The Artists Who Fell for the Llanthony Valley (And Why You Might Too)
I never get tired of the view from the top field, even after all these years of counting ewes up there with a lukewarm mug of tea in my hand. It’s easy to stop really seeing a place when you live in it every day. But every so often something reminds you that this valley isn’t just home to us and the sheep, it’s been pulling in artists, poets and dreamers for centuries. Read more about The Artists Who Fell for the Llanthony Valley.
Llanthony Priory alone has been painted by one of Britain’s most famous artists, and the wider valley has drawn sculptors, novelists and typeface designers up here looking for inspiration, long before anyone dreamt up glamping domes or hot tubs with a view. So I thought it was about time I told you some of the stories. Grab a cuppa, this one’s a good one.
Turner and the ruin that wouldn’t behave
Let’s start with the big one. In 1794, a young J.M.W. Turner came up the valley and set up his easel on the hillside opposite Llanthony Priory, the same ruin you’ll walk past if you head down towards the pub from us. He painted the priory bathed in this dramatic, almost heavenly light, with the hills behind it exaggerated to twice their real height. Very Turner. He was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good bit of drama.
That painting now lives at the Tate, and art historians still talk about it as one of the paintings that helped make ruins like ours fashionable among the Romantics. Every time I drive past those crumbling arches on the school run, I think about him standing there with his paints, working out how to make our hills look even more impressive than they already are. Honestly, they didn’t need the help.
You can see the painting itself on the Tate’s website before you visit, then come and stand roughly where he stood. It’s a proper goosebumps moment.
The poet who tried to build a utopia in our ruins
A few years after Turner packed up his easel, the priory was bought by a poet called Walter Savage Landor. Landor had big ideas. He wanted to turn the estate into a kind of rural utopia, improving the land, helping the local tenants, building a grand house among the ruins. He even needed an Act of Parliament to get permission to knock parts of the old buildings down.
It did not go well. Within three years he’d fallen out with his neighbours, his tenants, his lawyers and, for good measure, the Bishop of St David’s too. He eventually gave up on the whole scheme and left the country, leaving his poor mother to sort out the mess. I think about him whenever a barn plan of mine goes sideways. Farming and grand plans have never mixed brilliantly round here, and apparently that’s been true since 1807.
Eric Gill and the typeface you’ve used today without knowing it
Head further up the valley to Capel-y-ffin and you reach the spot where things get really interesting. In 1924, the sculptor and typeface designer Eric Gill moved into an old monastery there with his family and a small band of fellow artists, hoping to build a quiet, self-sufficient community away from what he saw as an increasingly noisy, industrial world. No electricity, leaky roofs, supplies arriving by pony. It was not exactly glamping.
But it was, by all accounts, one of the most productive periods of his career. It was here, in the middle of nowhere, that he designed Gill Sans and Perpetua, two typefaces that are still used all over the world today. If you have ever read a Penguin paperback, ridden the London Underground, or seen the BBC logo, you have looked at letterforms shaped in our valley. He was, by every account I’ve read, a complicated character in his personal life, but there’s no denying the mark his work has left on the world, and it started right here on our doorstep.
David Jones, Eric Ravilious, and a farmhouse full of watercolours
Gill wasn’t working alone up there. The artist and poet David Jones stayed with the community through the 1920s, and for a while was engaged to Gill’s daughter. His watercolours and engravings from that period are held in major collections today.
Then in early 1938, the painter Eric Ravilious booked himself two months in the same hamlet’s only farmhouse, keen to explore a landscape wilder than his native Sussex. He knew full well he was following in famous footsteps, Turner included, but where the earlier Romantics had painted our ruined abbey with all its drama, Ravilious painted the ordinary stuff. A sheep feeder on wheels, tipped at an angle, became the subject of one of his most celebrated paintings, later selling at auction for well over £300,000. There’s something rather lovely about that. Grand ruins get all the attention, but sometimes it’s the everyday bits of a working farm that make the best picture. I look at our own feed troughs differently now, I’ll be honest.
The novelist who wrote our valley into fiction
It isn’t only painters. The novelist Bruce Chatwin spent time staying with a painter near Capel-y-ffin, and the Black Mountains landscape around us became the backdrop for his novel On the Black Hill, the story of two brothers living out a fading way of farming life on these hills. It’s a proper read if you want to understand the rhythm of life up here, and more than one guest has told me they packed a copy for their stay with us.
So what does all this mean for your stay?
Honestly, I think it means you’re in good company. People have been coming to this valley for hundreds of years to slow down, look properly at the hills, and make something of what they find here, whether that’s a painting, a typeface or just a bit of headspace. You don’t need to be Turner to feel it. Half our guests turn up with a camera or a sketchbook without really planning to use it, and end up filling the thing by the time they leave.
If you fancy following the artists’ trail yourself, it’s an easy walk down to Llanthony Priory from us, where you can stand roughly on Turner’s spot, and a proper yomp further up the valley to Capel-y-ffin if you want to see where Gill and Ravilious set up their easels. Bring good boots, because the weather up here has humbled far grander plans than yours, as poor Walter Savage Landor found out.
Whichever of our little hideaways you’re booked into, the Hatterall Hut, the Carriage or the Dome, you’ll be looking out at more or less the same view that’s been inspiring people for two centuries. Just maybe with a hot tub and a lot less leaky roof than Eric Gill had to put up with.
Come and see what this valley does to you. I reckon it’ll get under your skin the same way it got under theirs.
Stay wild