Welsh Journals

Hafod, which included some 10,000 acres of upland 'populated by a hungry, ill- housed and despairing tenantry', had been left in a half-ruined condition by the former lessee, but Johnes saw in its romantic situation the ideal site for his purpose. He set about its renovation, using as his principal architect Thomas Baldwin, surveyor to the city of Bath. Subsequently, when the house was completed, he added, with the assistance of the young John Nash, an 'octagon library' to accommodate his growing collections of books and manuscripts, for Johnes was a most enthusiastic and extravagant bibliophile. The eventual result was a house and landscape which some described as 'sublime' and others as 'heterogeneous jumble' but nevertheless a sight which attracted many visitors who came there by way of Devil's Bridge (where Johnes thoughtfully provided a new inn), and who included in their itinerary a stay in Aberystwyth, an increasingly popular resort. Johnes suffered his share of personal disasters, including in 1807 the destruction of his great house by fire with much of its contents, a loss computed at well over £ 70,000 in financial terms and much more in sentimental value. Even more of a blow was the death of his only child in 1811. She was the only fruit of his second marriage, and except for his second wife (who survived him by seventeen years) left him with no-one in the world whom he cared about, for he had long been at loggerheads with his other relations. Meanwhile, in 1802, Johnes had set up the Hafod Press, specifically to print his translations of the medieval French chroniclers, Froissart, Joinville, and Monstrelet. For these ambitious tasks he used the materials he had assembled over a long period by purchases of noted libraries. He was in the habit of rising at five in the morning and working for several hours on his translations before breakfast. These enormous efforts were rewarded, if not by unanimous critical acclaim, at least by a large public demand; with his final work, the Monstrelet translation, appearing in five volumes in 1810-altogether an amazing achievement for a solitary scholar working away in his remote rural retreat. Johnes believed that only a resident owner could adequately supervise and encourage his tenants, and certainly he was an owner who liked to be at home and disliked the brief visits he made to London as one of the county Members. (However, he did enjoy visiting Dawlish in Devon in the spring since he found that season a very unfavourable one in his part of Wales.) Johnes was a major figure in the Cardiganshire Agricultural Society, and he had his own volume of advice to tenants printed in Welsh and distributed free to his and other local farmers. However, his efforts to create a model farm, introduce turnips, and improve the hill pastures met with little response from his tenantry, while his experiments with new breeds of cattle, dairying, and the making of exotic types of cheese enjoyed only mixed success. His imported breed of sheep suffered severe losses in the harsh winter of 1799, and by 1807 Johnes had run down his farming activities and was concentrating more on forestry. The terrain and the climate were not of the most favourable, nor were the conservatism and superstition of his farmhands, for the shepherds, he wrote, refused to count the number of his sheep, holding that it was 'very unlucky to tell them'.