Kilvert's Diary

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St Michael’s, the 12th-century church, extensively rebuilt in the 1850s, is much as it was in Kilvert’s time. Where, for instance, was its prudery when a country parson was able to bathe naked on a public beach without suffering from any apparent inhibitions? But it is not unlikely that his resistance to illness began to be undermined a few years earlier, in the spring of 1876, when his relationship with Ettie Meredith Brown, which had been filled with "wild sad sweet trysts", was brought to an end by her parents. Plomer said that he had had all the twenty-two notebooks typed out in full when they came into his possession, but an examination of the remaining original books shows some passages are marked with red pen; they were the pieces Plomer did not use in the edited volume.

Life on the wing | Books | The Guardian Life on the wing | Books | The Guardian

In Clyro, Ashbrook House, Ty Dulas in Kilvert’s day, is the solid, grey-stone house at the heart of the village where Kilvert had his lodgings. Old Hannah Whitney, with her “thin grey-bearded nutcracker face”; Etty Brown, her cheeks “the dusky bloom and flush of ripe pomegranate”; Edward Evans, close to death in his shabby hovel, his “gaunt ghastly” cat just waiting to pounce. The society organises an annual seminar and dinner, as well as a pilgrimage that travels to sites associated with the diarist.From 1876 to 1877 he was vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire, and from 1877 to his death in 1879 he was vicar of Bredwardine, Herefordshire. The fate of Kilvert's is bound up with a peculiar combination of bad luck and the mysterious motives of one of his descendants, his niece Essex Hope. If complete it would have made nine substantial volumes, but with war looming and paper shortages, no more could be printed. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches. a] The National Library of Wales, which holds two of the three surviving volumes, published The Diary of Francis Kilvert: April–June 1870 in 1982 and The Diary of Francis Kilvert: June–July 1870 in 1989.

The Kilvert Society

One was ‘postured among the ruins in an attitude of admiration… discoursing learnedly to his gaping companion and pointing out objects of interest with his stick. However, next day Kilvert joins in the fun: "I was out early before breakfast this morning bathing from the sands. Formerly known as Clyro Court, this baronial-style house, with its impressive ceremonial staircase, was built by the local Baskerville squire and was the scene of the croquet and archery parties attended by Kilvert. He then entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye. However, in 1958, Plomer learned from Essex Hope, to whom the originals had passed on the death of Perceval Smith, that she "had done away with most of the Diary".

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. A fork-tailed red kite rides the thermals above, its feathered limbs spread wide as it prowls for rodent morsels below. He didn’t mix socially with the only other lodger, a solicitor’s clerk, partly because of his detestation of tobacco smoke. The extracts published by Jonathan Cape in three volumes (in 1938, 1939, and 1940) were immensely popular because they conjured up an image of a lost age of peace, innocence, and rural harmony at a time of tension and war.

The ultimate guide to country life - The Oldie The ultimate guide to country life - The Oldie

Directly opposite was the Swan Inn (now the Baskerville Arms) where men lying by the roadside all night sometimes disturbed Kilvert with their ‘cursing, muttering and vomiting’. In the intervening years between Kilvert’s death and her own, two sisters, the Misses Newton, who had been very fond of their vicar, had been buried on either side of him, leaving no space for poor Mrs Kilvert. I did not scold Mrs Hope," Plomer wrote at the time, but he admitted later that he felt like strangling her with his own hands. 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.

It is an area of ravishing beauty, of rolling hills and brooding mountains, of secret little valleys and, in Kilvert’s time, impoverished cottages and hill farms –inhabited by local characters like Old Hannah Whitney with her ‘ancient beauty’ and supply of folklore, and John Morgan, the ‘old soldier’, who fought in Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War. By the time Kilvert's diary came into the hands of Plomer in 1937, it had been reduced by perhaps as many as 10 volumes. Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley… dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.