When I first walked this way in 1960, the road between Painscastle and Rhulen was a rough track. It’s been metalled for years now, and climbs steeply from the Bach Howey valley to emerge among bracken and mawn pools on the crest of Llanbedr Hill.
I love this Radnorshire landscape, nestled into the crook of Afon Gwy (the River Wye). It’s as lovely as any part of Wales. The years I worked here were happy ones. I often return, and did so this week to seek in the tormentil-starred greensward, faint traces of a stone chicken shed. It was in that shed in remote Cwm Ceilo that Reverend John Price – “the Solitary” – lived for decades before his death in March 1895.
Price, aptly, was born in Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire. Bright and devout, he studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge, was ordained in 1834, and later received the living of Llanbedr-Painscastle – a near-ruinous church with a declining congregation.
A source of charity and minister to the homeless of this entire rural area, he married those in irregular unions and paid them five shillings for the privilege. When he called in on parishioners, he left money for his refreshments. Tramps cooked food on the church stove as he conducted services.
The diarist Francis Kilvert described an 1872 visit to his fellow clergyman: he was “a man rather below middle height, about 60 years of age, his head covered with a luxuriant growth of light brown or chestnut hair and his face made remarkable by a mild thoughtful melancholy blue eye and red moustache and white beard”. Kilvert makes clear the poverty, disorder and squalor in the cabin, yet though shocked, there is warmth in his account of the priest who chose to live in this Gospel simplicity.
As I walk the hill, curlews pitch up to their bubbling crescendos. Soon they’ll retreat to the estuaries. Poignant calls of golden plovers sound all around. I look down across the bracken, already russet from summer’s drought, towards the old keeper’s cottage, now no more than a pile of rubble among tall ash trees, and feel how profoundly the Solitary’s spirit has imbued the place with peace. A Welsh John of the Cross, he had the simple devotion of an early Christian saint.
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