Kilvert's Diary

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A John Betjeman documentary on Kilvert, Vicar of this Parish, was shown on BBC television in 1976. [10] This led to Kilvert's Diary being dramatised (eighteen 15-minute episodes) on British television between 1977 and 1978, with Timothy Davies in the title role. Kilvert's lyrical nature writing was recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility. Kilvert had relished his connection to Wordsworth through his friendship with the Dew family of Whitney Court, overlooking the Wye. Mary Dew was related to Wordsworth's wife, Mary Hutchinson, and the subject of the Wordsworth sonnet "To the Infant M.M.". 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. "For some time," Kilvert remarked in 1874, with self-conscious artistry, "I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars." 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. He showed passages from the diary to his Oxford friend Anthony Lawson Mayhew, and perhaps, additionally, to his future wife, Elizabeth Rowland, and observed that the diary might interest and amuse "some who come after me". Howells, Anita (13 June 2001). "Kilvert and a sad love affair". Hereford Times . Retrieved 24 October 2017. Additionally, members benefit from a twice-yearly journal and mid-year newsletter. These are full of articles that expand on diary entries with information about the people, places, and events that Kilvert recorded. But the diary is not just a mine of social history and folklore: what comes across is Kilvert’s human heart, deeply concerned for the well-being of his poorer parishioners and doing what he could to relieve the loneliness, squalor, and hunger that he witnessed. Kilvert’s attempts to write poetry are self-consciously artistic. His diaries, by contrast, often achieve poetic resonance artlessly in their descriptions of people, events, and the landscapes he loved.

The Kilvert Society | The Past

A mile or so out of Clyro, I reach Lower Lloyney farm, a solid square-jawed place with a muddy yard. The workhorse building reminds me that this is hill farming country, as short on luxury as it is rich in weather. Neighbouring Herefordshire, with its rich fertile plains, is awash with grand farmhouses. Not so here. People build as they live: simply, without frills. The pub, which dates from medieval times, recently underwent major renovation after a serious fire. Now it offers flagstone floors, friendly locals, Butty Bach on tap, a well-worn dart board, and great cod and chips. Kilvert never made it across the threshold, though. After finding Painscastle’s mayor at the porch, he asked him for a guided tour of a nearby quarry instead. Of all noxious animals,’ Kilvert continues, ‘…the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), whose steps I am following, knew the value of a contemplative rest. Reading his diary entry for February 1870, I imagine him gazing at this very view: “Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley ... dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.” You may also notice the curious prescience of the words, from the Book of Hebrews, engraved on Kilvert’s white tombstone: ‘He being dead yet speaketh’. As his book, Kilvert’s Diary, attests, Clyro (or ‘Cleirwy’ in Welsh) is a fine starting point. Stroll a mile south and you hit the beautiful Wye river, William Wordsworth’s “wanderer through the woods”, whose gentle banks lead upstream along the Wye valley walk. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches.

The Kilvert Society

It was during this period that he began courting Elizabeth Rowland. Unlike Ettie, with her "true gypsy beauty", the future Mrs Kilvert was rather plain, but her charitable interests made her perfect for a vicar's wife. She remained devoted to Kilvert's memory, and never remarried. On her death in 1911, she was buried in Bredwardine churchyard at some distance from her late husband. Separated in life, the couple were not even destined to lie together in death. The plot next to Kilvert, intended for her, was taken by a pair of spinster sisters.

At last, too, Kilvert had found a wife. He was married to Elizabeth Rowland, who he had met on a trip to Paris three years earlier, in August 1879. Kilvert, Robert Francis (1989). Alison Hodge (ed.). Kilvert's Cornish Diary: Journal No. 4, 1870: from July 19th to August 6th Cornwall. Alison Hodge. ISBN 978-0-906720-19-6. St Michael’s, the 12th-century church, extensively rebuilt in the 1850s, is much as it was in Kilvert’s time. Whenever I sit in the churchyard, with its avenue of yew trees leading to the lychgate, I think of that wonderful moment in the diary on Easter Eve: the graves, decorated with flowers, are described as looking like people asleep in the moonlight, ‘ready to rise early on Easter Morning.’