Is this the greatest account of rural Britain ever written?
What is your favourite account of life in Rural Britain? – Cider with Rosie is close to the top of my list….
In 1870, country parson Francis Kilvert began a diary of his ‘uneventful life’. The result, says Mark Bostridge, is sublime
One hundred and fifty years ago, in January 1870, a young curate in Clyro, a small village near Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh borders, began a diary. His name was Francis Kilvert. He was 29 years old, tall, with a dark beard. A cousin of his would remember him long afterwards as “very sleek and glossy, rather like a nice Newfoundland dog”.
While he ministered to parishes in Wales, as well as in Wiltshire, the county of his birth, Kilvert remained lovingly attentive to this daily record of his life for the next nine years, until the year of his death at the age of 38. Eventually published in three volumes – in the years 1938, 1939, and 1940 – Kilvert’s Diary was immediately acclaimed…