The Normans get a bad press when it comes to the history of British landscapes. Their destruction of English towns has been compared by one historian, George Garnett, to the Blitz, whereas environmental writer Marion Shoard blamed Norman land-grabbing barons for ‘putting the countryside out of bounds’. Yet, in the midst of the tumult, an adventurous cleric undertook a 1,000-mile journey on horseback and foot around the perimeter of Wales.
Hailed as Britain’s first great travel writer, Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), would go on to describe a route that was packed with edgy encounters, witty asides, extraordinary wildlife and the occasional miracle. He’s a kind of medieval Bill Bryson, bouncing along the trail in search of the next fabulous story, and he was well suited to the role. The son of a Welsh princess and Norman baron, he had been educated in Latin at the Benedictine Abbey in Gloucester and learned French during two lengthy visits to Paris. By 1184, he was Court chaplain to Henry II and was soon acting as a liaison-officer between the King and various princes of Wales.
Gerald was the perfect go-between: fluent in Norman and Welsh cultures and unafraid of travel. In 1188, he was told to accompany the Archbishop of Canterbury — who intended to preach the cross and to recruit archers for a forthcoming crusade to the Holy Land — on a tour of Wales. Nearly all of Gerald’s 1,000-mile route can be closely followed today and it’s no less wonderful than it was in 1188.
Beginning and ending in the fortified border town of Hereford, the route they took connected the ring of Norman castles and monasteries built around the edge of Wales, avoiding the hazardous heartland of Pura Wallia (Welsh Wales), prowled by warbands allergic to the rule of Norman kings. This was not a modern hiking trip, planned around cafés, inns and campsites. The Archbishop was an at-risk VIP who had to travel with a security detail, servants, fellow clerics and a vast amount of baggage.
Gerald records that a fortnight was consumed making ‘all the preparations necessary for so long a journey’ — pack animals and saddles had to be sourced, horsemen and armed escorts had to be recruited, and funds raised. Today, Wales can be circumnavigated by car in 24 hours; but, in 1188, anyone risking this complete route would have to set aside at least a month and, for anxious Normans, this was an expedition into the unknown. Today, by combining clues within Gerald’s text with tracks and place-names on modern Ordnance Survey maps, it’s possible to retrace almost all of his 1188 journey.
'Gerald’s Wales was embellished with lakes of blood, plagues of toads and a knight called Gilbert who gave birth to a calf'
Gerald's route took him to Dinas Head in Pembrokeshire, where white-tailed sea eagles soared, and to the home of beavers in the valley of the Usk.
His party rode out of Hereford on Friday, March 4, heading west for the protection of the Norman castle at New Radnor and, after a night within its walls, continued south towards Hay-on-Wye, probably on the modern bridleway that crosses the exposed moorland of Gwaunceste Hill. I last hiked this bridleway in the company of a film crew shooting a BBC documentary about Gerald. All of us were protected from the wind and rain by high-tech, lightweight waterproofs and comfy boots, but the wools and leathers worn by Gerald and his companions were heavy and held the water. Faith was the medieval Gore-Tex.
That, and a belief in miracles: Gerald’s Wales was embellished with lakes of blood, plagues of toads and a knight called Gilbert who gave birth to a calf. On the far side of Gwaunceste Hill, the cavalcade descended to the village of Glascwm, recalled by Gerald as the home of ‘a handbell with miraculous powers’.
Over the next five days, they zig-zagged south through Llandew, Brecon, Abergavenny and Usk to the coast at Newport, where the journey got tricky. In the absence of a coast road, Norman travellers rode their horses along the beaches, which forced them to ford the fast-flowing rivers coursing across the sand from the mountainous interior of Wales.
‘As we approached the Neath,’ recalled Gerald, ‘which is the most dangerous and difficult of access of all the rivers of South Wales, on account of its quicksands, which immediately engulf anything placed upon them, one of our pack-horses, the only one possessed by the writer of these lines, was almost sucked down into the abyss.’
