Hay-on-Wye: Visitors approached it across a bridge over the River Wye,
admiring the way its grey stone houses sprawl at the foot of the Black Mountains.
In the Sixties, Hay-on-Wye was a remote town in the Welsh Marches where not much happened. Then, as now, the visitor approached it across a bridge over the River Wye, admiring the way its grey stone houses sprawl at the foot of the Black Mountains. Behind the town the green scarp of Hay Bluff soars 2,000ft into a sky sown on a good day with buzzards and hidden on a bad day by rain. There is a castle, a market on Thursdays, and shops selling sheep farmers’ requisites.
The Welsh border runs through a corner of the town. A former squire, harbouring the anti-Welsh sentiments that often reach their fullest expression within a hundred yards of the line on the map, used to patrol on Sundays with a shotgun to stop the inhabitants of the Welsh side, where the pubs were closed on Sundays, swarming into the pubs on the English side, where they were not.
Then Richard Booth arrived and filled the town with second-hand books. In 1977, Booth crowned himself King of Hay and declared UDI. A horse was appointed foreign minister. The King’s ankles were snapped at by various pretenders.
Another Hay began to overlie the quiet market town: an eccentric place, where unusual human beings felt entirely at home. Jonathan Meades, architectural critic and psychogeographer, once said that living in Hay was like being trapped in a railway compartment full of escaped lunatics. This was harsh when he said it, and has become less true as the years have passed. But the town is still set at a slight angle to the rest of the world.
So nobody was really surprised when ,30 years ago, a recent graduate called Peter Florence decided to put on a literature festival. The first Hay Festival sold tickets from a caravan under the clock tower for events that took place in the British Legion and the back rooms of various pubs. The public proved enthusiastic. The festival moved to the school, expanded into various tents, and (still under the directorship of Florence) migrated to purpose-built sites to the west of the town, expanding as it went.
Jimmy Carter appeared and so did Bill Clinton. Authors and their agents began to lobby passionately for slots. The Italian province of Lombardy, twinned, bizarrely, with Powys, asked for Florence’s advice in setting up a festival in Italy. The idea caught fire. This year there will be Hay Festivals not only in Wales but in countries including Mexico, Spain, Peru, Colombia and Denmark.
The original festival has continued to grow and the organisers are confident that they will comfortably top the 250,000 tickets sold last year, with events featuring Stephen Fry, Helen Fielding, Colm Toibin, Elizabeth Strout, Ian Rankin, Jacqueline Wilson and a host of other luminaries.
All this literature can cause visitors to overlook the fact that beyond the town are England and Wales at their greenest and most pleasant. If you would rather go for a walk in the hills than in an author’s mind, you are in the right place. The favourite walk is up Hay Bluff. A short drive up a singletrack road leads to a flattish car park. From here the bluff leaps into the sky, its steepness in some places unpleasantly close to 45 degrees. Climbing it makes a popular constitutional of precisely the right length and steepness to strengthen the adult heart muscle and restore teenagers to something resembling humanity.
The Black Mountains are almost flat-topped. Their summit is a lofty plain running gently away south, a wilderness of dun grass and clumpy heather slashed with deep valleys. Over this plateau the hardy can walk to half-magical spots such as Capely-ffin, whose monastery was once the home of the great carver and type designer Eric Gill, and the ruins of the priory at Llanthony, now partially occupied by a tiny hotel. Farther to the east is the Olchon valley, beautiful and supremely isolated. There is a charming morning stomp along the Cat’s Back, a peninsula of the Black Mountains that separates the Olchon valley from the rest of the world, ending in 10ft-wide ridge that sweeps hundreds of feet down on one side into the Olchon and the other to Craswall.
Doughtier walkers will know that Hay is on the 177-mile Offa’s Dyke path, and that the market town of Kington, full of excellent watering holes, is some 15 bracing miles to the north.
And then there is the river. The W ye starts asa trick leon the slopes of Plynlimon. It gallops through Builth Wells and Erwood, wild and free. When it arrives at Glasbury, five and a half miles upstream from Hay, it is slightly tame randa fraction less free, because Glasbury marks the beginning of the Wye navigation.
The craft of choice is the canoe. There are plenty of hire firms around Hay, eager to oblige with canoes and safety gear and to collect you and your vessel from a specified point by arrangement. A favourite is Wye Valley Canoes, which has the great advantage of being bang next door to the amusing and delicious River Café (info about both on wyevalleycanoes.co.uk), in which I once counted five novelists under the age of 35.
In good weather, canoeing down the river is about as close to paradise as you can get. Glasbury to Hay is the traditional beginner’s route, featuring pools, glides and exhilarating but unthreatening rapids. Pack a picnic and swimming gear. Accept safety briefing and equipment. Climb into a canoe and point the nose downstream.
The first set of rapids draws the canoe into its rippled vee. Beyond the south bank, green prisms of mountains inch by. Every now and then a salmon jumps, a big, chaotic splash among the sand martins that nest in little burrows in the bank.
Rapids pass, and long, slow pools. There is a weir, mildly exciting to shoot, and the Warren, the long shingle beach covered with the landlocked beach bums of Hay. The bridge looms up — the rapids under the right-hand arch are kept clear of big stones, if anyone remembers. Below the rapids is the quay where canoes get picked up and paddlers sit and decide what to do next.
During festival week there is the Fair in the Square, featuring live local bands of high quality. There is Richard Booth’s Bookshop, once home to uncounted millions of spiders, now bright and trig, with a fine café and terrace. And finally there is Shepherds ice-cream parlour, a long-established Hay favourite, dispensing coffee, sandwiches and unbelievably delicious ice cream made with the milk of sheep that graze the sweet grass of Wales.
As the sun crosses the yardarm other watering holes come to life. There is Tomatitos, the locals’ favourite tapas bar. Kilvert’s, named after Hay’s 19th-century parson diarist, has historically been about as close to a hanging spot as the place gets. The Old Electric Shop has recently started dishing out cocktails in the evening. Hay is a town that likes to communicate by rumour, and the Electric Shop is a good place to get news of fringe events. A couple of hundred yards across town, the Blue Boar in Castle Street is the traditional rendezvous for a slightly older clientele, who can be spotted chatting up each other’s spouses in quiet corners.
As far as gastronomy goes, the best restaurant in the region is the Stagg at Titley, 15 miles away (and hard by Bradnor Hill, England’s highest golf course). The Stagg was the first pub in England to win a Michelin star. For those who do not care about such matters, Hay and its hinterland have plenty of cafés and pubs that sell excellent food.
Then there is the Three Tuns. The redoubtable woman who once owned the Tuns used to sell local cider of high potency, limiting new clients to half a pint and eyeing their knees narrowly for signs of buckling. If no buckling took place, she would serve the other half, and soon ad lib. The Tuns is now a gastropub, with an attractive terrace within smell (but not sight) of the river.
Walking and canoeing and browsing and sluicing are all very well, and you can do them anywhere (though Hay is peculiarly favoured in this respect). There are few other places in the world, though, where you can climb a mountain and canoe a river, then come down to rub shoulders with Graham Norton, Chris Riddell and Germaine Greer, and consider the meaning of life with Ken Dodd, Will Young, Tracy Em in and Michael Rosen. And afterwards, repair to the Electric Shop to continue the debate.
See you there.