George Bowring: murdered by Welsh magic

The Victorian writer R.D. Blackmore, if he’s remembered at all today, is known for his three-volume novel Lorna Doone.  It’s an adventure story, set on Exmoor in the seventeenth century, about the feuding and violent Doone clan and the love between the narrator, John Ridd, and the eponymous Lorna.  The book sold badly on its first publication in 1869, but later enjoyed huge popularity. In the twentieth century it spawned several films and television series, and an American brand of biscuits, first produced in 1912.  Blackmore, though, considered that his best work was not Lorna Doone, but another ‘triple-decker’ historical novel of 1872, set partly on the Glamorgan coast, The maid of Sker.  He’d spent time as a child staying with relatives at Newton Nottage, Porthcawl, and was familiar with the gaunt sixteenth-century mansion of Sker that stood by the sea a few miles away.

It’s sometimes said that The maid of Sker is Blackmore’s only fiction with a Welsh setting, but that’s not strictly true.  In 1895, five years before he died, he published a series of stories entitled Slain by the Doones.  He was clearly trying to revive Doone fever (and sales) among his readers.  It’s possible that some or all of the stories were not new and had been gathering dust in a drawer.  Only one of the four stories, though, concerns the Doones.  The third of them, entitled ‘George Bowring: a tale of Cader Idris’, is the uncanny story of a fatal holiday in Meirionydd.

The narrator, Robert Bistre, recalls his relationship with his old schoolfriend George Bowring, and how he gave him a fine gold watch as a wedding present.  In 1832 the two decide to escape cholera-infected London and take a holiday near Cader Idris.  One day, Bistre sets up his easel to paint on the mountain slope, leaving Bowring to find a spot to fish in the river.  Bowring unaccountably goes missing, his fishing equipment abandoned.  His body is later recovered from a pool lower down the river, under a rock called the Giant’s Tombstone.  It’s carried to a poor farmhouse nearby, ‘Crug y Dlwlith’, where the owner, Hopkin ap Howel or ‘Black Hopkin’, warns them off with a shotgun, saying that his daughter, his last surviving child, is seriously ill.  The locals believe that Bowring died by drowning and the official verdict is that cholera is to blame. But Bistre suspects that his friend had been murdered: he was fit and a strong swimmer, and his precious gold watch could not be found.

The mystery is cleared up twenty years later, when Bistre returns to the scene with one of Bowring’s sons.  The son climbs to the exact spot where his father vanished, and to his horror he meets there a man who drops dead in front of him (‘down he fell, as if I had shot him through the heart!’).  Bistre arrives and immediately identifies the dead man as ‘Black Hopkin’.  It was he who had murdered Bowring senior, it seems, for the sake of his gold watch, in the belief that the gold would preserve the life of ‘Gwenthlian’, his dying daughter:

In these lonely valleys lurks a strange old superstition that even Death must listen to the voice of Time in gold; that, when the scanty numbered moments of the sick are fleeting, a gold watch laid in the wasted palm, and pointing the earthly hours, compels the scythe of Death to pause, the timeless power to bow before the two great gods of the human race—time and gold.

Poor George in the valley must have shown his watch.  The despairing father must have been struck with crafty madness at the sight.  The watch was placed in his daughter’s palm; but Death had no regard for it.  Thenceforth Black Hopkin was a blasted man, racked with remorse and heart-disease, sometimes raving, always roving, but finding no place of repentance.  And it must have been a happy stroke—if he had made his peace above, which none of us can deal with—when the throb of his long-worn heart stood still at the vision of his victim, and his soul took flight to realms that have no gold and no chronometer.

So ends this broken-backed and improbably plotted story – an odd blend of Thomas Hardy’s rural primitivism and M.R. James’s uncanny supernaturalism.  It gains what purchase on the imagination it can muster from the contrast between the urbanity of the two London friends and the wildness and irrationalism that undo them in the mountains of north Wales.  As soon as they arrive in the remote village ‘Aber-Ayder’ at the foot of Cader Idris they feel a disturbing otherness around them.  The sound of rushing water they find deafening; the locals are monoglot slate workers who ‘scarcely ever poach, except on Saturdays and Mondays’.  The place the two friends choose to fish and paint is high on the mountain, ‘a savage place, deserted by all except evil spirits, that even the Aber-Aydyr slaters could not enjoy the fishing there’.  As they climb further, the terrain becomes alien and frightening:

On our left hand, cliff towered over cliff to the grand height of Pen y Cader, the steepest and most formidable aspect of the mountain.  Rock piled on rock, and shingle cast in naked waste disdainfully, and slippery channels scooped by torrents of tempestuous waters, forbade one to desire at all to have anything more to do with them.

Some of the local people are just as alarming.  At ‘Crug y Dlwlith’ Bistre is terrified by the wife of ‘Black Hopkin’, a black-haired harridan who screams at them in Welsh to keep away, and then by the ‘swarthy’ Hopkin himself and his large gun.  The corpse bearers are now feeling discouraged, and Bistre has to resort to an appeal to Welsh patriotism:

But knowing how proud all Welshmen are of the fame of their race and country, happily I exclaimed at last, when fear was getting the mastery, ‘What will be said of this in England, this low cowardice of the Cymro?’  Upon that they looked at one another and did their best right gallantly.

In the end, the key to the mystery of Bowring’s death is Welsh superstition – that the presence of gold might somehow stave off imminent death.

How much of all this gothic primitivism did Blackmore derive from personal knowledge of the land and people of Meirionydd?  The story’s topography is vague and uncertain.  Most of the place-names Blackmore could have found in an atlas easily enough (‘Aber-Aydyr’ and the river ‘Ayder’ are his own coinings).  The only distinctive one is the name of Black Hopkins’s house, ‘Crug y Dlwlith’, which Blackmore glosses as ‘the Dewless Hills’ (though ‘crug’ mean ‘rock’).  ‘Diwlith’ (dewless) is an uncommon word in Welsh, but it does exist as part of a place-name, ‘Twmpath Diwlith’, a Bronze Age round tumulus – not in north Wales, but situated just a few miles from Newton Nottage, on Mynydd Margam.

The ‘gold superstition’ seems to be Blackmore’s own invention: I can find no such custom mentioned in the works of Trefor M. Owen or other students of the folklore traditions of Wales.

It seems, then, that The maid of Sker was, after all, the only work R.D. Blackmore wrote that had a truly Welsh setting.  His situating of ‘George Bowring’ on and around Cader Idris is, in truth, arbitrary.  Still, the story has some interest for the usefulness of Eryri to English writers as a location of magic, madness and otherness.  It’s a novelistic tradition with a long history: Susan Cooper’s classic children’s book The dark is rising (1973) draws on many of the same tropes.