Blue Remembered Hills

As a boy of nine or ten I used to sit in the window seat on the first floor landing of my grandfather’s house in the Forest of Dean, and gaze at the Black Mountains in the distance. They weren’t always black, but mostly as mauve and blue as Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’. Beyond them lay another country called Wales, which for me was as wrapped in mystery as the mountains often were in mist. It was a land where people spoke a different language, played harps and, so I was told, sang like angels! Little did I know that one day I would have a home there … And little did James Roose-Evans know that in moving to Wales he was also setting out on a different kind of journey altogether - a spiritual adventure into the unknown. For more than fifty years James has kept a journal. Here he draws on his Welsh diaries to evoke a sense of the timeless and magical world of Radnorshire: the landscape, its people and a quality of life in the Welsh Borders which still to this day attracts so many writers, artists, musicians, sculptors and seekers.