Letter from my terrace 14 Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey 

A couple of weeks ago I visited Tintern Abbey.  You’ll find it on Google. But Google is the easy way.

Go there. If you make the effort, and making the effort is always worthwhile, you will find it just north of the town of Chepstow and south of Monmouth.  It is on the west bank of the River Wye, a river which marks the boundary between England and Wales. It is, in fact, ‘a young bird’s flutter’ from England, as Keats would have said. The old ruins are fine and the hills and woods that surround them are even finer for the monks always chose their places well.  Location, location, location. The Wye is one of the most beautiful rivers in Britain, and that is high praise because rivers are part of the way of life there.   

There was a picture of Tintern Abbey in Fanny’s room in Mansfield Park.  It was the old family school room and poor Fanny had fitted it up as her little retreat and she took refuge there whenever her cousins or aunt were unkind.  Poor Fanny!  How much she had to endure.  Still, she received her reward at the end, thank goodness.

Wordsworth wrote his poem just upstream on the way to the old town of Monmouth. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798. ”  He was then in his late twenties and was still responsive to the power and beauty of the mountains, fields and rivers.

It is strange to think that this poem was actually written before ‘Mansfield Park’ which belongs in spirit to the enlightenment of the previous century.  There was just about as much romanticism in Jane Austen as in a railway timetable.   She had other strengths.

Why did Fanny Price have a picture of Tintern in her room? Why did Wordsworth visit it? Turner went there too and his watercolour of Tintern Abbey was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794.

In fact, tourism began on the River Wye. People flocked to the river and to Tintern in search of the picturesque. From about 1770 onwards ‘tourists’, for we can now call them that, took a boat tour from Ross-on-Wye past Tintern and down to Chepstow.  They saw nature, the cliffs and the woods, the rocks and the ruins from the water. William Gilpin published a book about the journey in 1782. He wrote, ‘If you have never navigated the Wye, you have seen nothing.” Then, as now, it paid to exaggerate a little and to overstate your case in order to make it!

So in the so called ‘Age of Reason’ we have the Romantic. Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ came before Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’. At any time there is an overlap of ideas, a mixture: one person can have a little of each, another can be out of kilter with their time, one person thinks as years before, another as years ahead, and nothing is simple. There is no black and white.  It’s not a case of classicism out and romanticism in.  Then as now there was a wide river of trends and tendencies, all as mixed and mingled as the River Wye as it flows past Tintern.

So go to see Tintern Abbey if you can.  Take a photo of what Turner painted, breathe in the spirit of the river and the woods as Wordsworth breathed it and see the scene that Fanny had on the wall of her room. Leave the stifling shops of Cardiff.  Leave the crowded shopping malls of Bristol for another day and walk under the trees of the River Wye and among the stones of the ruins of Tintern. Walk over the old metal railway bridge to the far bank and look at the Abbey from there. Then walk back for a cup of tea in the café near the Abbey ruins and have scone or two and some Brooke’s ice cream, the finest ice cream in the Wye Valley. The cows that give the milk graze on the hills behind you.

The Tintern air will clear your head and wash your mind as it no doubt did years ago for the monks who chose to live there.