Under the Tump Read Free

son that I owe my lifelong connection to Pen Ithon. As a young officer in the Royal Artillery regiment, Eustace Steel met and married an elegant young visitor to the Haig estate. Her name was Patience Bell, known to everyone (for reasons lost in time) as Perd. She was from a coal-owning family in Northumberland. Today, the couple lie buried together in an overgrown patch at the back of Llananno churchyard. They abut the Ithon’s bank, listening to the gossip of the river as its gabbling waters rush by. Or so I like to think.
    It would be too much to say that my grandparents called me back. Yet knowing that their remains lie on the Silurian rock of Radnorshire eased our transition from Buenos Aires to the Welsh countryside. It robbed the idea of its randomness. In some small way, too, it felt as though I was reconnecting, retreading old ground. For me, this was enough.
    Having quickly assimilated the prospect of Powys, Emma made the idea her own. She surfed all the relevant property websites and quickly identified three possible houses. Two were holiday lets deep into mid-Wales. Another was an old worker’s cottage in a village called Clyro, located on the easternmost fringes of Radnorshire, a mile outside the market town of Hay-on-Wye.
    We spoke to my parents. They were heading down to Pen Ithon the following month and agreed to visit the three potential properties on our behalf. Their verdict was less than positive. The holiday lets were too small and too remote, they said. Clyro they thought a better option. The village had a small primary school, a shop, a pub, a community hall. The downside was the house. Four hundred years old, it was showing its age. The roof buckled and the rooms smelled of damp. Needed a lot of work, my dad reckoned.
    An appealing factor of the Clyro cottage was its proximity to Hay-on-Wye, or simply ‘Hay’, as all the locals call it. With around 1,800 residents, this miniature market town is more than twice the size of Clyro. Even so, it feels more like a township than a town. A rural hub, perhaps.
    Hay’s size may be small but its ambitions are not. Today, this small border settlement enjoys an uncontested reputation as the nation’s ‘Town of Books’. The title owes its origins to Hay’s penchant for second-hand bookshops, whichfirst began springing up in the mid-1960s and which today number more than two dozen.
    In the late 1980s, Hay embarked on its very own book festival. Over the decades, it has grown into an annual literary love-in. Every town seems to have a book festival these days, but Hay’s ten-day jamboree stands out as one of the country’s largest and most iconic. With each passing year, the town’s bookish status becomes that bit more cemented.
    Emma and I had been to Hay once before. As with many other visitors, it was the festival that drew us. We had only just started dating and were too wrapped up in one another to pay much attention to our surroundings. The vague recollections I had of the town were all broadly positive: bright sunshine, stripy deckchairs, fresh-cut grass, new books, second-hand books, young novelists, old novelists, first love.
    Having Hay on the doorstep appealed especially to Emma. She needs the movement and energy that busy conurbations bring. In Radnorshire, such opportunities are slim. Even by Welsh standards, the now defunct county is judged ‘out-of-time’, to quote the biographer and academic Peter Conradi. As with frontier states the world over, it suffers from being neither in nor out, neither one thing nor another. ‘[It’s] ignored or forgotten by the English as too remote, and by the Welsh as too English,’ Conradi writes. Its demographics seem to back this up: at 26,000 people, its population is a mere one per cent that of Greater Manchester, despite both covering an equal area.
    Given our respective tugs towards the rural and the urban, Clyro struck us as a rare middle ground. Removed, but not too removed. One foot in the