Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery
1862
George Borrow arrived in Wales in 1854 with his wife, daughter, and a trunk full of books. He spoke Welsh - had learned it years earlier from a Welsh groom in England - and he had come to see the country where his favorite language lived. What he found was a nation of mountains, rain, stubborn beauty, and people who refused to abandon their ancient tongue. Wild Wales is a travel book from an age before tourism, when Wales still felt foreign to English visitors. Borrow climbs mountains in terrible weather, sleeps in inns where no one speaks English, stumbles into eisteddfods, and argues with everyone he meets about politics, religion, and the state of the world. He is opinionated, irascible, and frequently hilarious. The Wales he describes - its remote valleys, its chapel-going rigor, its language hanging on against all odds - has largely vanished. This is a portrait of a nation at a hinge moment, rendered by a writer who cared enormously about language, landscape, and the strange bonds between people and places.
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