After the excellent book on his travels, In Patagonia, it is at first surprising to find Bruce Chatwin writing a novel about the small sheep farmers at home on the hills of the Welsh Border country of England. Sheep farming is, of course, the common link. In the nineteenth century large numbers of tough, poor, and exalted Welsh peasants migrated to Patagonia as if drawn to the isolation, the rains, the snows and hard conditions they knew at home and where they would be free of the mocking gaze and rule of the Sassenach conquerors. The people of On the Black Hill are part of the sturdy remnant who toiled and haggled at home.

But if the novel is a watchful traveler's journey through peasant life during the first eighty years of this century, its characters are strong and strange enough to burst the bonds of parish record...