The Watershed

Sometimes, on the borders of sleep, I remember the walk down from Hay Bluff to the Vale of Ewyas. Along the Brecon escarpments. Across the watershed into Nant Bwch, a ravine with a stream far below. Past a group of buildings where, in Victorian times, there was a monastic retreat, and where in the 1920s an artistic commune flourished for a time. If I have not drifted off, I pause at the church at Capel-y-Ffin, with its stumpy chimney like the tail of a perching wren; and before turning down the valley towards the ruins of Llanthony Priory I lift my drowsy mind’s eye to the ‘Vision’ farm, high on the fern-covered flank of a hill in the heart of the Black Mountains. In my mind’s ear there is the rushing sound of the River Honddu, the voice of the Vale of Ewyas.

‘For forty-two years, Lewis and Benjamin Jones slept side by side, in their parents’ bed, at their farm which was known as “The Vision”.’ When I read the opening sentence of Bruce Chatwin’s novel On the Black Hill soon after it was published in 1982, I felt nudged by a kind of affirmative recognition. Surely this would be the ‘Vision’ farm that I remembered from the time when my family spent a week or so each summer in the Black Mountains, my sons playing beside the Nant Bwch stream and netting crayfish in the Honddu. And surely the ‘Black Hill’ of Chatwin’s title was a reference to an outcrop of the Black Mountains themselves? But I soon realized that the setting of his novel, which revolves round the joint life of identical twins in a hill-farming community on the borders of England and Wales, is deliberately imprecise – an evocation of various places near Llanthony and along the southern end of Offa’s Dyke rather than a specific geographical location. ‘What divides fact from fiction?’ Chatwin was once asked. ‘I don’t think there is a division,’ he replied. Chatwin made his name first as a writer about the exotic and the faraway. His essay In Patagonia was fashionable reading for many travellers in South America in the late 1970s, and his first novel The Viceroy of Ouidah dealt with the dark heart of the slave trade in West Africa. As he later recalled, he had turned his back on a comfortable and prestigious career because he tired of valuing for probate the estates of people who had died. His ability to appraise the contents of a room remained with him, however. It is put to great effect in his descriptions of the farmhouses into which he takes his readers in On the Black Hill. By describing the parlour in the house where the twins Lewis and Benjamin are born, raised and live on as old men, he is able to evoke the tension-filled love between their parents, a hill-farmer called Amos Jones and his English wife Mary. They married in the 1890s after the death of her father, who had been a missionary in India, and by selling her father’s books they were able to purchase the ‘Vision’ farm. The Staffordshire dogs on the mantelpiece, the engraving of the Pool of Bethesda, the watercolour sketches of Indian temples and palaces: these were Mary’s. The carefully carved frames around old family photographs: these were made by Amos, who would take out his set of chisels after a hard day’s labour on the Black Hill. Outside the dwelling-place, the seasons of the hill-farming year challenge the mood of the family during the twins’ childhood. In winter Amos feuds with his neighbours, and his anger and depression last until late spring. Mary learns to recognize as an annual occurrence her husband’s contrite appearance in a sunlit doorway with a bunch of apple blossom. It is her sign that summer has finally arrived. Chatwin catches perfectly the collective temperament of a community where Welsh and English traditions mingle to produce a border culture. Social signals are conveyed by patterns of worship – Church or Chapel – and the twins are often taken on a ‘Welsh’ walk or an ‘English’ walk: ‘Welsh’ up the mountain past a Congregational chapel for a view westward to the Radnor hills; ‘English’ down to parkland and a screen of yews round the Anglican churchyard. Looking west, they can see ‘farms and chapels and Father Ambrosius’s monastery nestling in the valley below’. This is the author’s barely dis guised reference to the monastic buildings that I remember from my own sojourns in the Black Mountains. They were built at the instigation of an Anglican priest known as Father Ignatius, who hoped to revive the monastic tradition in the Church of England. In 1880 there were excited reports about an apparition of the Virgin seen by altar boys in the fields below the monastery, and it is likely that the actual ‘Vision’ farm that I remember took its name from those reports. Chatwin invents a similar story to explain the naming of his ‘Vision’ farm, but sets the apparition in the eighteenth century. The dominant theme throughout On the Black Hill is the intense connection between Lewis and Benjamin, the twins who are in a sense not two persons but one, and who even as old men have never made a life away from the farmhouse where they were born. Their mother becomes aware of their remarkable affinity when they are still babies, noticing that when Benjamin is stung by a wasp, it is Lewis who cries with pain. As they grow up, her protectiveness towards Benjamin becomes a source of tension with her husband. When, in the latter stages of the Great War, the Army Board insists on taking one of their sons, she accuses Amos of having reached an agreement with the Recruitment Officer whereby Lewis, the stronger son, remains at home to work the mountain pastures. Benjamin, by now a conscientious objector, is taken to detention barracks in Hereford and eventually returns to the farm weakened and listless, but with a tacit hold over his brother. ‘You left me,’ Benjamin had once said reproachfully to his brother when he was lost in a snow-storm and only found again by his twin, who divined where he was. Now that they are young men Benjamin’s hold over Lewis has been strengthened. The years pass, their father is killed by a kick from a cart-horse, and Lewis yearns to get away from the farm, to travel and see ‘Cape Horn and the giant Patagonians and the girls of Tahiti’ whom the twins were told about by an old fisherman on their one holiday by the seaside as children. Lewis is attracted to women, but his brother ‘loves only his mother and his brother and he does not like girls’. When, as a grown man, Lewis meets a woman from London who seduces him to win a bet with her artist husband, he is humiliated when he realizes Benjamin has sensed what has happened and told their mother before Lewis has even returned to the farm. By the time of Mary’s death, just as the Second World War is breaking out, Lewis has lost the struggle to break free from his twin. It might be thought that On the Black Hill is an exception to Chatwin’s pattern of writing about the exotic and the faraway. But in basing his story in a location where there is a complex ‘borderland’ culture, and in telling the life-story of two old men who together turn away from the modern age, he is in fact examining the theme of restlessness: the thwarted instinct to get away in the case of Lewis; the fearful response in the case of Benjamin. On the Black Hill falls into two halves, and Mary’s death is like the watershed of a mountain ridge. Before she dies, the plot’s tension derives from the troubled relationship between her sons. After her death, the twins, withdrawn from the world in their hillside home, look on as a harlequinade of characters – long-lost relatives with an eye to the ‘Vision’ inheritance, a crooked antique dealer and a murderous solicitor, hang-gliding enthusiasts and Hare Krishna hippies – are presented by the author to their wondering gaze. One passage has always remained with me from my first reading of this moving and complex novel. On the night after their mother’s funeral, the brothers, reconciled by her death, go into her bedroom, put on their father’s nightshirts, unfold fresh linen sheets sprinkled with lavender, and lay across the bed the patchwork quilt which their mother made with pieces of dress fabric from her youth in India and her married life on the Black Hill. Before climbing into bed, they smooth out the patches of fabric and remember without speaking the stories Mary told them as she was stitching the quilt, bringing the two halves of her life together.

‘Goodnight now!’

‘Goodnight!

Beneath the faded quilt, united at last by the memory of their mother, the brothers soothe their troubled, single, mind.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Andrew Joynes 2026