“Why Tintern Abbey?” A friend asks me. I am not so sure. I am not even that fond of William Wordsworth. As a student of English Literature (which, in those days, meant literature from England), I studied one of his poems called Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey and it stuck in my head. I was always curious about where these writers lived, visited and wrote. Eight years ago, I visited Haworth and Bronte country, Stratford-Upon-Avon and Shakespeare. This time it was South Wales and Tintern Abbey.
Of vales and hills
The bus turned the corner and I caught a glimpse of the Abbey. “Oh God, the family is going to crib,” was my first thought. We were booked for two nights and three days and, picturesque as it appeared, the Abbey did not look as if it would take more than an hour of our time. Fortunately, our B&B, the Tintern Old Rectory, was beautiful. Built somewhere in the 1700s, it overlooked the star attraction: the Abbey.
The ruins of the Abbey were spectacular. Though open to the sky, it still retained its majesty. I sat on a wooden bench and closed my eyes and, I promise you, I heard the rustle of the monks’ habits, the chanting of prayers and some clanging of vessels from the kitchens. Established somewhere in the 1100s, it flourished till the mid-1500s, when Henry VIIII came along and brought with him the downfall of all such abbeys. There are niches in the old stone walls, where books were once arranged. Behind the remains of the inside walls are the cloisters and dormitories, where weary monks laid their heads after a hard day at work and prayer; the soaring windows must have looked heavenly with stained glass. They still do, without any glass...
But the real action came the following morning when, over home-made preserves and scrambled eggs, we met Brennan Saddler, a young Wordsworth scholar from the US. Saddler was setting off that morning to try and find the spot from where Wordsworth might have written Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
So off we went, armed with a printout of Wordsworth’s poem, the few miles towards the ancient Royal Forest of Dean and climbed up to Symonds Yat Rock. A sweeping view of the river Wye and the valley below must have been exactly what Wordsworth had gazed at too. Our clues from the poem are ‘sycamore trees’ under which he reposed, the murmur of the river Wye, the cliff, the cottages and cave. Just as I began to get effusive about the surroundings, Saddler applied the brakes. She said that many critics had pointed out the surroundings were hardly as bucolic as Wordsworth made them out to be. The year he visited, the Wye was a sludgy polluted stream and ugly iron foundries were marring its banks.
But it is not so now. Then, of course, there is something called poetic licence. Wordsworth took his inspiration from William Gilpin’s book Observations On The River Wye (1782). But long before that, Cistercian monks came here, worked hard to clear the land, set up the Tintern hamlet and got people to till the land and grow food.
On love and life
The first time Wordsworth visited this place was in 1793, around six months after Louis XVI lost his head. He was not quite a happy man, as he had left behind his mistress Annette Vallon and an illegitimate daughter Caroline in a France that was in roiling revolution. Wordsworth, of course, refers to it as his ‘boyish days’. He came back more sanguine in 1798 with his sister Dorothy, when he wrote his poem ( Five years have past... is how the poem begins).
We seated ourselves on a rock and Saddler read aloud the poem to us, before filming the area for a project to show people where Wordsworth had wandered and reflected on the lines of this poem. Those were goosebump moments and I promised myself to give Wordsworth’s poems another chance.
Fact file
Though Tintern Abbey is mentioned in the heading of Wordsworth’s poem, there is no mention of it in the poem itself.
The abbey stands on the Welsh bank of the river Wye. On the other side is England.
Tintern Abbey is the second Cistercian abbey to be founded in Britain and the first in Wales. The first abbey in the UK was the Waverley Abbey in Surrey.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has thoughtfully set up a telescope on Symonds Yat Rock. If you are lucky, you can spot the famous Peregrine Falcon and its nest.
