III

A week which stands out in my memory as one of perfect communion with the past was spent with another English friend in Llanthony Abbey, in the Vale of Ewyas, in the Black Mountains of Wales.  We had gone prepared for camping with a tent of ethereal lightness, which was to protect us from the weather.

For the first night we were to tarry amid the ruins of the twelfth-century abbey, some parts of which had been roofed over and used as an inn.  When we arrived, the rain was falling in torrents.  Soon after supper we took our candles and climbed the winding stone stairs to our rooms in the tower.  The stones were uneven and worn by generations of pious feet.  Outside we could see the ruined nave of the church, with all the surrounding buildings.  We were in another age.

Had the sun shined next morning we should have gone on our gypsy journey, and Llanthony Abbey would have been only an incident.  But for five days and five nights the rain descended.  We could make valiant sallies, but were driven back for shelter.  Shut in by “the tumultuous privacy of storm,” one felt a sense of ownership.  Only one book could be obtained, the “Life and Letters” of Walter Savage Landor.  I had always wanted to know more of Landor and here was the opportunity.

A little over a hundred years ago he came to the vale of Ewyas and bought this estate, and hither he brought his young bride.  They occupied our rooms, it appeared.  In 1809, Landor writes to Southey, “I am about to do what no man hath ever done in England, plant a wood of cedars of Lebanon.  These trees will look magnificent on the mountains of Llanthony.”  He planted a million of them, so he said.  How eloquently he growled over those trees!  He prophesied that none of them would live.

After reading, I donned my raincoat and started out through the driving storm to see how Landor’s trees were getting on.  It seemed that it was only yesterday that they were planted.  It was worth going out to see what had become of them.  They were all gone.  I felt that secret satisfaction which all right-minded persons feel on being witnesses to the fulfilment of prophecy.

And then there was the house which Landor started to build when he and his wife were living in our tower.  “I hope,” he writes, “before the close not of the next but of the succeeding summer, to have one room to sit in with two or three bedrooms.”  Then he begins to growl about the weather and the carpenters.  After a while he writes again of the house:  “It’s not half finished and has cost me two thousand pounds.  I think seriously of filling it with straw and setting fire to it.  Never was anything half so ugly.”

I inquired about the house and was told that it was not far away on the hillside, and was yet unfinished.  I was pleased with this, and meant to go up and see it when the spell of bad weather of which Landor complained had passed by.