynote lecture, a lengthy exposition of Kilvert's interest in mineralogy. It went down a storm with his fellow Kilvertians. He tells me he is currently putting together a paper about the diarist's religious beliefs, and touches the side of his nose. He is, I should know, a 'bit of a controversialist'.

The main body of the group has drifted off ahead. To the left of us is a row of bungalows, single-storey toadstools at the foot of the towering grassy bank. To the right is a short modern terrace and beyond it a collection of new three- and four-bedroom homes built where an orchard once stood. They are all inhabited by newcomers to the village. At the rear of their neat fenced-in gardens runs the busy bypass.

After about 400 yards, the village proper runs out, splitting between the hilly back road to Newchurch and the main road to Hereford. A clutch of brave cottages cling to the slanting sides of the former, which is known locally as Thomas the Cutter's Pitch, or simply Cutter's Pitch. The name is a throwback to a Mr Thomas, who used to live at the bottom of the hill and who earned a living as a castrator of rams and bulls.

A little way up the steep slope, the road is joined on the left by a threadbare tarmac track that wiggles back above the village and then away into the distance along the contour of the hill. The lane leads up to the ancient farmhouse of Penlan, which sits on the ridge line almost directly above the church. A whitewashed aerie, it is one of Clyro's most striking buildings.

Our friends Mary and Chris Bird live there now. They have two boys, similar in age to Seth and Bo. Mary grew up in the house, which was a working farm for generations until her father retired and passed it on to his son. He then sold it to Mary, who, like many young people born and brought up in the area, had moved away in her twenties. She worked as a nurse on film sets before returning home to start a family. Chris is a Londoner and a lighting technician for television and films. They met on location.

From Penlan's eagle vantage point, Pottery Cottage seems squashed and flat, an oblong waymarker dug into the ground at the exit to the village. Beyond, the rumpled bedspread of the Wye valley expands in sandstone lumps and bumps before ceding to the pretty pillowed foothills of the Black Mountains and their arching headboard peaks behind.

Kilvert often admired the view from here too. Once, while visiting 'old Meredith' in Bird's Nest Cottage a little up the way, he found himself taken back by the 'sublime spectacle' of a white and golden cloud on the far horizon, before checking himself and realising that the cloud was actually the 'long white rampart' of the mountains, their slopes bathed in snow and lit up by the setting sun. The snowfall so stilled the countryside that the church bells in Hay could be heard from across the valley.

I like looking up to Penlan almost as much as down from it. The farmhouse's square front is so intensely white and the grass around it so strikingly green that it stands out with the stark intensity of a lighthouse on a cliff. Kilvert recalls waking up and admiring how the sun's early rays 'struck red' against its whitewashed walls.

At the bottom of the pitch stands another white, square building. This used to be the New Inn, a notorious drinking spot until its licence was revoked in October 1871. Between the Baskerville Arms (which Kilvert insisted on calling by its former name, the Swan) and the New Inn, Clyro was not without its night-time rowdiness. More than once, he observed a parishioner the morning after with a cut lip or swollen eye.

The tour group stands across the street from the former New Inn in an untidy semicircle as the archivist recounts a story about the gipsy Henry Warnell, who once ran cursing and blaspheming down this same stretch of road. A poacher from up on Clyro Hill, Warnell had recently been jailed for six weeks' hard labour after kicking the New Inn's publican in what Kilvert prudishly describes as 'the bad place'. The fast-moving innkeeper had moved just in time to save his corduroy trousers from being torn.

Today, the New Inn is a private home. The Baskerville Arms remains open for business, although it's far from the drinkers'...