A Grand Tour of wet Wales
Byron Rogers
PENNANT edited by Gwyn Walters, with woodcuts by Rigby Graham The Gregynog Press, £750, pp.163, ISBN 0954983912 Pennant should have been a publishing sensation, yet how many of you have heard of a book of which within weeks of its appearance all but 12 copies were sold? Not only that, its de luxe version in inlaid leather (at £2,750 a copy) had been sold before it even came out. There will, of course, be no second edition of either, for we are not in the world of conventional publishing.
We are in the world of fine art publishing, of hand-made paper and limited editions, where men never read upon the po but put on white gloves just to open the covers of a book, which, given its price, you will not see reviewed elsewhere. But it is still a book. So what do you get for your £750, apart from a thing of beauty in its purple box with the gold lettering?
To begin with, you get a classic of dry comedy. Thomas Pennant was an 18thcentury Welsh squire, or at least a squire in Wales, anglicised, distant and fascinated. For while others of his class undertook the Grand Tour in Europe, Pennant undertook his in an unknown land, complete with interpreter and a painter-servant, in what he considered his native country. The only thing is, in the course of this there is hardly any dialogue, for 18th-century Welsh squires had scarcely a syllable of speech in common with their countrymen. The Englishman George Borrow, a century later, having taught himself Welsh (or what he thought of as Welsh) would talk to anyone, at least anyone he could catch (many ran away). Pennant talked only to squires or vicars, with whom he would stay (though on occasion being forced to put up at ‘a coarse lodging’), and for the most part you get the impression that he is travelling through an empty land.
But Pennant was also an 18th-century intellectual. He has the poise and the unassailable sense of superiority of such a man, as when he writes of the sixth-century prince Llywarch Hen, ‘[He] left his country to expel the Saxons and Irish out of this part of Britain. He leaves us ignorant of the event: all he acquaints us with is, that he lost 12 sons in the generous attempt.’ Such a sly, stifled snigger.
Again, when he describes the medieval poet Guttun [sic] Owen’s thanks for the lavish hospitality he had received at Valle Crusis abbey: ‘Guttun does not forget the piety of the house, and is particularly happy being blessed by abbot John with his three fingers covered with rings.’ But what makes this book in particular such a classic of comedy is that Gregynog have commissioned the wayward Rigby Graham to illustrate it. For if it was open season on the past for Pennant and the 18th century, it is open season on Pennant and the 18th century for Graham.
Where they sought the picturesque in the mountains and castles of Wales he has Harlech Castle dwarfed by an old cart (marked Ivor Jones) in the foreground. This sets up such a tension you turn the page just to see what the man will do next. Under a tree an 18th-century goat boy plays on a pipe-horn while a jet Harrier hovers. Skies vibrate with greens and yellows, and for the famous St Winifred’s Well at Holywell, in which a king of England, James II, bobbed to increase his sperm count, Rigby Graham chooses to show workmen about to demolish a derelict industrial building.
Pennant of course will never know what he missed [he writes airily]. I thought it infinitely preferable to those gloomy ruins of the church with all those nuns and all the Catholic trinkets and junk which was offered for sale to visitors and all those eager pilgrims anxious to throw themselves into that cold and slimy outdoor swimming bath.
Curiously this is one moment where the double act is at one. Mr Pennant, staring down at the bobbing pilgrims (‘The greatest number are from Lancashire’), sniffs, ‘Few people of rank at present honour the fountain with their presence.’ People of rank were important to Mr Pennant. All those squires, all that ancestry, and, which is far more important, all those ‘country seats’.
And all that rain. Drenched to the skin, the curious little posse of squire, painter servant and interpreter came through the passes and up the hills, moving through a landscape where there were no signposts and distances were a matter of guesswork. In the course of reading his account I became very fond of Pennant.
I loved the way everything he saw could be shamelessly filed away under those allpurpose 18th-century constructions. A town is ‘mouldering away with age’, a church lies ‘in a picturesque and romantic bottom’, another is ‘embosomed in hills’.
Only occasionally is his poise shaken, as when he shudders at the sight of a precipice, remembering ‘a frolick of my younger days’ when he used to career down it on a peat sledge. Or when, in Barmouth, he marvels at houses built on so steep a slope ‘as to give the upper an opportunity of seeing down the chimneys of their subjacent neighbours’.
The humour is so dry and so delightful, it is like seeing pinpricks of light through an attic roof. There is the 90-year-old giantess who could outwrestle, outshoot and outrow all men, who, when she married, ‘gave her hand to the most effeminate of her admirers’. And the cannon foundry at Wrexham which ‘in the late war between the Russians and the Turks, furnished both parties with this species of logic’. Or when he enters Conway: ‘A more ragged town is scarcely to be seen, within; or a more beautiful one, without.’ Everything is so quiet in this book.
And now, 200 years later, Mr Rigby Graham comes to shatter that quiet. Following in Pennant’s footsteps into what he loudly complains is ‘the futility, hopelessness and everlasting wet of Wales’, he fills his skies with planes, and his meadows with machinery.
Tasteful engravings would have made this a beautiful book. Mr Graham’s contribution makes it a work of extraordinary fun. All you need do is sell the Mondeo.
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