In via iterum

Wales Trip Day 1: Hay on Wye, Brecknock

Before leaving the UK we intend to do a fair amount of sightseeing. This is an account of a week we recently spent travelling in Wales. Its not a live-blog, but I noted a few observations each day so that the posts read a little as if I had had a computer with me. (And its not as if anyone reading this cares where I actually am sitting when I post this!)

Hay on Wye lies exactly on the border between England and Wales (having entered Wales in Monmouthshire we approached it from the Welsh side). It is a small and pretty English country town, which would be picturesque but unremarkable if it were not for its unique selling point - that it is the secondhand bookshop capital of the UK. Something like 30 secondhand bookshops, dealers and other related shops are crammed into the town - the centre of which would easily fit within a decent sized Shopping Mall.

Apparently, things ended up this way because an eccentric in the 1970s bought Hay Castle, declared the town independent and himself King. One of his first acts was to declare the town to be 'booktown' and amazingly people heeded his decree and (despite the distance from the major urban centres of the UK) came and opened their bookshops. My wife comments that this poses the question, does the opening of the shops validate the declaration of independence by clearly accepting the social contract!

Whether that is the case is sadly academic, as we found out when we parked. The Oxford Road car park sits on the Beacons side of town, and lies below a hill. As you come to the entrance it looks fairly small, but as soon as you come over the top of the hill you see that it is (by British municipal standards) vast. Despite Hay's pretensions of independence the car park is administered by Powys County Council. [Powys, for all its historical meaning as an area is confusingly not a County at all. Hay is in the county of Brecknock (or Brecknockshire), but UK local government structures no longer reflect the real counties]. The car park is terribly marked - you can see at least two generations of older parking space markings overlapping with the current ones. Thanks to this we wound up with a ticket for parking in a bus bay. We are appealing this on the grounds that the car was parked within a clearly marked car space, and that if they want to change the markings they should scrub out the old lines before painting new ones. If you are planning to visit Hay, watch out for this.

UPDATE: We heard about our appeal and they cancelled the parking ticket!



After parking we wandered around town, had a spot of lunch and started looking at some of the bookshops - including a fantastic little shop which specialises in old children's books. We found a couple of nice old fashioned activity books (now terribly un-PC) there. By this point it was getting late in the afternoon, and our son (who is 2) was in need of a nap. So we decided to head for our hotel, which had a pool and return to Hay in the morning.

To be continued...

posted by j @ 9:50 AM