Smith, Alison (1996). The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-4403-8. From the Roundabout, I head north downhill, leaving the Begwyns behind in favour of lusher ground below. At Pentre farm, I cut across two hedge-lined fields to Bachawy brook. I find no evidence of the ford marked on the map, so make do with a hop, skip and jump. Kilvert's hopes that his personal record might be made public may have been distant - he was disappointed in his lifetime by his failure to publish his somewhat conventional poetry - but he harboured them all the same. He showed passages from the diary to his Oxford friend Anthony Lawson Mayhew, and perhaps, additionally, to his future wife, Elizabeth Rowland, and observed that the diary might interest and amuse "some who come after me".

The Kilvert Society

Of all noxious animals,’ Kilvert continues, ‘…the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’ The diary runs from January 1870 until just before his death on 23 September 1879. We believe the diary filled about twenty-nine notebooks. Mrs Kilvert removed all the notebooks from 9 September 1875 to 1 March 1876 and 27 June 1876 to 31 December 1877, we believe for personal reasons. She removed all mention of herself. On Mrs Kilvert’s death in 1911 the remaining twenty-two notebooks were passed to Kilvert’s sister Dora Pitcairn who in turn left them to her niece Frances Essex Hope, n ée Smith. A mile or so out of Clyro, I reach Lower Lloyney farm, a solid square-jawed place with a muddy yard. The workhorse building reminds me that this is hill farming country, as short on luxury as it is rich in weather. Neighbouring Herefordshire, with its rich fertile plains, is awash with grand farmhouses. Not so here. People build as they live: simply, without frills. Bennett, Alan (2007). The Uncommon Reader. London: Faber and Faber and Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-84668-049-6. As his book, Kilvert’s Diary, attests, Clyro (or ‘Cleirwy’ in Welsh) is a fine starting point. Stroll a mile south and you hit the beautiful Wye river, William Wordsworth’s “wanderer through the woods”, whose gentle banks lead upstream along the Wye valley walk. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches.

Kilvert’s Diary

Take Clyro itself. ‘Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley… dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.’ Bypassed in the 1960s by the A438, the current population of the village is less than it was in Kilvert’s time (when it stood at 842) and peacefulness descends as one walks the main street. years ago, in January 1870, Francis Kilvert began his diary - the finest ever insight into rural living, says Mark Bostridge

Walking the Welsh Marches with a Victorian clergyman Walking the Welsh Marches with a Victorian clergyman

Robert Francis Kilvert started his famous Diary on 1 January 1870. The first entry in the published version starts on 18 January, so we do not know if he gave a reason for starting to keep a diary on that particular date. Fortunately he does say on 3 November 1874: ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal? I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me’. Kilvert was probably thinking of family, not that his diary would eventually be read world-wide. Francis Kilvert also published pleasant but conventional poetry, republished by the Kilvert Society in Collected verse: 3rd December 1840 - 23rd September 1879 by the Reverend Francis Kilvert in 1968. The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), whose steps I am following, knew the value of a contemplative rest. Reading his diary entry for February 1870, I imagine him gazing at this very view: “Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley ... dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.”

The complete text, from the first entry in January 1870, written when Kilvert was curate at Clyro in Radnorshire, to the final one in March 1879, by which time he was the incumbent of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, came to well over a million words. Plomer decided to winnow it by about two thirds. "It simply creates that really unknown and remote period," he enthused to Elizabeth Bowen as he began work, drawing lines in red crayon beside paragraphs which were to be omitted. "I showed a bit of it to Virginia [Woolf]: she was most excited. I have insisted on editing it for myself . . . But it's going to be a great deal of work, especially for some poor typist, who will probably be driven blind and mad." In particular, Woolf applauded the comic perfection of the scene at Kilvert's cousin Maria's funeral in Worcester cathedral where, in a sequence of brilliant descriptive strokes, the pallbearers are depicted staggering under the weight of the "crushingly heavy" coffin, which threatens at times to topple over and kill or maim them. Many readers who are interested by the diary have found themselves drawn to Kilvert himself, to his humour and modesty, and to the frankness with which he writes about his susceptibility to female beauty. There are 44 passages containing descriptions of women and girls. These are sometimes emotionally overcharged and, just occasionally, give the modern reader uncomfortable pause - for example, the state of near-ecstasy in which Kilvert writes of receiving the caresses of the seven-year-old Carrie Britton. It was his rejection by Daisy Thomas, daughter of the vicar in Llanigon, that caused Kilvert to leave Clyro in 1872. He returned to Wiltshire to be his father’s curate for several years.

The Kilvert Society | The Past

Conradi, Peter J (17 July 2009). "Book of a Lifetime: The Diaries, By Francis Kilvert". The Independent . Retrieved 2 May 2016. After a century and a half, there is still no better guide to this stunning corner of the Welsh Marches than Clyro’s erstwhile curate. Just this once, however, I ignore his lead in favour of a refreshing pint. The pub, which dates from medieval times, recently underwent major renovation after a serious fire. Now it offers flagstone floors, friendly locals, Butty Bach on tap, a well-worn dart board, and great cod and chips. Kilvert never made it across the threshold, though. After finding Painscastle’s mayor at the porch, he asked him for a guided tour of a nearby quarry instead. Kilvert's lyrical nature writing was recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility. Kilvert had relished his connection to Wordsworth through his friendship with the Dew family of Whitney Court, overlooking the Wye. Mary Dew was related to Wordsworth's wife, Mary Hutchinson, and the subject of the Wordsworth sonnet "To the Infant M.M.". Kilvert's art in capturing life on the wing - that uncanny ability, as VS Pritchett noted, of his eye and ear seeming always "to be roving over the scene and to hit upon some sight or word which is all the more decisive for having the air of accident" - also provoked comparisons to Hopkins and Proust. "For some time," Kilvert remarked in 1874, with self-conscious artistry, "I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars." You may also notice the curious prescience of the words, from the Book of Hebrews, engraved on Kilvert’s white tombstone: ‘He being dead yet speaketh’.

It was during this period that he began courting Elizabeth Rowland. Unlike Ettie, with her "true gypsy beauty", the future Mrs Kilvert was rather plain, but her charitable interests made her perfect for a vicar's wife. She remained devoted to Kilvert's memory, and never remarried. On her death in 1911, she was buried in Bredwardine churchyard at some distance from her late husband. Separated in life, the couple were not even destined to lie together in death. The plot next to Kilvert, intended for her, was taken by a pair of spinster sisters. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of one of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written. In 1937, the poet and novelist William Plomer made a momentous discovery in a pile of manuscripts at the offices of Jonathan Cape in Bedford Square, where he worked as a reader. His attention was seized as soon as he started to read the contents of two bound Victorian notebooks, filled with a spiky sloping script that was difficult to decipher. St Michael’s, the 12th-century church, extensively rebuilt in the 1850s, is much as it was in Kilvert’s time. Whenever I sit in the churchyard, with its avenue of yew trees leading to the lychgate, I think of that wonderful moment in the diary on Easter Eve: the graves, decorated with flowers, are described as looking like people asleep in the moonlight, ‘ready to rise early on Easter Morning.’ Despite Kilvert's niece's actions she ironically was a Vice-President, and an avid member of the Kilvert Society for many years up until her death in 1964. However, there was one type of individual, increasingly common with the spread of the railway network across Britain, who aroused his dismay and whom he treated with contempt - and that was the tourist.