Robert Bloomfield’s Tour of the Wye in 1807: ‘Away, away to fairy land’, by Philip Hoskins

1. From Dursley to Chepstow. ‘Upon the Sparkling Stream’

On Monday 17th August 1807, Robert Bloomfield and a party of friends rode out from Uley, near Dursley in Gloucester, descending into the Severn Vale towards Framelode where they were ferried across the River Severn. From there they trundled through the Forest of Dean to Ross-on-Wye, completing the first stage in the ten-day journey that was also to take in Monmouth, Chepstow, Abergavenny, Brecon, Hereford, Malvern, Tewkesbury, Cheltenham and Gloucester; finally returning to Uley.

This circular route was the inspiration for Bloomfield’s great poem The Banks of Wye published in 1811, and his Journal of a Tour Down the River Wye, a prose account published posthumously in The Remains of Robert Bloomfield. Poem and journal are complementary: the prose providing the skeleton of the story against the counterpoint of the much longer account in verse.

A feeling of exhilaration that continued throughout the tour had quickly overcome the despondency that Bloomfield had felt earlier when writing ‘Shooter’s Hill’, a time when he was unwell and had included dreams of Cambrian mountains as a key to the restoration of his health. This challenge to overcome low spirits had come with an invitation from his Gloucestershire friends, Mr and Mrs Lloyd Baker, to join them on a Wye tour.

In addition to the Lloyd Bakers, the party comprised Bloomfield, Robert Cooper with his two sons and two daughters, and a governess. A small number of servants accompanied them including the coachmen needed to look after the nine horses and to drive the two sociables, ideally named. These carriages were open vehicles with two seats for passengers placed across the carriage and facing each other; the hood providing partial cover against rain could probably have been kept stowed away.

After spending the night of 18th August in Ross, on a beautiful morning, our travellers climbed aboard a pleasure boat complete with an awning and provisions, to begin their two-day river journey stopping overnight at Monmouth and Chepstow. The sociables were sent on ahead.

The delight in the prospect ahead was realised as:

At noon on the first day the boat was moored near Coldwell for a meal. In describing the scene Bloomfield glides from the underwater perspective of watching fish to the surface of the water mirroring the spectacular view.

2. A Day of Indescribable Pleasure

In the afternoon the passengers disembarked to clamber up Symonds Yat while the boat followed the bend in the river where they boarded again. As they continued down-river Bloomfield was amazed by his first sighting of a coracle being used to fish for salmon, a craft that remained in use on the Wye until the twentieth century.

He described the day in the Journal: ‘My heart is brimful of indescribable pleasure when I think of this day. Beauty in all its variety is perhaps the leading feature; but sublimity is paramount to all considerations at the passage under Coldwell Rocks, and round to New Weir and Great Doward, and thence on to Monmouth.’

3. Tintern

An early start from Monmouth at 6.00am was essential to ride safely the contra tide that would be met on the way. They passed Redbrook and Landogo and stopped at Tintern, where everyone was astonished by the dramatic opening of the Abbey door. While Bloomfield’s friends sketched, he entertained them by singing appropriately Psalm 104, the great hymn in praise of God and the order of his natural creation.

The need for haste limited time for breakfast at Tintern but this did not detract from the delight in viewing the Abbey:

‘Enrapture’ was Bloomfield’s term for the scene with its woods and glades, its wandering river, the magnificent ruined Abbey and its surrounding hills. As the river journey neared its end Bloomfield entertained affection and praise for the knowledgeable boatman, Pollett, who had safely and skilfully brought them to Chepstow:

While Bloomfield and his fellow tourists could enjoy the delights of seeing Chepstow castle by moonlight, Pollett and his small crew of boatmen faced the hard exertion of rowing up-stream until the elms that Kyrle planted in Ross would come into view.

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4. The Growth of Wye Tourism: The Picturesque Movement

Whilst Bloomfield was savouring his first impressions of the Wye he was taking a river excursion that was part of a burgeoning tourist traffic that had begun much earlier: it was in 1745 that the Rev. John Egerton started taking friends and relatives on boat trips down the valley from the rectory at Ross. By the time of Bloomfield’s trip there were eight pleasure boats plying their way down the river from Ross. A wider interest in the river’s attractions was fuelled by the appreciation of sublime beauty fashioned by the Revd William Gilpin and his ideas of the Picturesque. Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, published in 1783, not only gave an account of his tour of the Wye in the 1770s but also set out his theories on how a landscape should be viewed. He was rather prescriptive and in his opinion a view should be broken into varied components of river and terrain – with ideally a ruin and a few peasants to complete the scene – as if in the confines of a picture. The Wye Valley offered limitless examples to support his theories and as a result tourists thronged to enjoy the spectacle of sublime beauty, to sketch and to paint.

One of the ways by which Gilpin encouraged tourists to translate vista into picture was by use of the Claude glass. The device comprised a convex darkened glass and the idea was to hold it high and look backwards into the scene. This gave the effect of softening the view and giving it a picture-like quality. Bloomfield presents almost a Claude-glass-like image of the scene mirrored in the water in his passage, above, about the meal at Coldwell.

Many of these visitors were creatively inspired: by the beginning of the nineteenth century the River Wye had drawn the attention of many artists and poets who were to make their reputations in the Romantic Movement. Turner came in 1792 and 1798, painting Tintern Abbey on a number of occasions, and Wordsworth composed his ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ in a wood above Llandogo.