Horsemen and servants risked their lives to haul the animal free of the clasping sand — quicksand becomes lethal when an incoming tide submerges the victim’s head. Gerald acknowledged the risks taken in saving the animal and records the ‘damage done’ to his ‘books and baggage’. As are many locations on Gerald’s route, the mouth of the Neath is no less hazardous today, but is set in a landscape that reflects 800 years of modernisation: beyond the quicksands, you can see the M4 motorway gliding over the Neath on concrete stilts.
The ruined Cistercian monastery of Strata Florida, Ceredigion, new and magnificent when Gerald of Wales trod its stone floors.
In an age before the Met Office, unexpected changes in the weather could lead to hypothermia. Wolf packs still roamed the interior. There was also a risk of attack. In the south, near Carmarthen, the travellers were told of ‘a young Welshman’ who had been riding to meet the Archbishop when he was murdered by ‘twelve archers from the nearby castle of St Clears’. In the north, a clash between a ‘local band of robbers’ and a ‘band of youths’ led to ‘some being killed there and then and others mortally wounded’. It’s not the kind of thing that happens on the Welsh Coast Path today.
There may be blood on the tracks, but this is also a land of wonder. Gerald writes of salmon leaping the waterfalls of the Teifi, of beavers that bite off their own testicles and of the abandoned Roman town of Caerleon, ‘beautifully situated on the bank of the River Usk’. His own place of birth, the Norman castle of Manorbier on the coast of Pembroke-shire, is set in a wild garden beside a ‘great crag of rock’, with a ‘most attractive orchard’ and ‘hazel-nut trees which grow to a great height’. Sea views and an ‘excellent fish pond’ fed by a lake with a watermill complete the idyllic picture. In the whole of Wales, Manor-bier was ‘the most pleasant place by far’. Today, it rises with undiminished charm above the Welsh Coast Path.
After three days in St David’s, the entourage continued along the coast then detoured inland to Lampeter and the new monastery of Strata Florida. The ‘Vale of Flowers’ has become a place of ghosts, its Cistercian stonework reduced to stumps and a single, gigantic arch framing that spiritual vale.
'If Gerald had ever seen a brocken spectre, I suspect he’d have seen it as a miracle'
The travellers’ 51-day journey reached its climax some way before returning to the city of Hereford. The highpoint, literally and figuratively, was Snowdonia, soaring above the coast at the furthest corner of Wales. Gerald was overwhelmed: ‘The mountains are very high,’ he wrote, ‘with narrow ridges and a great number of very sharp peaks all jumbled together in confusion.’
Beyond Caernarfon, the Archbishop’s cavalcade was forced into a tight valley with ‘many steep climbs up and down’. It was too much for the horses and the riders had to dismount and walk. For Gerald, the enforced foot travel was an opportunity for ‘rehearsing’ the forthcoming pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but it was all too much for the English Archbishop, who ‘sat himself down on an oak-tree’ that had been flung to the ground by wind. Wearily, the cleric joked about the wisdom of nightingales in avoiding Wales: ‘We are not quite so wise, for not only have we come here but we have traversed the whole country.’
Leaving Hereford on March 4, 1188, Gerald and his party had to scale the windtorn heights of the Brecon Beacons to travel south-west.
Snowdonia was another place of miracles. Gerald describes a ‘floating island’ on a lake high in the ‘Snow Mountains’. A second lake is unique for eels, trout and perch that have ‘only one eye’. Snowdonia also has a ‘remarkable eagle’ that waits on a particular stone to ‘satiate its hunger with the bodies of dead men’.
I was in Snowdonia recently and enjoyed the rare spectacle of a temperature inversion that filled the valleys with a tsunami of silver cloud pierced by peaks bathed in blue sunshine. As my son and I walked the ridge of Carnedd Llewelyn, each of our images was projected onto a cloud bank, haloed with a rainbow-striped corona. If Gerald had ever seen a brocken spectre, I suspect he’d have seen it as a miracle.
I think of Gerald whenever I’m in Wales. Another of his books, The Description of Wales, can claim to be the first, detailed geographical account of the country. In an age characterised in conventional histories by bloody battles, plagues and Court assassinations, Gerald diverts our gaze to the landscape and to its web of bridleways and footpaths, a reminder that we can still read his stories by taking a walk on the wild side.