Well preserved
George Clive
The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare through Wales and England 1793-1810 Edited by M.W. Thompson
(Allan Sutton Ltd £10.95)
Henry Hoare, the creator of Stourhead, chose as his heir his great-nephew, Richard Colt Hoare. At the same time, he excluded him from participation in the falnilY bank; he was convinced in 1780 (like W Many before and since) that British financial ruin was inevitable, and he hoped thus to insulate Stourhead from disaster. Colt Hoare continued and elaborated the Plantings at Stourhead, and he became, after the early death of his wife, an outstanding archaeologist and local historian, and an inveterate traveller. Up till '793 he toured in Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain; after that, like many of his countrymen, he was forced to turn his at- tention to Britain, with Snowdonia taking 'r Place of the Alps, Lake Bala for Lake Avernus and the Devil's Bridge for Tivoli. The South Glamorgan County Library owns 11 volumes of Colt Hoare's previous- ly unpublished travel journals; from them b r Thompson has extracted the present kook. It is ably edited and introduced, and ueautifully illustrated from Colt Hoare's own works. It has to be said that Colt Hoare does not rank with the great travellers of this or any iother Period. He stayed by preference in hrIns, and he says whether they were good or uad, but he does not comment on the peo- ple he met there. Some of his journeys were made with friends, but he does not mention them except in passing. Occasionally, he stayed in a country house; his hosts remain ndescribed. Nor do the the local in- rillabitants interest him much. He seems to have met hardly any incidents on the road; have
either very lucky of very stoical.
_ he interest of these journals, and it is considerable, lies in their account of the rinact;iOns of an exceptionally cultivated and haqu'.ring man into what were then, and ,-131311y for the most part still are, the prin- ",,Pal sites of Wales and Northern England. trthe covered Wales far more thoroughly him the North; in 1800 he even built The a house at Bala, which still exists. ,,n.e Year before, he had illustrated Coxe's `11,1,storical Tour of Monmouthshire; in 611 Fenton's Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire; in 1802, he retraced the route of Giraldus Cambrensis' itinerary in preparation for his translation of 1806. Throughout his travels, he describes the condition of the places he visited, and the impression they made on him, and com- pares them with others, and this is what will give the book its appeal, to anyone who knows and loves the same scenery, but sees it with very different eyes.
Today's traveller should find Colt Hoare's journals surprisingly reassuring. Nearly all the sites that gave him such pleasure are still there to be enjoyed. Hafod, one that is not, he found very disap- pointing — 'A singular, and not an elegant species of gothic architecture'. Other ob- jects of disapproval were Wyatt's restora- tion of Durham Cathedral, and, although he admired Kedleston, he said of Harwood that it contained 'a fine suite of rooms done up in the most gaudy and expensive style imaginable'. Very oddly, for one who planted so much, he does not relate the parks he visited to his own garden at Stourhead. He deeply disapproved of Studley Royal: 'The water in all its parts is detestable. Narrow, round, oval canals bedecked with little islands, and staring white painted statues ill accord with the beautiful woods on their banks.' He hated the approach to Fountains Abbey, now so much admired — 'all this scenery wants the hand of taste'. The Naval Temple, recently constructed at the Kymin, outside Mon- mouth, he thought in as bad taste as Studley. Stone walls between fields he thought 'the most hideous of all fences'.
He was surprisingly enthusiastic about the early monuments of the Industrial Revolution. The smelter at Amlwch he call- ed 'one of the most beautiful sites 1 ever saw'. The Parys copper mine he rated even
higher than Gordale Scar, which he had up till then regarded as the ultimate sublimity.
He particularly enjoyed a trip down the Cheshire salt mines. More predictably, he
was a great and discriminating admirer of
the Welsh castles. He visited Conway, his favourite, again and again. His drawings of castles and abbeys and the more ac- complished engraving therefrom, make up most of the illustrations in this book. He
laments the destruction of much of
Margam Abbey during the period of writing; in 1803 he gave up Llanthony Ab- bey for lost, 'visited once more, and pro- bably for the last time the ruins of Llan- thony Abbey, which are now, alas ap- proaching rapidly to dissolution'.
Llanthony Abbey, happily, survived another century or more of neglect; and this emphasises Colt Hoare's appeal which lies not so much in the recollection of a vanish- ed world, but in the accessibility of the scenes it describes. The castles and moun- tains that Colt Hoare admired, the lakes in which he fished are still there; and the reader who follows his travels rather more easily than in the author's chaise, can even pay a sentimental call on Colt Hoare's house, Fach-Ddeilliog at Bala, which now serves as the public rooms of a motel.
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