The Byways of Montgomeryshire

In November last year I went on a bookshops weekend with John Howard and another old friend, who writes exquisite fantasy tales under the name ‘John Gale’. We had hired a former estate cottage high up in the hills above Welshpool, Powys (“the only passers-by are badgers” said the owner), with far-ranging views and particularly vivid vistas at sunset. We met up on the Friday afternoon at Shrewsbury railway station: the town is a sort of fulcrum for the Welsh Border country, and its historic centre is pleasant to walk around.

I had made a list of the five second-hand bookshops in the town, and notes on a route on foot taking us between them: all but one were indeed open, a circumstance not always to be relied upon in the trade. At the first, in an arcade, I found some monographs on the Roman town of Uriconium, and at The Raven Bookshop in the market hall Mr H obtained a nice copy of E H Visiak’s seafaring fantasy Medusa, which is pretty uncommon in the wild. The third was an Oxfam bookshop which did not yield very much.

The best was Welsh Bridge Books and Collectables, in a wonderfully quaint building, a maze of little rooms and alcoves and twisting staircases, with fascinating stock, and also curios. Here I found a pile of astrology magazines from the Nineteen Seventies with swirly lettering and art and a very new-agey ambience. One of the young editors was Mike Howard, who went on to produce a long-running newsletter, The Cauldron – Pagan Journal of the Old Religion, to which I sometimes contributed. These Seventies mags must have been among his earliest work.

Mr Gale had discovered that there was a second-hand bookshop in Welshpool so we went there on Saturday and found it – one very long room crammed with stock. The owner regaled us with news of the effort required to move all this from a former shop across the road. He had started with just a market stall. His main stock-in-trade was modern paperbacks, particularly thrillers and family sagas, and local history, but it was enough of a jumble to offer possibilities for rarer fare. We each bought quite a lot: mine were mostly crime paperbacks.

Then a stroll around the town, where a stall in the market hall offered tarot readings in a sort of draped alcove, and another had pagan greetings cards, crystals and mystic pewter jewellery. I like the way that this sort of thing, which would have been considered outré a few decades ago, is now accepted as quite usual, all of a piece with the fruit & veg stall.

Next to Oswestry to the north, where some ambling around led us to a small book room in an antiques shop opposite St Oswald’s church. Here I found The Byways of Montgomeryshire by J B Willans (1905). Who could resist such an amiable and arcane title? The red binding was faded from sun and shelf wear, so that the back cover looked like a piece of abstract art with some such title as ‘I Wander in a Hall of Roses’.  The book was an engaging account of walks by the author and sometimes a companion (or rides by trap with his pony, Turpin) around the county, looking at churches, halls, manors and the varying landscape, illustrated by the author’s own atmospheric photographs.

When I browsed in the book back at the cottage later, I found it described a walk from the very lane where we staying, up a steep hill to a cross roads, where a right turn would take us to the half-timbered medieval church at remote Trelystan, which had rumours of old battles and the rallying-ground of a king, and semi-pagan saints. Willans and his companion had done it in deep snow, but when we followed the way on the Sunday morning it was in pale Autumn sunlight. We found a tranquil, well-cared-for, ancient place in a grove of yew trees: I counted seven, but guides say six. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of them only appears on certain occasions. It was like encountering one of the Celtic shrines in a Machen story, where the Grail might be kept.

The tone of the book is lively and informal and only lightly antiquarian, and I surmised the author was quite a young man: in fact, it turned out when I looked into him that he was then 24. The British Library gives his full name as John Bancroft Willans. He was the only child of a Liverpool railway engineer and lived at Dolforgan Hall in the county. Though he continued to be active as an antiquarian and photographer, he did not publish another book.

I enjoy finding old topography and travel books like this about long-ago wanderings in a lost Britain. As well as often recording fragments of forgotten history and folklore, they have an atmosphere that seems similar to that of supernatural fiction from the period, the stories of strange encounters in lonely country. I don't think they have been much studied, and I am sure there are more such books of old journeys and obscure byways to be found.

(Mark Valentine)

Images: Portrait of John Bancroft Willans, courtesy of People’s Collection Wales.

Trelystan: The Church in the Hills by Betty Mulrroy.