Another factor in the growth of tourism was the Napoleonic Wars; the resultant embargo on sea movement to the Continent or meant that Britons had to look to their own back yard for travel opportunities: the Grand European Tour was out.

5. Noise and Bustle

Paradoxically, while passing through an area of great natural beauty, Bloomfield – like most tourists of the time – seemed oblivious of the tremendous amount of industrial activity that was going on and the considerable river traffic with boats of up to 500 tons being built at Monmouth. The wide area of woodland in the lower Wye was being plundered of natural resources: timber, minerals and coal. There was a great deal of metal-working with processes powered by the tributaries of the Wye – Redbrook, Whitebrook, and the Angiddy (directly opposite Tintern) – which were all sites of foundries producing iron and copper. The tourists seemed unaffected by furnaces and smoke: in fact they regarded it all as pleasantly ornamental and in a boat at eye-level would not have seemed menacing. Nevertheless Gilpin was not totally oblivious to all the clatter and smoke: he noticed that: ‘The country above Tintern Abbey hath been described as a solitary tranquil silence; but its immediate environs only are meant. – Within half a mile of it are carried on great iron-works, which introduce noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity.’ The Lower Wye gorge, the jewel in the crown of the river, was left behind by Bloomfield and his friends but there was much to see in the mountainous terrain and beyond on the route that lay ahead.

6. In the Mountains

On 20th August after examining Chepstow castle, the next stop was at Ragland to examine the castle and to savour its ivy laden walls and the mystery imparted by a vault where any lighted candle was summarily extinguished by (as the village woman guide officiously said) the presence of the devil! These were two of the many castles on the route that were examined, drawn and whose historic significance was described by Bloomfield. The night of the 21st was spent at Abergavenny on the Usk nestling between the Black Mountains’ Sugar Loaf, Blorenge and Skirrid. The party’s adventurous journey on the following day was to take them to the summit of the Sugar Loaf where they hired an open cart jokingly called ‘the Welsh sociable’ by Bloomfield and which was drawn by three ponies and driven by a ‘red-faced little fellow, named Powel’. As there was not enough room in the cart, some had to ride on single horses, a few of which were fitted with side-saddles for the ladies, including the conspicuously pregnant Mrs Lloyd Baker. The final part of the climb was followed by a picnic a little lower down from the summit. Considerable exertion was required for the last steps to reach the top and Bloomfield explains his inner drive to reach the heights:

7. Welsh Character and Customs

From Abergavenny and Crickhowell the sociables took them to Tretower Court, a late medieval defended house with the remains nearby of an earlier castle, in an area where the Welsh language and character were apparent. Here Jane Edwards, a venerable centenarian supported by her walking stick, asked for alms.

Brecon was reached on the 22nd where two nights were spent. On Monday 24th, Bloomfield was impressed and touched by the Welsh custom of planting flowers over graves which he observed in the churchyard at Hay-on-Wye. He contrasted the tranquillity of the scene with the crowded graves in the Bunhill Fields dissenting burial ground in the City of London.

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8. Hence for Homeward: ‘The Treat Is O’er’

After Hay the character of the landscape changed again as the party reached the massif of Plynlimon, the mountain that is the source of both the rivers Wye and the Severn, and where Bloomfield reluctantly bade adieu to his beloved Wye. He will have to rely on his memories rather than any prospect of seeing its banks again:

On the journey towards Hereford, the night’s stop for the 24th, the orchards overhanging the roads reminded Bloomfield of the abundance of the elms in his native Suffolk. The next night was spent at Worcester where the only available lodging for Bloomfield was a shop which also acted as a post office. The shopkeeper/postman ‘man of the house’ was rather lopsided as was his house. This enabled his poet guest to observe through a large fracture in the wall the ostlers and maids at breakfast and their exchanges of pleasantries. The last significant climb was up the Malvern Hills on the 26th which rewarded the travellers with a panoramic view that extended from the Black Mountains to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Cotswolds and the Severn. Although the horses were again there to carry the travellers, Mrs Lloyd Baker, who had coped extremely well with the rigours of the journey, felt constrained to decline.

The final stretch of the journey was from Malvern to Tewkesbury, and to Gloucester by way of Cheltenham, where Bloomfield’s old friend Dr Jenner joined the group on their walks, finally returning everyone to Uley on Thursday 27th August. In the following week Bloomfield stepped off the Oxford coach and was soon united with his wife, Mary, who undoubtedly would have been delighted with her new elegant tea caddy, the gift of Dr Jenner. It is likely that this was the same tea caddy that appeared in the sale of Bloomfield’s effects on 28th and 29th May, 1824

9. Perspectives

If The Banks of Wye is a picturesque poem, Bloomfield absorbed Gilpin’s theories without subordinating to them his own clear vision and perception. However, Bloomfield offers this compliment in the later paragraphs of the poem:

Less obvious is the place of The Banks of Wye in the large corpus of writing that encouraged the growth of Wye tourism. In 1811 when the poem was published Bloomfield was at the height of his powers and was attracting a large readership. Such a successful work must have appealed not only to the literati but also to merchants and businessmen of some affluence who might have found holidaying on the Wye irresistible:

The Wye landscape that Bloomfield knew is more carefully tended now that it is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and survivals of its early industrial age are now less intrusive and more likely to be displayed sensitively as part of an archaeological heritage.