Thomas Hardy's Valency Valley
Explore the picturesque village of Boscastle and the inspiring cliffs above Boscastle’s old harbour. Hardy wrote a great deal about this "wild weird western shore" and he came back again later in his life to produce some of his best poetry. We'll go inland too, through peaceful woodlands alongside the meandering Valency River, to St Juliot's and learn more about his story with Emma Gifford and why he returned to those Blue Eyes so late in life.
This is a whole day out and walkers are either met in Boscastle or taken their direct from Polzeath.
Looking for the real Cliffhanger?
The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (which was published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff
Hardy writes:
The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags themselves. T.H. 1899
The shore and country about ‘Castle Boterel’ is now getting well known, and will be readily recognized. T.H. 1899. The forthcoming weather is a little wet maybe but nothing compared to the famous flood of August 2004 when two rivers burst their banks in the Valency valley above Boscastle and about two billion litres of water rushed down the valley straight into the narrow town creating one of the worst floods in Cornish history and a place for students of Geography to come on field trips for ever more.
About the far west of this Wessex Map, which just happens to be on the coast of North Cornwall, Hardy described as the "outskirts of Lower Wessex":
The place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.
TH 1899
Did Hardy (1840-1928) ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
He was nominated over 20 times but he never won it! At 83 he was most seriously considered for it but edged out by Rabindranath Tagore, an amazing polymath who is the only person to have written two national anthems and was the first Asian ever nominated!
It was while on an architectural job to restore the parish church of St Juliot in North Cornwall in 1870 that Hardy fell in love with Emma Gifford. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a traumatic effect and after her death he revisited places linked with their courtship with "Poems 1912–13" reflecting upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with Emma's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry, much of it his best and included The Going and The Voice.
The Going
Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
Never to bid good-bye
Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
Unmoved, unknowing
That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.
Why do you make me leave the house
And think for a breath it is you I see
At the end of the alley of bending boughs
Where so often at dusk you used to be;
Till in darkening dankness
The yawning blankness
Of the perspective sickens me!
You were she who abode
By those red-veined rocks far West,
You were the swan-necked one who rode
Along the beetling Beeny Crest,
And, reining nigh me,
Would muse and eye me,
While Life unrolled us its very best.
Why, then, latterly did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time's renewal? We might have said,
"In this bright spring weather
We'll visit together
Those places that once we visited."
Well, well! All's past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.